Your Sales are Slow?: Get Creative
“Do not let what you cannot do,
interfere with what you can do. ”
With much uncertainty — Brexit, Trump, China — buyers in some markets are keeping their hands in their pockets. Yet in business, we are still expected to meet our profit targets. As an executive, your reality is that you still need to grow sales and market share. Growth means take decisive action and fast.
How can we do this? Simply we need to find creative answers to two questions:
How can we increase sales in the next 90 days?
How can we reduce costs in the next 90 days?
When we say creative, we mean get out-of-the-box ideas. How do you get these kinds of ideas? In brief, start with good questions, assemble a diverse team, ask questions, collect answers; choose the best actions, take actions.
Some managers will say “they don’t have time for this”. However, many managers don’t know one secret for getting creative ideas: the less time you give teams, the more creative their ideas. So, leaving teams with plenty of time is bad for getting creative ideas. So, give your teams tight deadlines. With tight deadlines, you need a good method.
Grab 3M Post-it notes
Whether you are in the office or a café, grab some 3M Post-it notes — square notes are best. On the first note scribble one of the questions.
Set an alarm for two minutes. Tell participants:
They need to generate as many ideas as possible, one idea on each 3M Post-it note
Their target is at five or more ideas each
They have two minutes starting now
With a team of five people, you will have 25 ideas or sometimes far more with creative groups.
Group 3M Post-it notes: Pick the best ideas
“A great company is much more likely to die from indigestion from too much opportunity than starve from too little. The challenge is choosing opportunities, not creating opportunities.”
Many ways exist to pick the best ideas. However, many methods are complicated and slow. We prefer fast methods. One tool we use is a GE method:
Ask two questions:
In 90 days: Easy to implement or Tough to Implement?
In 90 days: Small results or Big result? (Choose a $ sales value to suit your business)
Then based on your answers, put your 3M Post-it notes in one of four groups
Based on our experience, you can expect to classify about 16% of ideas in group 1: Business Opportunities. So, if your group generated 25 ideas, then typically about four ideas would fall into this group. Of course, if you set a target of 10 ideas for each person, you might have 50 ideas, and eight ideas might be Business Opportunities. We think it's better to have more Business Opportunities to choose from instead of just considering the same ideas.
The best returns come from acting on 1: Business Opportunities, so as Nike says: Just Do It. Sometimes you might want to create some energy in your team, so then you might pick some of 2: Quick Wins.
Use 3M Post-it App
While the world goes crazy about Apps, in our experience, we find that working with pens and 3M Post-it notes brings out far more creative ideas. So, we have always viewed Apps for creating and organising ideas with some doubt. We have been reluctant to lose the energy and fun that appears when we combine: teams and pens and 3M Post-its.
So, we are delighted to report on a new App from 3M that combines the energy from using 3M Post-it is and the efficiency from using Apps. 3M have created an App that allows you to photograph square post-it notes — up to 50 square notes at once. (The 3M Post-it note, above, with a question, is a sample of what you can get.)
Once notes are in the App, you can move them around and put them in groups. You can edit notes too.
That’s great, but there’s more. When you put 3M Post-it notes in groups, 3M calls a group a board. So, in our example above we have four boards:
Business Opportunities
Quick Wins
Special Effort
Time-Wasters
The App can export a board full of 3M Post-it notes:
As a PDF document
As a PNG image (higher quality than jpg)
As a PowerPoint presentation
As an Excel Spreadsheet
As a Zip archive of all images
So, you can capture creative ideas with tools you can touch (pens and 3M Post-its) and then efficiently organise ideas and share ideas, with the App. To create an App using only electronic 3M Post-it notes would be easy, but this loses the energy — mental and physical — generated by physical activity. To create an App that encourages you to keep buying 3M Post-it notes is smart business. To create an App like this that combines energy and efficiency: brilliant.
Have a look for yourself: https://www.post-it.com/3M/en_US/post-it/ideas/app/
Video of app 1.5minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-54-41GCHU
If you want to increase sales, grow market share and profitability, get your team working and 3M Post-it notes flowing, we can do this in our Competing On Value workshop, call us.