Needless to say, innovation has become a necessity for organizations. Innovation influences a firm’s performance and helps them to gain a competitive advantage and become market leaders. Companies claim to exert tremendous efforts in embracing innovation, yet many still do not have a clear innovation strategy and are unable to clearly align it with their overall business strategy. Some would opt to just embed it within their values or cultures, or as a business attribute, without having a clear plan and system for its effective implementation.
PwC’s Innovation Benchmark (2017) showed that 54% of the surveyed companies (>1200 respondents) reported that they are struggling in bridging the gap between business strategy and innovation strategy. Companies would make enormous investments in innovation, however, they do not see the returns from these investments. This is mainly because there is no alignment between their innovation strategies and their business strategies.
There is no such thing as the “right innovation strategy”. Companies need to determine and create their own innovation strategy to fit their business needs such as business strategy, culture, and organizational structure. But why would companies go through all this hustle? Why is there a need for companies to create an innovation culture when they may already have a strong business strategy in place?
The answer is simple: it helps companies to have successful innovation management. Innovation strategy aids organizations to know whether there is a need to innovate, to what extent, and in what areas. Accordingly, a company’s innovation strategy should be communicated across their organization; all the way from the CEO down to the most junior person in the workplace.
Katz, Du Preez, & Schutte (2010) highlighted that innovation strategy can be described in two roles: the first one is an improvement role or, in this case, the “improvement innovation strategy”. The second role is a future business role or the “future business innovation strategy”. For the improvement role, innovation strategy does the following:
Aligns a firm’s objectives with innovation objectives;
Acts as a guide for the type, level, and influence of innovation needed to attain a firm’s objectives;
Allocates a firm’s resources between daily operations and innovation initiatives; and
Creates a road plan for a firm to effectively utilize resources for innovation.
In relation to the future business role, the innovation strategy aids firms to determine when and how to selectively abort the past (such as old methods and actions). This will also enable firms to direct their attention towards future business. In other words, the future business strategy would oblige a company to alter its pattern, position, or perspective strategy, which, in turn, pushes the firm to move from the current business and develop future business.
Consequently, there is no doubt that firms today need to innovate permanently within their organizations. However, they must do so in a strategic way. Here are some ideas on how you can do that within your firm:
Revisit your business strategy and make sure it is updated to your current business context.
Analyze your organization’s assets, competition, market opportunities, and the firm’s culture.
Consider the following components when defining your innovation strategy: type, level, impact, risks, collaboration, place, maturity, resources, and drivers.
Determine the right timing for market entrance in case of product or service innovation.
To sum up, there is no such thing as the perfect innovation strategy. It is a strategic management decision that should be carefully taken by the most senior leaders in the workplace. It has to be shared with each and every individual so that it is reflected right from the beginning of the innovation process. Considering the nine components mentioned above is essential to be able to develop your innovation strategy.
The first four components (type, level, impact, and risk) help the company to have the right blend of innovation needed to bolster the firm’s objectives and goals. As for collaboration (impacts the level of financial and human resources), place (assists the balance between the types of resources) and resources (divides the resources between the daily operations, innovation initiatives, and innovation capability improvement), they provide a guideline of the allocation of resources for innovation. The last two components are drivers and maturity which make the company ready to innovate their future business.
If you are still waiting for the old normal to come back, you will see that almost two years of experiencing the pandemic has forever changed the way people look at sales. Back in the day, businesses skipped the socializing aspect and went straight to selling products or services. However, it seems that building a relationship is more important now than ever as COVID-19 inadvertently transformed sales towards being more human.
LinkedIn report’s State of Sale for 2021states that “70% of the buyers want to continue working remotely half or more of the time in the future.” Remote working, the limited in-person interaction, and the inability to travel had a strong impact on the sales strategy, so revenue leaders discovered the urgent need to shift their strategy by building a more human and personal approach when closing a sale.
Certainly, we are now at the beginning of a Human-to-Human era. So what kind of sales strategies should sales leaders use to increase the sales team’s performance? This article will present seven sales strategies that can be used to outsmart and overcome pandemic challenges.<
Regain and re-qualify your loyal clients
The cost to acquire a new customer is higher than to retain an existing customer. Loyal customers are a source of boosting profits through these challenging times when customers are extremely conscious of their budgets. Companies must have a customer loyalty program for salespersons to use to their advantage.
Having offers like additional discounts, credit card programs, punch cards, and points systems is a good way to incentivize customers. If the customers feel rewarded, they will choose to stay with your business. It also avoids the possibility of them going to other competitors in the market.
A referral program is another fruitful strategy that can bring unlimited opportunities. Customers are more inclined to spread the word and refer your company’s products or services to a friend or family member if there are rewards for doing so. This is also an easy way to keep existing customers and to attract new clients.
Follow up with your customers regularly
As shown in LinkedIn’s report, only 2% of sales are done from the first interaction with a client while 80% of sales occur after at least five follow-ups. In terms of timeliness, 63% of the potential customers are not ready to buy for at least 3 months. Meanwhile, 20% of customers would be more likely to purchase in the next 12 months.
In practice, almost half of salespeople give up after just one trial. However, only 8% of salespeople will try to reach the customer for the fifth time. This means that those who make an extra effort would more likely be the top-performing salespeople in their organization. Following up means building trust and loyalty. This means salespeople need to take time to use various channels such as emailing, calling, and even social media to reach their clients. It cannot be done without a consistent and time-efficient strategy. Nevertheless, a follow-up time-efficient strategy implies efforts, creativity, and a lot of patience.
Use Social Selling like a pro
Salespeople can use Social Selling practices as a tool for building relationships. Social sellers can connect and interact with potential prospects on social media, avoiding spamming. This is a new sales strategy that can focus on presenting your brand and providing solutions to build trust and loyalty.
In times like these, when we are missing face-to-face interaction, social selling should become a priority. Social selling cannot be done without Social Listening. This term refers to using the right tools in monitoring what people are saying on social media about your company, products, or services. In being cognizant of these tools, you can also find valuable opportunities to know what your customers need. Oftentimes, companies will send an email to their customers. However, sending an email will no longer be enough to break the barrier between the seller and buyer. Instead, having a real conversation with your clients can build trust and confidence.
Focus on inbound sales
Inbound sales are defined by Mark Roberge, Advisor at HubSpot as “a scalable sales strategy that focuses on attracting interested prospects to your business and building lasting relationships to help your customers succeed.” The focus is more on quality than quantity. This is also the opposite of outbound sales.
Inbound sales start with defining your Buyer’s journey and understanding their current needs in three main steps: awareness, consideration, and decision. After which, the next step should be focused on identifying leads, connecting with them, exploring their current needs, and advising. From there, inbound sellers should separate the passive buyer from the active buyers and focus more on finding a good fit or ideal buyer. Finally, inbound sales imply writing a personalized presentation adapted to the buyer’s context.
It is now very important to step out of the game when it comes to sales. Sales representatives should become advisors and consultants who can understand the current challenges the customer is facing. By doing so, they should also be translators for the content that is provided on the website of the business.
Create content and provide solutions
Through creating and sharing useful content, social sellers can provide value and interact with potential customers. With the sophistication of interactions today, customers will know genuine intent from just a simple sales talk. If a sales representative is only interested in promoting what he wants to sell and not connecting with the customer, the customer will feel it and refuse any further interaction.
Furthermore, sharing the right content can change up the routine. This will help both customer and seller to also learn something new and useful. Channels such as LinkedIn and other relevant news and articles sites can prove to be useful in this area.
There is a wealth of relevant content that sales representatives can use to reach their clients in a meaningful way while providing information. LinkedIn articles, statistics, and research data that are relevant to your company are important for customers to learn more about your business. Other information such as infographics, videos, and even content on your company’s working culture can be useful in connecting with your customers
Use technology to your advantage
Social sellers should use and master technology to their advantage. Learning how to use various online tools to strengthen their online presence will give them that edge when reaching out to customers. You can utilize technology and boost your sales through various means such as having knowledge in CRM tools, video conferencing software, meeting schedule, content automation, and quote generation.
In an article written for Johns Hopkins Magazine, Patrick Ercolano describes sales as “a struggle for everyone, but it is less so for those who understand it and know how to leverage digital sales capabilities.” This goes to show that there is a need for sales representatives to rethink their strategies within the digital space. Additionally, he mentioned that “digital sales transformation is about making technology focus on the process, so you can focus on the customer.”
LinkedIn also stated this year that 77% of sales professionals are going to invest more in sales intelligence tools. This number shows that CRM System integration is a must. Utilizing sales engagement and sale intelligence software is very useful for building trust with their customer base as well.
Use KPIs to measure personal and departmental performance
There is a need for a rigorous measurement system to improve sales performance. In the past, metrics were more oriented toward measuring individual or team performance. Nowadays, the performance measurement needs to be more focused on customer satisfaction and retention, as well as the tracking of activity quantity.
The most important KPIs to measure customer satisfaction and customer retention are % Customer satisfaction, % Customer loyalty, % Customer satisfaction with service levels, % Customer satisfaction with complaints handling, % Net Promoter Score, % Customer retention, $ Customer retention cost. Meanwhile, the most used activity quantity KPIs used to measure sales performance during this pandemic are the following: # Leads created, # Calls made, # Sent emails, # Follow Ups, # Social Media Connections, # Meetings Scheduled, # Proposals Sent, % Closed Ratio, # Referral Requests, # Attemted Upsells. To see all these documented KPIs, explore SmarKPIs.com, the world’s largest database of documented KPIs.
Satisfied customers mean happy customers and they can become the best advocates of your brand. Considering all these seven sales strategies, we realize that it is time to reconfigure our ways to sell. The sales representative will not disappear and cannot be replaced by any technological inventions because humans need other humans to trust and interact.
If we reconfigure our sales strategy based on building loyalty and trust, we need to be perseverant in following up, mastering social selling and social listening skills. We also need to focus on Inbound Sales by using the best technological advances to our advantage. Finally, if we can do all these and measure our performance, we can outsmart the pandemic challenges.
Decision-making and strategy planning are considered the most important managerial functions. One cannot simply exist without the other. Planning refers to the intent of choosing a future course of action, whereas decision-making implies selecting a course of action from the alternatives. The interrelation between the two functions creates the process of strategic decision-making, which entails the efforts before and after a choice has been made.
With the strategic decision-making fueling the management process, every organization can model its own by imprinting it with the corporate culture. That means every company attempts to create a better mousetrap to dominate the market through common values, attitudes, and beliefs that ultimately influence the way decisions are made. Eventually, the strategic decisions are considered rational if consistent with the corporate objectives.
The strategic decisions and list of action items are the outcome that derives from the regular performance review meetings held by the Strategy Office and Department Heads. These gatherings aim to monitor the organization’s progress in achieving its objectives by looking at KPIs’ results and initiatives’ status.
Through strategic, tactical, and operational decisions, companies form a habitual way of doing things. As a result, the employees get a sense of behaving and acting in certain situations.
Decision-making techniques
Different techniques are applied depending on the data analysis type encountered. During the data gathering and reporting stages, specialists often encounter the analytics data. Several approach techniques found in practice would be using statistics on historical data to identify data patterns, forecasting methods or regression, and correlation analysis.
During the performance review meetings, the executives benefit from the analytics, and a root cause analysis is conducted to identify the real source of issues, the moment in which the situational analysis starts to take on color. Before any decision is made, several root cause techniques are conducted, among which are the Ishikawa diagram and the 5 Whys.
By using the Ishikawa diagram, managers can identify the many possible causes for an issue. By listing the main issue and finding its possible root cause matches, a fishbone diagram’s results serve as a map of problem-solving situations.
The 5 Whys gives the specialists the chance to understand how relevant asking questions is. The approach is rather simple. Whenever a problem pops up, ask “why?” five times to clarify the nature of both the problem and solution. The answer has to come from informed decisions. The decision-making process should be based on an insightful understanding of what is actually happening on the work floor.
Residual uncertainty is what haunts many executives. But what is that, and how can it affect strategic decisions? After grueling hours of conducting the best possible analysis, there remains one gram of uncertainty. Either that may materialize into a new product in development that cannot ensure 10% in net profits or the outcome of an ongoing negotiation. However, there is always quite a bit of uncertainty around the corner that can fissure the best strategic decisions agreed upon.
Under the umbrella of uncertainty, traditional approaches pursued in strategy planning can turn out to be a spike for failure. Disparaging uncertainty can lead to strategies that do not defend against the threats nor take a chance to discover the opportunities brought by it.
In order to hedge this risk, agile decision-making techniques are addressed. Some of them consider their risk tolerance by evaluating the consequences of each alternative and apply Second-order Thinking. Others choose to perform a comparative analysis of alternatives, gather input from each team member, and then share perspectives with the whole team. This is called the Decision Matrix. In the stage of documenting decisions, the Decisions’ Log technique is applied, while in the stage of communicating decisions, there is the DACI matrix (Driver, Approver, Contributors, Informed).
Initial and horizontal alignment as part of strategic planning
After the decisions have been agreed upon, the key phase is to translate the corporate goals into objectives for each business unit. This completes the circle and brings us to the finish line of the strategic decision-making process. At this final stage, the traditional cascading approach may cause discrepancies between the objectives and projects from each business unit. To prevent this, a horizontal alignment is performed.
In other words, the managers, together with the strategy office, need to cascade corporate objectives, KPIs, and targets at operational level. All conflicting initiatives or objectives need to be addressed. The last step is setting in place prioritization criteria for selecting initiatives to see what gets approved and what is not.
What is an agile government, and how can it be achieved?
Agile is a well-known approach in the IT industry, where teams create deliverables in small incremental value within an iteration to achieve one big final goal or a product. This approach supports continuous development and allows teams to shift quickly when necessary because clients may ask for drastic changes.
Given the kind of results produced by the agile approach, it has attracted not only the IT industry but also the public sector and governmental institutions. To better understand the agile principles, let’s take a look at how Indonesia is reforming its bureaucratic system and implementing new strategies.
Bureaucracy in Indonesia
Indonesia is one of the countries in ASEAN that already put some effort into being agile by reforming its bureaucracy. President Joko Widodo expressed this intention in his speech at the Sentul International Convention Center on July 14, 2019. He recommended structural reform “so that institutions are simpler, more agile.”
Indonesia has a total of 217 government agencies, 31 ministries, and 98 statutory agencies as of 2014, based on the data of the Institute of Public Administration Australia. In the World Bank’s Mapping Indonesia’s Civil Service report, Indonesia’s civil service has increased by 25 percent from around 3.6 million in 2006 to over 4.5 million in 2018.
Bureaucracy bleeds several problems, ranging from corruption to low performance. The study “A Structural and Mindset Bureaucratic Reform Agenda for Jokowi’s Second Term.” published in May 2020, cited data from the Commission of Corruption Eradication (KPK) showing that in 2018, out of 2,357 civil servants who had committed corruption, only 891 were dishonorably discharged and 62 percent have not been fired and are still receiving salaries.
Indonesia’s six strategic steps
The bureaucracy culture of the Indonesian government can be traced back to its history of colonialism. But the country continues to aspire for reforms to give the public quality service. Its bureaucratic reform initiatives will be implemented according to the Grand Design of Bureaucratic Reform 2010-2025.
Bureaucratic reform, according to Indonesia’s “Regulation of Minister of State Apparatus and Bureaucratic Reform Number: PER/15/M/PAN/7/2008 concerning General Guidelines for Bureaucratic Reform,” refers to a systematic process and carefully planned fundamental changes in government organizations that aim to achieve high performance in carrying out duties and efficiently implementing services, development, and governance.
Widodo instructed his cabinet to implement bureaucratic reforms based on the “Regulation of the Minister of State Apparatus Utilization and Bureaucratic Reform number 25 year 2021 regarding Simplification of Organizational Structure in Governmental Institution.”
It consists of instructions in the form of a Circular Letter, which presents six strategic steps for every government institution as they reform their bureaucratic system.
Identifying which echelon can be simplified according to each organizational structure;
Mapping which structural role for echelon III, IV, and V in each unit that can be converted into functional roles;
Mapping the functional roles needed by each institution to replace the structural roles;
Adjusting the budget according to the new organization’s structure;
Communicating the results to internals;
Submitting the results to the Minister of State Apparatus Utilization and Bureaucratic Reform.
Indonesia’s bureaucratic system is loosening up to give way to an agile environment. An organization that is flattening its organizational structure is aiming for a more agile, adaptive , according to the paper “Cultivating Agile Organizational Culture: Addressing Resistance to Change in Bureaucratic Government Organizations.”
The study states that in organizational flattening, “leaders allow subordinate units to operate with minimal higher level control, and prefer more collaborative interactions.”
Going agile: analysis and recommendations
Bureaucratic reform, when done right, could transform organizations and public services. For instance, the One Stop Service at the Investment and Integrated Licensing Service Agency (IILSA) in Puruan City is a result of reforms made in the administrative services licensing process.
For a country to exhibit agile governance, it has to listen to its constituents in an efficient manner. According to the article “Agile: A New Way of Governing” written by Ines Mergel, Sukumar Ganapati, and Andrew B. Whitford, agile administrations must welcome reforms and adapt to the changing environment, public values, and public needs.
The authors stressed that agile governments must choose adaptive structure over hierarchies and silos and individual discretion over bureaucratic procedures.They also emphasized that consensual decision-making and trial-and-error approaches must take place for a government to be agile.
To be adaptive, governments must introduce an approach where their decision-making structure is decentralized and bottom-up, according to the paper “Adaptive governance: Towards a stable, accountable and responsive government.”
Indonesia launched its decentralization process in 1999, encouraging participation in community and regional planning and involving citizens in local governance. However, Indonesia has yet to experience the full effects of decentralization.
For example, in the area of public finance, decentralization is not being carried out properly due to two concerns, as stated in the report “Government Decentralization Program in Indonesia” released by the Asian Development Bank.” The first issue refers to “the capacity of subnational governments to produce public and private goods, increase productivity and employment, and promote economic growth in their jurisdictions, was not increased.”
The second concern is about the lack of training of financial managers, as required by the new laws of public treasury and auditing.
To address those issues, the government must demonstrate flexibility. Mergel, Ganapati, and Whitford suggest that flexibility is crucial because agile is not confined to one finished product, service, or process and prioritizes continuous improvement instead.
This is applicable in contracting processes. Traditional governments apply the waterfall model, but agile “requires a contract management approach that is flexible and stretches beyond a fixed-price, one-time project.”
Lastly, these public management reforms can only happen under a new style of leadership. In the IT industry, developers in an agile environment are expected to collaborate with business users. The same is true for agile governments, where leaders must serve and empower people.
To learn more about how governments can measure and improve performance at all levels, visit The KPI Institute’s Center for Government Performance.
Executives are familiar with Alfred Chandler, one of the more prominent strategic management scholars, along with Henry Mintzberg. Chandler perceives corporate strategy as the determining factor behind a firm’s long-term goals, after which you allocate capabilities and adapt actions & activities in a fashion that can achieve them in both an effective and efficient way.
