An Ideas-to-Sales Process To Drive Business Success

This blog puts the ideas of Why Agile Fails into a practical framework

A structured Ideas-to-Sales process is important to ensure that the strategic objectives of the leadership team are delivered upon by the workforce across all disciplines. It is by following this process that the company can directly see how small changes build to big gains.

In this blog I will describe a simple Ideas-To-Sales process that has been developed over many years of real-world business growth. This process can help any company become sharply focused on the customer and deliver valuable products that will boost revenue and make employees happier.

An Ideas-to-Sales process is the method a company goes about deciding what it does that makes it special, the strategy by which the company is going to grow and the steps it takes to deliver on that strategy. Every company should have an Ideas-to-Sales process, but in most companies it is an undocumented ad-hoc collection of disjointed conversations, split by rank, silo and expectations. This leads to confusion, and then to disenchantment, inertia, stagnation and finally failure.

Defining the Beginning and the End

Our Ideas-to-Sales process assumes that the CEO has already defined the Mission, Vision, Purpose and Value for the company and that everyone is aware and supports them. The process therefore starts with the business strategy, specifically the strategic objective for the next one to three years. I use ‘objective’ in the same way it is used in Objective and Key Results (OKR). Objectives are significant, concrete, action oriented, and (ideally) inspirational.

The end of the process are the Key Results. Key Results are the benchmark by which the success of the objective is measured. A Key Result is measurable and verifiable, it is met or it isn’t.

The CEO OKR may be singular or there may be a few, but no more than three. Meeting these OKRs should consume the resources of the company and so they need to be meaty. They are the cornerstone by which the success of the CEO and company will be judged.

For example, for a fictional stockbroker may make the following their strategic objective. In it it provides a vision of change, benefits to the customer and the Key Results by which it will be judged.

“We believe that Self-Service Online Shareholder Services coupled with Intelligent Proactive Investor Communication will enable shareholders to access their shareholding details, track transactions, and respond promptly to the market will significantly enhance the shareholder experience and therefore produce 20% increase in Revenue and a 25% EBITDA growth over the next two years”

Taking the Initiative

The next step of the process is for the Senior Leadership Team (SLT), those folk that report to the CEO, to identify the initiatives for the coming twelve months. The time boxing is critical, while the strategic objective may be multi-year, the initiatives need the stress of deadlines to focus the company on delivery.

Initiatives are also expressed as OKRs. Each OKR has an owner who is a member of the SLT. Each initiative should deliver on either attracting more paying customers, retaining existing customer, increasing the spend per customer or reducing fixed and variable costs. Initiatives are the big changes that should ‘move the needle’ for the company. They should have a WOW factor that excites and engages the staff. It should be clear how an initiative supports the strategic objective without extra explanation. It is at the initiative level do we see Steering Committees appearing.

Initiatives will cross over the domains of the SLT members. Sometimes you might find that one member becomes overloads, or it is difficult to load balance initiatives across the team. This is a perfect opportunity to drive collaboration and support into the company from the top. Ownership of initiatives is not about making your department superstars at the expense of the other departments, but to achieve great things across the company.

In the previous example, it is clear that initiatives will be needs to attract, retain and increase per-customer spend. For example:

• “We believe that a frictionless onboarding that does proof of identify checks seamlessly while obtaining the PII of the new customer, performs KYC checks in real time and uses guided tours of the app and website with example funds will boost new monthly users by 25%”
• “We believe that smart self-service portal in which the customer can input a query in natural language and have the page built dynamically that serves up the relevant content and settings will increase trades by customer by 10% per month, app engagement per customer by 15% per month and overall monthly regular users by 20%”
• “We believe that ML driven communications that monitor changes in the market pricing and events specific to a customers portfolio and dynamically reach out the customer with suggestions will increase customer transactions by 15%”

Projects With Meaning

An initiative is delivered through a series of projects. Projects are owned by members of the middle management team, those folk who report to members of the SLT. A project is the vehicle by which changes are delivered to the customer, and so will usually include marketing, sales, support, technology and other teams. A project should be time boxed to no more than three months, with a preference towards less than eight weeks.

A project has a Project Manager who is responsible for tracking the progress of the project and highlighting if the timescales are being challenged, but is not involved at all with the actual development of the project. This is very similar to how a project manager would work in, say, construction. They would ensure that the trades, suppliers and equipment know when they are needed and track their arrival but would not tell a brickie where or how to build a wall.

Projects themselves are described using OKRs. The refining of OKRs from the strategic objective, through initiatives and onto projects give a timeline of Key Results that can be used to get early sight of the success or otherwise of the strategy. This progressive feedback means that projects shouldn’t need to be fully defined before starting on the first project. At the start of the initiative the projects should be enumerated and the OKRs written up. However, filling out the details of the project should start only once it become clear that a preceding project is being successful. It is important to allow the learnings of doing the work inform the planning of future work.

Taking the first initiative, then there may be the following projects:

• ”We believe that adding automatic KYC checks to the onboarding process will reduce drop out by 15%”
• “We believe that adding video/ID card Proof of Identity to the app will reduce drop out by 25%”
• “We beleive adding a guided tour to the app will increase second use of app by 20%”
• “We believe that adding a guided tour to the website will increase second use of website by 10%”

Defining the Outcomes, Stories and Tasks

Outcomes, Stories and Tasks are covered in my blog Why Agile Fails. Outcomes are very similar to OKRs but at a direct customer level. A project is a set of outcomes that drive measurable changes into the experience of the customers, employees, suppliers and so on.

Conclusion

This has been a whistle-stop tour of an Idea-to-Sales process. The aim of the process is drive clear accountability into every level of the company, and to links work at the lowest levels with the strategic objectives at the top. Such levels of transparency and flow engages and brings together all levels of staff and management. By doing this the company gets a much clearer understanding of how to drive growth in customer focus, satisfaction and revenue.

I encourage you to try this process. If you have any questions I can be found on LinkedIn at (3) Richard George | LinkedIn