Last updated on December 23rd, 2018 at 04:42 pm
A whole new marketing revolution is in progress with advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, big data, tracking and personalization all playing important roles to feed the sales growth of B2B companies. The race is certainly on; But the bigger question is – who will win it?
Innovation management is extremely crucial for the success of any organization and companies who are slow in adapting to innovation will lose the race and ultimately perish. The question of generating ROI from innovation in the initial stages should not bother the CEO because innovation certainly pays just as patience results in sweet success.
The Need For An Internal Innovation Management Culture Is Quickly Growing
Most B2B businesses are still concerned over getting sales but there is hardly any system or culture that fosters discussion on new ideas and innovation. The task of generating revenue rests on the sales team. Now, let’s understand what are the roles and responsibilities of a B2B sales team before we move further.
- Development of the marketing strategy.
- Setting up KPIs and quarterly targets to measure growth.
- Cold selling the product or services.
- Representing the businesses at conferences and events.
- Developing and nurturing relationships with clients.
Innovation management does not have a place in list of responsibilities of the sales team, nor does it finds a place in the marketing team.
Now, how can you expect any enterprise to grow if there is no process for idea management and development?
Innovation management is needed to keep the business way ahead of the competition in terms of thinking, productivity, relationship and sales.
How Does Innovation Management Help?
Your employees and your customers are the best sources of ideas. You seriously need to think of a system that collects ideas from the employees/ customers and process them in terms of practical implementation. Here are some of the ways by which innovation management can help to nurture ideas to improve the bottom line.
Development of Ideas
Proper innovation management will help to develop ideas both at the product level and at the sales level. Tasks like participation in workshops and seminars, surveying the current customers, surveying the employees, surveying the existing market, analyzing the future market and performing a behavioral analysis of the customers to suggest ideas that can makes the product or the strategy different from the existent one and in a manner that can raise the sales.
Designing Solutions
A separate innovation process will help to design and models solutions that enhances the customer interaction and makes it easy for the potential customer to subscribe to the product.
Development of Strategies
Data from the innovation process will help to develop new strategies that will help both the marketing and sales team to generate and nurture leads. It is evident to note that there will be enormous amounts of data in the innovation management platform obtained from various sources.
Coordination of Cross Functional Activities and Development of New Products
One of the most important roles that innovation management will play is the coordination of various cross functional activities that represents both the customers as well as the employees. This involves overseeing allocation of projects, resource planning, product delivery and customer satisfaction.
List of Tools For Better Innovation Management
Now that you are fully aware about the advantages that innovation management will offer, let’s discuss the tools that should be a part of every innovation process.
1- Qmarkets
Qmarkets provides a complete idea management suite that comprises of the following products:
- Q-optimize – It discovers improvements that can be implemented organization wide in order to boost productivity.
- Q-ideate – It captures the collective intelligence of employees to initiate process improvement and promote performance excellence.
- Q-scout – It helps to manage strategic corporate scouting portfolio and evaluate results againsts predefined KPIs.
- Q-open – It lets you connect with the voice of the customer and helps to deliver products and services that perfectly matches the needs of the customers.
2- Trello
Keeping a track of everything is required to analyze the performance capabilities of every process. This is where Trello can be a huge asset.
Trello lets you create boards for every project and add team members to it. All the activities that happen on that project can be seen on the board as a single page. There is less hassle involved and the entire process is extremely easy.
3- Zendesk
Customer engagement is extremely crucial for any business to succeed. This is where Zendesk comes handy for any innovation manager. Zendesk’s CRM software lets you set your own rules, create macros and maximize your team’s efforts with scheduled business hours. In short, Zendesk lets you tracks the problems of the customers, prioritize them and solves them. Moreover, you have all the data in the dashboard which can then be evaluated to improve the current processes so that the problems don’t arise.
CEO’s Must Not Worry About Innovation ROI
I have kept is extremely simple and straight so that you understand that innovation is the need of the society and businesses who fail at innovation will fail in their businesses. CEO’s must understand this and should create a separate innovation process. Moreover, they must use innovation management tools and acquire the data needed to implement the gathered ideas in the best possible manner.
Innovation is a constant process and it it covers so many processes that you can’t really measure the ROI of innovation. It is for this reason that the CEOs should not worry about innovation ROI and make way for healthy innovation within the organization.
