$1 billion in sales from new ideas: How a reliable supply of ideas can create sustainable revenue and margin growth.

The client was a large IT services company, and they had a curious observation– the sales team had better control over deals when they were the ones to come out with the initial idea and helped the client develop and promote the projects internally. The deals were erratic when this didn’t happen, and win rates were abysmally low. The sales team is putting in the effort in either case, so it would be preferable to have higher win rates.

How can the company create an Ideas Factory that reliably generates new ideas that clients appreciate and purchase? To generate new ideas, the account team must understand the client’s business and find ways to generate themes that could be tested with the clients. This cannot be done without improving the ability to build trusted advisor relationships with clients and to articulate business value. The teams also needed a cadence of ideation and follow-through that must be repeated consistently to generate multi-year results.

Doloop Digital’s Gaurav Rastogi worked as the Board’s lead for this multi-year project. In the first six years, this team worked with 43 accounts with annual revenues of $2.1 billion. The 650 sales and account managers were coached to develop 4,000 client relationships. The teams met twice a year to carry out opportunity workshops, where 971 client-validated ideas were generated from 142 workshops. These led to business wins worth $1 billion and a standing pipeline of another billion dollars. The board’s requirement of ‘deal control’ meant that the deals needed to be sold at a higher price than the average deal for the same consultant quality. The team reported a 14-18% higher billing rate for these proactive deals.

How do you create a reliable supply of bankable ideas to bring new business to clients? Here are some things you should begin with:

• A cadence of account management and review must be followed. Like the annual marketplace, these allow for new services to show their wares to the account team and for the account team to relay their client’s needs to the rest of the organization.
• Arrange opportunity workshops with careful planning and orchestration, and test all the newly generated ideas with clients soon after generating them.
• Capability building must go hand-in-hand with your opportunity development.

Further learning. Contact us for Gaurav Rastogi’s “Setting Up an Ideas Factory” workshop.