Whether it’s being more transparent with your team or empowering them to go forth and conduct independent research, harnessing these tips can help to bolster your franchise business.
Can you remember the last time your team wasted time and money on an idea that didn’t live up to its expectation? Well, the most common reason for these failures is that the initiators have not properly understood what the customer really wants and needs. Swept away with the excitement of a new idea, or perhaps responding to a JDI (“just do it”) request from up high, there can be dangerous assumptions that lurk in the shadows.
So, what can you do to avert this waste and circumvent this common pitfall?
1. Make evidence-based decisions
Ideas can be cloaked in enthusiasm, held up as the much-awaited savior and the silver bullet that we’ve all been waiting for to deliver on our business goals. But decisions need to be based on evidence, not excitement or blind faith.
There is a fine line here between asking for so much evidence that we take too long to make decisions, and requesting just enough evidence at this early ideas stage to enable us to pick the best ones. Asking the right questions at the right time is the most important job you can do as a business leader.
The question at this early stage is about who the customer is and what they want. Is there any evidence that the problem, need, or desire exists for a particular customer group? Is that need big enough for you to bother with? Are they up for spending money (or taking the required action) to get your solution?
At this point, we are just after a little evidence upon which to make decisions. This could be from as little as five customers, or perhaps it needs a slightly larger group, but starting somewhere is better than nothing at all. I guarantee once you start talking with customers, you will very quickly be able to refine who your customer is and find out whether they feel, think and behave as you think they do.
2. Empower your teams to carry out early idea research themselves
I am a huge fan of encouraging people with ideas to carry out their own research directly with customer groups before presenting their idea to management. Being able to find out whether an idea has legs before presenting it to management will not only give an early indication of whether the particular idea is worth going for but also spark new ideas, about who the customer is and whether there are bigger needs to address instead. In turn, you, as a business leader, are going to be presented with a larger number of better quality ideas.
So the message is clear: test before you invest and empower your teams to go gather the evidence so you can make informed decisions. Spending a little time upfront is going to be worth it in the long run – just think of the hours that were wasted last time you tried to progress an idea that turned out to be a dud!
3. Share your business goals and measures of success
If you are really committed to this, then you will need to share your strategy and key business success metrics with the rest of the business. Communicate what you are trying to achieve by when. This will help those people generating and testing out ideas to know that they are working “on strategy” and will save them from ploughing efforts into ideas that are never going to make it past first base.
The best commercial director I ever worked for used to ask this question: “What is it that we are not doing?”. It was a way of explaining what was on strategy and what was off strategy. It allowed the business to focus on doing fewer things really well. Giving examples of what we shouldn’t be working on was a really practical way to make sure we understood the business strategy. Avoid wasting effort on things that are not on point.
4. Be transparent about how investment decisions are made
If you are going to sign up to empowering your teams to test out ideas early on, then you are going to have to share even more with them upfront. While sharing business goals will go some way towards understanding how business decisions are made, there will be other specific factors at play for your particular business. For example, it could be about your agreed target customer segments, or the markets in which you are going to play and not play, or about what resources you have just waiting to be used.
Sharing these decision-making parameters will help you create an environment where it is okay to question and challenge. If decisions are based on whether they support the business success targets, specific business factors and on evidence from customer interviews, then people will be more focussed on what ideas to work on and the quality of the idea that they present. By giving your teams this focus, you will ensure that only fitting ideas are progressed versus time wasted on ideas that fall at the first internal hurdle.
“Asking the right questions at the right time is the most important job you can do as a business leader”
As a business leader, innovator and new-idea-researcher, I find challenges to be absolute gold dust. Sometimes we don’t see or want to see the elephant in the room. We don’t want to confront that nagging doubt that could mean we have to question our plans and bring back some old debates. We all love charismatic people with the courage of their convictions, colleagues who are brilliant at selling their ideas, but a persuasive character is not an indicator of a really good idea.
5. Be prepared to stop work on projects that aren’t going to pay off
What about all that work already in progress? Do you have that nagging thought that something you have already committed to building is not what customers want or need? Perhaps something in the market or environment changed since you started working on it? Or new customer insight that has come from testing out another idea indicates something already being developed is not going to fly? What about products or services that you have already launched that are not performing as they should?
This is just a matter of using resources in the most effective way and not wasting them. Just think of all that energy that could be repurposed and put to good value on really good ideas. There is no shame in stopping, just great leadership that is dynamic and evolves with the changing times. I have a good list of products and services (from ideas through to live) that I have killed and successful new offerings that those re-purposed teams have worked on instead.
THE AUTHOR
Julia Shalet is the author of the new book, The Really Good Idea Test, published by Pearson. She also offers practical, hands-on training to help your teams move their ideas forward.
