Fact: You can’t follow your way to a business growth breakthrough.
New sales, new profits and new growth don’t come from the old ways of thinking.
If you want to create a breakthrough you need to do something different. Something you’re not doing now. And more importantly, something that your competitors are not doing.
If you think that is obvious, this vignette should show otherwise: One of my clients had a new media solution that was proven to increase sales rates by 20% and more at half the cost of traditional marketing done by retailers. When they presented this solution to High-Level Executives, the number one question was “Who else in my category is doing it?”
It is a sad commentary when the knee-jerk response of an entire industry’s leaders is to look around and wait for one of their competitors to move first on a potential breakthrough.
These retail executives couldn’t move forward unless they could look around and see other people in their industry doing the same thing already.
I’m not advocating blindly jumping at every new concept without doing some due diligence. In fact, a few innovators chose to “test-forward” and brought millions of dollars of incremental revenue to the bottom-line as a result. But as business leaders we also need to look around, see that no one else in our industry has thought of something and see the potential Gold Mine of opportunity that creates.
Are you a business leader, or a business follower?