Innovators and entrepreneurs are missing opportunities to grow their companies according to Prof. Colin Coulson-Thomas speaking at the iFestival exhibition held at The Walkers Stadium in Leicester: “They develop exciting new products while adopting traditional and losing approaches to winning business. Their technical creativity needs to be matched by innovation in their approach to business building.”

According to the Adaptation chairman, “Understanding is critical. Sales personnel who do not understand the nature of their company’s innovations and the impacts they can have struggle to communicate with prospects who do not understand how they might benefit. High tech developments are often too complex for people to understand if traditional approaches to training, selling and e-learning are used.”

The Professor’s ‘Winning Companies; Winning People’ research programme identifies what successful people or winners do differently in areas such as winning business, building customer relationships and creating and exploiting know-how. Over 2,000 companies participated in the latest round of studies, and critical success factors or ‘winning ways’ for key business building activities have been identified.

The more successful innovators recognise that however exciting their breakthroughs they are unlikely to be adopted if people do not understand them. Coulson-Thomas explains: “Instead of pushing their products winners focus on helping people to assess their requirements, understand what is on offer, and select a way forward that helps them achieve their goals. Instead of hard selling they make it easy for people to buy.”

Coulson-Thomas believes: “The difficult work in areas like competitive bidding and building customer relationships has been done. We have identified critical success factors for key business development activities and what high performers do differently from their less successful colleagues.”

The Professor showed iFestival delegates how a new generation of support tools can help sales staff, account managers and prospects to understand complex offerings: “Using a sales accelerator developed by Cotoco sales staff at Eyretel were able to work with prospects to assess their needs, design and cost solutions, and generate proposals in forty minutes rather than the four weeks previously required, and in most cases without the need for specialist engineers to be in attendance.”

Coulson-Thomas revealed “At Eyretel the new approach led to sales increasing by 25% in eight weeks, and a two thirds reduction in the technical support required by the sales team. A return on investment of over seventy times the cost of developing the sales accelerator was obtained in the first year. Eyrtel won an innovation award for its support tool and was acquired by another company that subsequently listed.”

Examples of how support tools can make it very easy for average performers to adopt winning ways, understand complex areas and handle difficult tasks are given in Prof. Coulson-Thomas’ book ‘Winning Companies; Winning People’ (Policy Publications, 2007) which can be ordered from: http://www.coulson-thomaspublications.com.

Critical success factors for winning business are set out in best practice reports covering sectors such as engineering, manufacturing, IT and telecoms and seven professions; and a four-part ‘Winning New Business’ resource pack consisting of a report based on the experience of over 300 companies, a report on the top 20 winning business skills, 30 bidding tools and a CD-Rom containing these and other resources.

Details of the ‘Winning New Business’ resource pack, individual winning business reports, and related workshops can be obtained from http://www.adaptation.ltd.uk. Companies can also now compare their practices with their peers and high performing winners. Details of bespoke benchmarking and other services can be obtained from http://www.coulson-thomas.com

The iFestival is a celebration of innovation. The 2008 iFestival consisted of 158 separate events, culminating in an exhibition, series of lectures, and gala dinner at The Walkers Stadium, the home of Leicester City Football Club.

Prof. Colin Coulson-Thomas, author of ‘Winning Companies; Winning People’ has reviewed the processes and practices for winning business of over 100 companies, advised over 100 boards on director, board and business development, and presented at over 200 national and international events in 35 countries. He can be contacted via http://www.adaptation.ltd.uk and http://www. coulson-thomas.com

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