Two years ago, I helped an ad agency startup scale its revenue by 300%. The startup was doing fairly decent with new business from word-of-mouth referrals and almost no churn. It was excellent but not enough. To survive in a highly cutthroat market of advertising, in a red ocean market condition, surviving is not enough. There needs to be growth. And that’s why I was there.
Doing my homework in the initial few days, I realized the industry mostly ran on a traditional model of ‘Wine&Dine’ approach to sales. Means, agency CEOs and their sales teams traditionally built connections over lunch or dinner, relying on referrals from friends and acquaintances. Next, they often met these referrals over a few drinks to break the ice and close deals. But this was a long, tedious process that cost a lot of money when compared to the outcome and the startup’s revenue.
Hence, I decided to change it. I put to use the SCAMPER framework for innovation here. Substitute from SCAMPER, to be precise. I substituted the ad agency’s ‘Wine&Dine’ sales model with the software industry’s (SaaS industry to be precise) ‘Account Based Marketing & Selling’ or ‘ABMS’. But I didn’t swap ABMS from the SaaS industry, as is with the Wine&Dine of the ad industry. Rather, I modified the existing ABMS of SaaS by combining it with the best of two other marketing worlds, ‘Outbound Marketing’ and ‘Inbound Marketing’.
And it worked! Advertising pitches jumped exponentially from 3 or 4 in a month to almost a pitch daily. Which in turn resulted in the revenue growth I mentioned before. But does this mean the innovation was successful and I could rest? Nope! This was just the initial stage of my plan. Change management is not a one-time project. It’s a forever task to which most organizations fail to devote enough attention.
Even positive growth, overachievement of targeted revenue, or substantial profits—all are types of change that call for special attention. Hence, as I mentioned in my post on Business Model Canvas having a clear and transparent view of the entire business is key. A change in one area will automatically slowball to the others. Being resilient to handle that is what creativity and innovation management are all about.