Paul Sloane: creativity.

Paul Sloane is passionate about introducing creativity into the business process and finding new ways for organisations to operate and approach markets, so much so that he styles himself as an ‘innovation evangelist’.

His latest book – The Innovative Leader – is full of intriguing sections like ‘Be an arsonist and a fire-fighter’, ‘Kill the losers’ and ‘Be disconnected’. Its stated aim is to help business leaders transform their teams into ‘innovation warriors’ and their organisation into a ‘powerhouse of invention and entrepreneurial achievement’.

From manufacturing to sales

Can Sloane be successful in his aspiration? He certainly has the credentials for it – a multi-disciplinary career with a solid track record of achievement and innovation. It’s clear that change has been a big part of Sloane’s life: having started out in manufacturing at IBM in 1974, he transferred into sales four years later.

‘It was a big step into the unknown at the time but it was the best thing I ever did.’

Manufacturing offered a very narrow perspective on the world, according to Sloane. ‘Eventually it dawned on me that IBM wasn’t about manufacturing computers; it was about selling them and making money. And “sales” ran the company. When I made that switch, I was trained in what the business was about, how business people thought and how they make decisions; that has proved very useful.’

At the time, IBM operated a year’s sales training programme called Sales School, from which participants had to graduate successfully. Sloane passed out top of the school for his year and went on to be a new business salesman working in Manchester, selling system 34 and 38 hardware to competitive accounts and new accounts.

Sloane: take a different view.

Harsh but effective education

As a young salesperson in his twenties, Sloane learned to make a living by calling on directors of companies and helping to solve their business problems… ‘or being thrown out if I couldn’t’. ‘It was a very harsh but effective education.’

Clearly, this was something that suited him. ‘I made the Club (the IBM club that recognised salespeople who were over quota – Ed) every year for five years on the trot,’ he says matter-of-factly. ‘I was 100% Club and was “salesman of the month” on occasion.’

Subsequently, he joined the team that launched the IBM PC in the UK, and then move on to become the UK PC software marketing manager (this was a sales management role but IBM used to call their sales managers ‘marketing managers’ – Ed).

Explosive growth

It was not long before a head-hunter came knocking on Sloane’s door: this was a time of explosive growth in the PC market, and he was enticed away to join software house Ashton-Tate as UK marketing director. Rising rapidly through the management ranks, he became, in turn, European marketing director, UK managing director and then Northern European managing director.

Sloane: salesperson as trusted adviser.

Then, Borland bought the company in 1991 and Sloane moved to American company, Mathsoft, as vice president – international, responsible for all sales outside the United States. In the UK, the company sold the ‘Pass Your GCSE’ product with the guarantee ‘or your money back…’ It was the number two best-seller in the education charts behind Microsoft’s Encarta. And, of course, very few people actually asked for their money back because it would have meant admitting they had failed their GCSE. ‘It was a form of “guiltware”!’

Revenue resonsibility

Moving on after seven years, he joined Monactive as chief executive officer, before founding his own business Destination Innovation in 2002. To sum up his career, Sloane declares: ‘I’ve had revenue responsibility for the last 30 years in one way or another. I’m used to employing salespeople and also being one myself.’

So how does the selling experience translate into a wider view? ‘That’s one of the great things about selling. If you don’t understand people’s problems and come up with constructive solutions, you’re not going to make it. And to do that you have to have a business view; it can’t just be a product view.’

And what exactly are the benefits of creativity? That’s a question that almost so transparent that it hardly needs answering, according to Sloane: ‘Everybody recognises that innovation is the key to success.’ Simply being better, cheaper and faster is just not an option anymore.

Sloane: fresh ideas.

‘Whatever is being produced in this country, can be produced cheaper in China. And a lot of services are moving offshore as well. And the only way to succeed is to constantly innovate, find new ways of providing business services that your clients need because, if you don’t, somebody else will: somebody else is trying to find a smarter way, a better product, a better service.

‘If you’re not innovating, you’re going to be put out of business. There are many, many examples of companies who did a great job, listened to their customers, improved their product, improved their service, improved their quality, drove down cost, focused on sales and went bust.’

Innovate or die

Such as? Smith Corona, the typewriter manufacturer for one, says Sloane. Their position was usurped when word-processing machines came along in the 1980s; in turn, these were replaced by dedicated software on PCs. Polaroid is another example, put out of business by digital technology, as are music downloads which have really hurt the music industry.

‘But what happened? Apple took a different view. Apple said there’s an opportunity for us to innovate here. We can come up with the i-Pod and i-Tunes and offer a service based on downloads; we can make money at it by riding it.

‘If you focus on the current model, you’re in big danger,’ Sloane warns.

But surely not every company can claim to be a true innovator all the time – another equally good model is to let other companies introduce innovations and then buy them, in a way that Microsoft has become very adept at?

‘One of the best ways to innovate is to pinch other people’s ideas!’ agrees Sloane. ‘To be an innovator, you don’t have to be a genius inventor. Quite the opposite; one of the best ways to innovate is to go and see what people are doing in California, in Holland, in Singapore, in Shanghai, and come back. And, if you’re the first person doing it in the UK, you’re an innovator.’

Creativity is really important in the sales profession, stresses Sloane. ‘I believe that salespeople can create their own unique sales proposition by combining:

• their product knowledge;
• their understanding of their customer and his or her business issues;
• their business knowledge of other businesses; and
• their ideas.

 ‘I advocate that salespeople should become ideas carriers – they’re carrying a virus and the virus is a fresh idea, and they give it to their customers. And it doesn’t have to be a fresh idea that relates specifically to their products; it has to be an idea that helps his or her business. So, if you can understand their business problems and you see something in a magazine or on the internet, you clip it and send it to them; you say “hey, I thought of you and I thought you’d be interested in this”.

‘There are three big benefits of this:

• it reminds the customers that you exist;
• it shows them that you are interested in their problems, not just selling your products; and, thirdly,
• it’s a great reason to call them up and have a chat to them.

‘Ultimately what the salesperson’s trying to become is not a product salesperson; it’s a trusted adviser. What people need these days is people who understand business and people who’ve got lots of ideas.

Salespeople need marketing skills

‘When I was at Mathsoft, I employed account managers to look after our distributors all around the world. And the most successful account managers came from a marketing background; they came with ideas. The people who came in from a pure sales background weren’t as successful; they were interested in managing the numbers, inventory and ‘when’s your next order’, but people who went to the distributor with an idea for a direct mail or PR campaign would generate more business. A salesperson needs marketing and creative skills; they need ideas to be really successful and different.’

Surely this route is only open to a small percentage of the sales universe? ‘Everybody can be more creative; everybody’s got an imagination,’ comes back the swift response. ‘It’s just a question of whether you use it or not.’

Sloane: you’ve got to contribute ideas.

‘Focus and determination and goal-orientation are important but if that’s all you’re doing then you miss the bigger picture, and you’ll never become a leader. Leaders are visionary. Ideally you need to be a bit of both; there are times when you’re focused and there are other times when you step back.

‘A good salesperson is networking, constantly prospecting and looking for new opportunities as well as trying to close the current opportunities they’ve got. So you have to switch between the two modes.

‘Ultimately, if you’re going to grow in a business, you’ve got to contribute ideas to the business, not just operational efficiency,’ Sloane emphasises. ‘And the salesperson who is creative – who is coming up with ideas, coming up with better ways of doing business, new approaches to the market, new opportunities, new initiatives for the company – is more likely to be promoted. I think they’re more likely to become the sales director and, ultimately, the CEO than somebody who just focuses entirely on delivery (although delivering numbers is a good thing!).’

Senior management want to innovate

In his experience with large blue-chips, Sloane comes across varying attitudes to innovation. ‘Most of the senior managers – the directors and CEOs – want innovation but most of them are frustrated as well; they’re not getting enough of it, and they don’t know how to fix it. The bigger the company, the more successful it is, the harder it can be to be innovative. Success can be an enemy of innovation and the current model militates against anything that’s new and radical and unorthodox.

‘Certainly, in many companies, there’s a fear of failure, and a blame culture, and a silo mentality. The other thing is that people are so busy in their day jobs that they don’t have time to try new things. However, the most successful companies overcome those problems and they fight them head on.’ (Sloane discusses numerous examples and ways to overcome resistance to innovation in his book – Ed.)

To round off, Sloane shares his top three sales sales tips:

1. Understand your client’s key business issues – not just his problems in the area in which you’re selling but what is it that’s really important to him or her at a business level; try to understand the overall business context, not just your product;
2. Secondly, have an attitude where you walk in of ‘I’m here to help’, not ‘I’m here to sell’; a salesperson’s primary attitude is to assist the client with advice, with contacts, with networking, with information; they will build up a better relationship in which they’re trusted but if they go in with an attitude ‘I’m here to sell’ ultimately the client won’t want to take their calls; and
3. Thirdly, become an ideas-carrier – bring ideas to your customer (creative ideas, wacky ideas); part of your strength is that you’re not in his company so you see things that he doesn’t see, so become a business adviser rather than a salesperson.

For sales managers, the advice is slightly different.

1. ‘The most important thing a sales manager has to do is to hire good people. I think a lot of sales managers are haphazard about hiring; they’re fooled into hiring people they like rather than hiring people who are really effective. The two most important qualities are the ability to ask questions and the ability to listen, and you can test both of those qualities at interview.’
2. Secondly, the sales manager should remove as many obstacles as possible. ‘The sales manager should be empowering people not controlling them.’ That involves trust, but you should be supporting people, rather than sitting on their shoulder controlling them.

Finally, at CEO level, the advice is different again.

‘CEOs have to take a much longer-term, broader view. You should delegate the day-to-day management and fire-fighting of the company as possible and operate at a level above that.

‘The leadership stuff is about vision, direction, strategy, strategic alliances; it’s about developing the whole team. The leader has to spend a lot of time on communication and inspiring, empowering and delegating rather than controlling, measuring and supervising.’

Paul Sloane’s seven golden rules

Challenge your assumptions.
Ask searching questions.
Listen.
Deliberately take a different point of view.
Try weird combinations.
Borrow with pride (pinch other people’s ideas).
Implement (get on and do it).

Paul Sloane’s one magic sentence

(What to say to somebody when they come to you with an idea and you can see things that are wrong with it – you can immediately shoot it down because you’re smart.)

‘That sounds interesting; how could we make it work?’

The Innovative Leader by Paul Sloane is published by Kogan Page, price £9.99. To contact Paul, email psloane@destination-innovation.com.

My Question / Comment Is...