What Innovators Do That Others Completely Miss (the cure for “average”)

What Innovators Do That Others Completely Miss (the cure for “average”)

My name is Renee Hribar. I am a sales strategist, TEDX speaker and author. I have some actionable, real, simple, sales tips that can actually make your sales simple and fun. I have been teaching sales for over 20 years. I’ve taught thousands of people to sell for the first time and the goal here today is to give you a nugget to walk away with and use right away. So let’s dig in.

What makes an innovator, an innovator? What does it take? What is that perspective?

I live in Detroit, and I grew up in New York, but here in Detroit it’s all about Henry Ford. He is an innovator, but Henry Ford did not invent the car. He invented a way to make the car affordable for everyone. That is what he is known for. People think he invented the car, but he didn’t. Just like Apple did not invent the iPod. They named it the iPod but they didn’t invent the MP3 player. They just figured out a way to make it accessible and marketable to everyone.

So let’s talk about how you might be able to use innovation in your business today. I take my clients through a three-question process every time they’re stuck. When they come to me saying

“Renee I’m stuck in sales” “Renee, I need more sales” or “I’m stuck with my promotions”

I just ask them: “What do you want the desired outcome to be?”

This could mean anything. What do you want the desired outcome to be? It might not be that they want more sales, maybe they want more time. But getting more sales gets them the funding that they need to hire more staff, or build out their operations so that they get more time.

So what is the end result? What are you actually trying to accomplish? Then what are you currently doing to try to make that possible? So then we list off what they’re doing. Maybe they have an intern, maybe they don’t. Or maybe they hired their sister or they have a neighbor doing something for them.

Then the goal is that we talk about what they want to accomplish and what they’re currently doing and here’s where the innovation comes in.

Let’s take it and actually look at it from different vantage points. There’s a great movie, with Liam Neeson, called Vantage Point. It’s fantastic. It goes about the same perspective that I want you to take today. Take what you have and look at it from other perspectives.

Now here’s the problem. It’s hard to look at our own situation from other perspectives. Do you agree? I have a coach and she always says: “You can’t cut the back of your own hair.” I mean you can, but it’s not going to look that good. So my recommendation to you is to find someone who can help you with this exercise.

Now the goal is this: Answer these questions and then as you go through, look at it from different vantage points.

“How can I turn this on its head?”

“How can I shake it up a little bit?”

We need an outside perspective. So maybe you’re in a mastermind and you want to have someone else’s perspective. I know in my mastermind it’s amazing because the members get the chance to actually have other brains on their business. I absolutely love it.

Let me give you an example. One of the women that I’m working with right now was thinking:

“Oh my goodness I have a podcast that’s geared towards this one specific audience and I am shifting how I work with my clients. I am shifting who I work with.”

So to that end she thought she needed to eliminate her podcast. A podcast that she had been working on for almost two years. She had two years of content, two years of great guests, of great downloads of SEO, of data, and she wanted to give that up. So when she came to me about this I told her “let’s do a special series within that encapsulation”.

Then we took it out and started looking at what she wants to accomplish, and what she currently has. That is when we realized she had been to an event with a pretty popular influencer. And she had a selfie with that person, and she had connected with them via email and messenger a few times before, during, and after the event. I said:

“What if you invited this influencer to kick off this new sector of your interview series within your podcast.”

She wasn’t even sure what he would say or if she would even be able to get his attention. But told her my perspective. This is a connection perspective. So she came in, we crafted the letter, she sent it to him, nervously, but she pressed send. And then guess what?

Not only did she get invited to be a guest on his podcast, but she interviewed him and now she’ll be interviewing his wife as well. That deserves a round of applause. She didn’t create any new resources, she did not create a new podcast. She did not create new anything.

This is, I really think, the creator’s bane. It’s that we want to create something new and then we see a problem. I think this goes down to a deeper societal level. Are we in a throwaway society? Where we think “Oh this is bad let’s throw it away, or let’s just get something new?”

It’s so easy to create something new nowadays it almost becomes a hindrance, a barrier to our success. Instead, I challenge you to innovate and to say

“What can I work with that I already have? What resources do I already have?”

Will you be an innovator? Will you take what you already have and turn it on its head? Get somebody’s unique perspective to help you figure out another way to get the result you’re looking for?

This is the time of year to do that. Right now, today, not wasting any more time. I challenge you.