Story:
How we as a IT consulting company engage our brilliant people to think innovation in the sales process to get focus on value instead of price

By Frode Hetland - Head of solutions at Peanuts AS

January 2, 2013 at 2:43pm

Sales process

Strategic Innovation Canvas

Summary

Inspired by the task board in scrum we have started to use a Strategic Innovation Canvas with post-it notes to engage our brilliant people and clients to pirate thinking.

Example of Strategic Innovation Canvas

Context

Peanuts are an IT consulting company located in Stavanger, Norway.

It was started in March 2011 by 6 entrepreneurs who wanted to create a place where focus is on the people and each individual’s passion.
As per January 2013, 45 more people has joined the company
In a market where employees has the power, it has been necessary to think different to attract the brilliant people.
The culture is based on 4 values, Enthusiasm, Team work, Integrity and Openness.
We challenge each other to step outside the comfort zone, because that is where the magic happens.

Triggers

We are in a market with several competitors and high focus on price on tenders. Tenders are often for operational needs like a new website, new intranet or an internal application. Our goal is to help our clients to get the most value for their money and we often see that we could provide our client more, but has to “hold back” due to the requested specification combined with cost.

The first thing we do when we receive a tender is to have brainstorming meetings. A lots of ideas related to our client's business comes up in the meeting.

How could we present these ideas to our clients to show them that we maybe have an alternative solution that is outside the original specification, but gives them more value for their money?

Christian Rangen from Engage//innovate participate in one of ours meeting, and he presented us for the idea of using strategic innovation canvas to illustrate it to the client.

Key Innovations & Timeline

Internally:

Today we have introduced the tool in the sales process; the next step will be to introduce it for internal development. It has been quite easy to implement the tool internally in the sales process, because it gives us selling points. What is important is to give everyone a short description of how the model works.

Customer;

It will depend on who you meet and what ideas you present. It is best to present ideas that is easy to understand/accept. Example could be Q-free.com, their main buisness are road user charging.