Author: Onit

First things first: What exactly is an “intrapreneur?” While the concept comes up frequently in Eric Reis’ recent book The Lean Startup, the term itself has been part of business vernacular for decades. Its definition is simple – an intrapreneur is “a manager within a company who promotes innovative product development and marketing.”

Even in 1992 this wasn’t a new concept, it simply gave a name to something that had been at the heart of business innovation for decades. To this day, intrapraneurs are everywhere in business. Whether a part of a sales and marketing team or a back-office legal department, intrapraneurs are constantly challenging the status quo and driving new ideas that help your business grow.

I know what you must be thinking at this point – Isn’t promotion of innovative ideas just part of the job? Shouldn’t all sales managers already be striving to grow the business? What makes an intrapreneur so special? What sets them apart?

The key to making a lasting impact as an intrapraneur is in understanding that process and workflow are at the heart of innovation.

Unfortunately, innovation and growth can be challenged by inadequate software used to manage process – like email and spreadsheets – and a lack of sufficient visibility into the process.

If you were to ask an intrapraneur if they are making their program or business process better, they most likely would say yes. But if you follow up by asking them, “How do you know?” – you might get some interestingly vague responses.

In this blog post, we hope to give you some ideas on how to innovate despite corporate IT and inadequate software tools and overcome uncertainty in process improvement.

Lean Startup Principles and Smart Process Apps Make Innovation Easy

Here are three guidelines from Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup that might help your company get started:

1.    Establish a Baseline with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

The first step towards that next ground-breaking business idea is to establish a baseline of data around how your users, whether they are the company’s customers or an army of sales reps, will actually perform your process.

This is where Onit can help.

Onit will build you a MVP within a matter of hours or days that you can get in the hands of your customers to see how they perform with your product.

2.    Tune the Baseline Toward the Ideal

Now that you have an Onit App or two that your customers are using, you can begin to fine-tune the system.

Onit automatically records every action a user takes when they are using your Apps. That means you can extract the data to analyze on your own, or Onit can build you amazing reporting dashboards to help you stay on top of your processes.

The detailed reporting capabilities will allow you to identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies standing in the way of innovation. By carefully analyzing these bottlenecks, you can make the executive decision to change aspects of the process. Perhaps that API call to Salesforce.com should execute before it gets to the legal team, or maybe the VP of Sales should review that contract before it makes it to the team in India.

When you have the ability to rapidly iterate on your design, you can quickly refine your process to be efficient and effective – even if it wasn’t at first.

3.    Pivot or Persevere

After a sufficiently long period of execution with your App, you’ll have lots of data and analyses on how your business could work. You’ll have insights that simply weren’t possible before.

With this information, you can make a clear decision on whether to continue scaling and building on your idea or to pivot to another one altogether.

If you decide to pivot, Onit licenses by the process, so it is very easy to switch to a totally different design without significantly affecting your cost.

Execution is All That Matters

Whether you are a Silicon Valley startup or a Fortune 100, execution is all that matters. You can have the best idea in the world for your business, but unless you make it happen and measure the results, you’ll never make an impact.

Onit is here to help you do just that.

We believe that process and workflow are the most important ingredients in business and we know a good deal about lean startup process improvement because we are a startup ourselves.

Email us today at [email protected] to start a conversation with one of our business process consultants. We will help you refine the design of your process and build your minimum viable product Apps to establish your baseline.

With the Onit Team and Smart Process Apps on your side, you can pave the way for all the intrapreneurs within your company to take your business to the next level.

Last week marked a major milestone in Microsoft’s company history when they held their first Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) with their new CEO, Satya Nadella.

Nadella has proven to be remarkably sophisticated in his thoughts on running Microsoft – from evoking quotes from German philosopher Friedrich Niezsche in describing his corporate vision to joking about sorting algorithms when expressing their “mobile-first, cloud-first” market strategy.

Beyond Nadella’s scholarly sense of humor, he also expressed some hard-earned wisdom about running one of the world’s largest, and arguably most important, channel sales organizations.

Here are some key insights all sales leaders can learn from Nadella:

1. Your Channel Partnerships are Integral to Adding Leverage to Your Business Growth

Simply stated. It’s important to foster these relationships.

Your direct sales organization can only generate so many customer touches a day, but when each of your sales reps has multiple partners collaborating with them on sales opportunities, you have effectively multiplied the power of your sales organization.

Unfortunately, most sales organizations do not align their sales personnel with their channel and other partners as well as they should.

One rep from your organization likely maps to five or ten different reps in partnering organizations, and with each organization, different CRM and content management systems are used that are often incompatible across corporate lines. This makes it extremely difficult to collaborate effectively.

Onit has been working with IT channel resellers and top vendors such as Microsoft, VMware, Dell, and Google to improve their channel relationships with business process Apps that cross the corporate communication barrier.

In addition to providing visibility across multiple corporate environments, Onit’s rapidly adaptable workflow management system allows us to quickly modify business processes to optimize your channel strategy over time.

2. Keeping a Lean Team Structure Can Help You Have Consistent Execution

The day following Nadella’s keynote address at the Microsoft WPC, he announced a company-wide layoff of 18,000 employees over the next year. Most of that was to trim some of the fat from the Nokia acquisition, but a significant amount of this layoff is to reduce some of the structural leadership layers that were bloating the decision-making process. The idea is to make leadership teams more lean and capable of quickly adapting and making decisions.

Keeping a lean team structure like this can help you attain more consistent execution across your sales leadership, and that’s a good thing when it comes to ensuring your customers experience the same high caliber of performance from your sales teams.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to manage that consistent execution across your sales teams, even if your sales team is already as lean as possible.  

Process can help create a healthy culture of consistent execution but processes run with spreadsheets and emails tend to fray out of control over time.

Onit can help you design a series of Business Process Apps that will help you maintain a consistent level of execution across your teams, all while providing the level of agility to change and stay optimized over the competition.

3. Increasingly Ubiquitous Technology Makes Human Attention the Most Valuable Commodity

The “Internet of Things” – and as Salesforce.com calls it – the “Internet of Everything” is fast approaching, with sensors on everything from our refrigerators to children’s diapers.

This data, stored and managed in the cloud, provides a wealth of wisdom to those who are interested. But there is a downside ….And this is the point Nadella made in his keynote at WPC.

With so many resources and information available at the click of a button, human interaction is becoming the most valuable commodity on earth. And as a result, productivity tools are even more important than ever.

We at Onit couldn’t agree more, especially when it comes to the attention of your sales team. It’s critical to be as efficient as possible so they can focus on high value tasks like closing deals and driving revenue.

At Onit, we work with our customers to develop custom business process workflows for everything from prospecting to opportunity management to account lifecycle management and everything in between. This is all integrated with your preferred system of record, whether it’s Salesforce.com, SugarCRM or an in-house proprietary system.

Don’t waste time with someone else’s vision of what a CRM is supposed to do. Let us build your vision for sales productivity. We can build an App for you. Contact us today for a complimentary consultation of one of your sales processes.