Idea Engineering
How strategic brainstorming can grow your bottom line.
BY JOHN CONNELLY
Steve Cremer of Harmony Enterprises Inc. in Harmony and Steve Thul of Whirltronics Inc. in Buffalo have more in common than a first name. Both head small manufacturing companies in Minnesota, both exemplify customer service, and both have partnered with Enterprise Minnesota to generate new ideas for the growth of their companies.
Whirltronics, a metal stamping company, went through the Eureka! Winning Ways program with Enterprise Minnesota in June 2007. The process created two ideas for new products that generated contacts worth more than $100,000. Harmony, a company that specializes in recycling and waste solutions, also went through Eureka! and came up with a list of 60 ideas to spur growth. So far, they’ve implemented two, but Cremer keeps the extras close at hand.
“Years later, when we’re doing our budgets, we still sit down and go through the same process we did at the beginning of Eureka!” he says. “We’ll look through all these [idea] cards again and look at how can we use that idea now and generate additional growth.”
As Thul and Cremer learned, coming up with great ideas is about more than just sitting down for a brainstorming session. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing dozens of companies like Harmony and Whirltronics walk through the idea engineering processes and come out the other side with a renewed energy and a whole new perspective on what it means to grow a company.
I’d like to emphasize three steps from this process that are integral to idea engineering— Dramatic Difference, Overt Benefit and Real Reason to Believe—and how you can apply these principles and see your business grow.
Dramatically Different
Why should existing clients or potential new customers care about the product or service you’re offering? What makes you different from everyone else? The answer to these questions is “the dramatic difference.”
One way to be dramatically different is to be the first or the only company in a particular field. Cremer and the team at Harmony put innovation to work by developing a compactor that could crush large volumes of liquid-filled bottles and ready them for recycling. “That idea really came from having a good relationship with the customer,” Cremer says. “[Now] we’re selling [the compactor] around the world.” By listening to his client’s needs, Cremer and his staff were able to problem solve and produce a product that continues to generate revenue for the company far beyond its intended target.
Being the first isn’t always possible, so when you’re in a field of likeminded competitors, it’s important to find out what makes your product unique. Thul and the Whirltronics team demonstrate their dramatic difference on the service side of the equation—especially when it comes to the heating, treating, painting and packaging system the company launched recently.
Instead of having to hire different specialists for each step of the process, “We have everything under one roof,” Thul says. “Right off my heat treat line, I’m going to paint them, [and] right off the paint line put them in boxes of 25 for [the customer].”
Both Cremer and Thul pinpointed ways their products are dramatically different, and neither of them focused on undercutting the cost of the competition. There is a temptation to make your product unique based on low prices alone. Yes, if your product or service is not unique, it had better be cheap. But what’s more sustainable—and profitable in the long term—is creating a product that is unique to a specific client or market. If you can establish that, you have something dramatically different, and price is far less of an issue.
What’s Your Overt Benefit?
When discussing the benefit your product has for potential clients, it is important to note that your product’s features are not necessarily benefits to your target customer. We often get caught up in trying to add as much as we can to a product or service, but if you’re adding more features to the list instead of enhancing key benefits—the ones that really matter to individual clients—you may come up short.
For example, let’s say you sell cars. There is a whole list of features—from gas mileage to horsepower—that makes your particular brand of car special. Let’s say your car offers the best stabilization control in the industry. Your customer isn’t buying the car for stabilization control; he or she is buying the car because that control reduces the risk of rollover, which enhances safety. Stabilization control is a feature, but safety is your overt benefit.
To find the overt benefit of your product or service, put yourself in the customer’s shoes and ask, “Why should I care?” And remember, features are the same for everyone, but benefits are relative to a specific client.
When Cremer recognized the economy was taking a toll on some of his clients, the team at Harmony came up with a benefit that made their products irresistible. Instead of selling his equipment, Cremer came up with an innovative way to help clients finance or even rent it.
“We knew budgets would be tight, but clients could still get a [quick] return on investment on some of this equipment,” Cremer says. “We will rent our equipment instead of selling so they can get something next week and start paying rent on it. A lot of places can still spend money to rent; it’s just the capital that a lot of larger organizations cut back on.”
For Cremer’s clients, the overt benefit was the ability to get the equipment they needed—and the quick return on investment the machines would offer—without breaking the budget.
Real Reason to Believe
If the overt benefit gets potential customers excited about what you’re offering, it’s reason to believe that closes the sale. Any business can make a claim to attract customers, but the relationship will quickly break down if customers find unsubstantiated claims when they look beneath the surface. In short, if you’re promising a benefit difference to your clients, then you must be doing something differently. Otherwise, what they’ll see is smoke and mirrors, and you’re left with a lost sale.
Smart businesses use a handful of ways to demonstrate their credibility to clients and give them a real reason to believe, including:
Expertise: Touting your pedigree, such as the number of years you’ve been in the industry, patents you’ve earned, proven formulas for success, etc. Give clients a reason to believe they’re dealing with an expert.
Kitchen logic: Sometimes common sense knowledge is so logical that customers can’t help but believe it. Stone countertop maker Q-Seal got this right when it created countertops with sealant baked in instead of painted on. Stone countertop owners have long accepted that sealant needs to be reapplied each year for waterproofing. Q-Seal made the logical jump that baking the sealant into the counter saves consumers time and money. It just made sense.
Testimonials: Expert testimony—whether from the news media, third-party testing sources or through studies/tests—provides your product with an objective outside endorsement. After all, seeing is believing.
Guarantees: The bold guarantee is a strong way to be seen as credible, but it’s also the riskiest. If you tell clients they’ll get their money back if the product fails, you’re risking losing money. However, by offering a legitimate guarantee, you’re showing potential customers you’re 100 percent confident in your product and that they’ve got nothing to lose.
The recurring theme in each of these points is credibility. Nothing undermines a client relationship faster than a false promise, and nothing bolsters customer confidence like a company that does what it says every time.
Thul, who calls Whirltronics “the best kept secret in the industry,” enjoys excellent client relationships with some of the industry’s biggest players. “The customers we have are long term in nature and well satisfied,” he says. “They’re the billion-dollar organizations out there that have very high expectations of their supply chain.”
Credibility with high-profile clients gives potential Whirltronics customers a real reason to believe the company can deliver on its promises. “If I’m not taking care of [the] Hondas and Toros of the world, they wouldn’t keep me as a supplier,” Thul says.
Real World Application
Applying these principles requires a shift in thinking for most companies. At Enterprise Minnesota, it is our goal to get companies thinking along these lines. We assemble a team of “thought leaders” who come from every corner of the company— management, sales, engineering, production, etc.—to get the idea generation ball rolling.
The first step is to capture all the diverse ideas in the room. The goal is not to come up with one great idea, but to focus on ideas in general. After a day’s worth of discussion, it’s not unusual for the thought leaders to come up with 50 or even 150 ideas. Those can then be narrowed to a handful of ideas that fit best with the goals of the company.
Once the ideas are on the table, we’ll prioritize them based on how well they’ll fit the business. We’ll get specific and ask, “Who are our current customers? What problems do they have that need solutions? Can we provide a meaningfully unique solution to an existing customer’s problem?”
The answers to these questions steer the company’s next step—whether that means developing new products, seeking out new markets or marketing existing products in a new way. Once you’re thinking growth, chances are you’ll keep the ball rolling even after the official process is complete.
Thul and his team hold a weekly “growth meeting” where they go over the same principles they learned in Eureka!, a process that has given his company a renewed energy for growth. “What [idea generation] did for the organization is that it gave us a model or structure to stay committed to the whole idea of growth,” he says. “Growth is not something that’s the flavor of the day. We realize that the commitment to growth over time will put us in a position to really be able to experience real growth in real dollars.”
John Connelly is director of project management for Enterprise Minnesota and Minnesota’s NIST/MEP center director.