Technology and innovation: Create leverage and future-proof your business

One of the best selling business authors of today is Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He penned a couple of books that are helping people shape businesses that are made to stick. You have probably come across them (“The Black Swan,””Antifragile,” “Skin in the Game,” “Fooled by Randomness,” anyone?)

Those pieces are quickly becoming a part of the Western culture, and rightly so. A black swan, that is, in Taleb’s dictionary, a sudden, unexpected event that shakes the world, may happen at any time. Not only those kinds of incidents matter. Global crises which could have been predicted also change the game for most businesses. Such an adversity was the COVID-19 pandemic.

Internalizing the knowledge from Taleb’s books is one way in which the businesses can prepare for such events. Those publications are on the must-read list for anyone who wants to set up a company for long-lasting success. Nevertheless, what about more practical advice?

We’ve written this article to help you create leverage and future-proof your business, so you don’t fall prey to such events. Here we go.

Innovation and Technology as a way of future-proofing and creating business leverage

Innovation, especially if paired with technology, might sound like an empty platitude, but that’s because you hear it way too often these days. It’s often used to describe products, ideas or people which go one step ahead of anyone else. One can describe a candidate for a job as an innovative thinker, a company as innovative, or its CEO as an innovator (Elon Musk has been called an innovator many times; he even won awards for being such.) Is there a meaning behind it, though?

Innovation may be on par with the word creativity, for that matter - most people can give a simple definition of it, yet they think it’s reserved for specific cases. We would like to show you that innovation isn’t just a descriptor of interesting things and noteworthy people. It’s a process that can be used to create business leverage and future-proof your venture.

Technology is here to help. It acts as an enabler for innovation. We want to show you how, but before we jump into it, time to discuss business leverage.

What is business leverage?

Business leverage is anything that helps you achieve advantage in the market. It can be a technique, tool or resource (knowledge, workforce, energy, time, money) that helps you do more than others without giving a lot from yourself. Great leverage is exponential. Take opening a franchise, for instance. Franchising makes you proliferate the market way quicker than growing a chain of shops on your own.

Referral marketing can be a similar leverage to your business. It multiplies your marketing efforts for a fraction of the resources that were spent. In both examples, your business grows at a much faster rate than it would without leverages like those.

In this article, we want to prove that innovation and technology can create business leverages, too. Their deep influence in the inner workings of your company can make you unstoppable, and what’s more important, resilient in face of the future events that could disrupt your business (or antifragile for anyone who has read Taleb.)

Can business leverage help in future-proofing a business?

It depends. Some leverages can prove themselves time and time again, while others fail when a black swan appears at the horizon. What’s the key to strong leverage that can be trusted to last? Well, you need to keep learning about the industry and market while staying close to the most important people for your company - your customers. Thus, you need to zoom in (pay attention to your company) and out (observe the industry) and stay open-minded.

Thus, in order to make sure that you have a strong leverage, you need to test it at different levels (through gathering and interpreting insights you have about the industry and competitors) and track the market’s changing needs (by observing your customers). Technology can help you do that. Data analysis tools, CRMs, monitoring sales and marketing, they all exist to help you gain insight that improves your business leverage.

When you keep strengthening your leverage, you can secure your business against anything unexpected coming in the future. Think about it. Say your leverage is that you are using a network of people to distribute your product. When an unfortunate event happens in the market, you have so much data and insight that you have been gathering with tools that it will be tough to beat you down.

How to create business leverage with innovation and technology?

Based on everything that we’ve written so far, you’ve learned that innovation and technology can help you build leverage and make your business unshakeable. But where’s the practical advice that we’ve promised? Let’s discuss how you can actually use innovation and technology to get leverage.

Leverage allows you to do more with having less. More sales, more marketing, faster delivery with giving little from yourself. It won’t happen by itself. You need to take some action.What we would recommend is to keep innovating and investing in modern technology.

It doesn’t mean that you need to become obsessed with chasing newly released products and methods of doing things. It would drain your resources, so it wouldn’t be productive at all. What I am proposing is that you should follow Pareto’s principle when deciding what to invest in.

The so-called 80 to 20 rule is a great guiding point. 80% of the things you do at your company should follow standard business practices, which are based on your competition and other companies that you aspire to become. At the same time, 20% of all the activities, tools and methods that you follow should seek innovation.

It’s a healthy balance. As long as you listen to your customers and observe the market, those investments cost you little. Why? Because you know when they stop working and it’s time to let them go. For every innovation, there’s technology that will tell you whether something works or not.

Innovation doesn’t need to radically change our business. For some of you, it may be using SCRUM to develop products, while for others it may be trying a new way of selling, and with that, let us segway into the last section of this article.

Meetsales helps build leverage and future-proof your business

The events of 2020 have disrupted most occupations, especially B2B sales jobs who used to deal products through face-to-face meetings. Companies who weren’t tech-first had a hard time operating during strict lockdown rules. Some of them looked for solutions and turned to tools like Google Meets or Zoom to stay in touch with their colleagues and continue to do business.

Although Covid-19 wasn’t a black swan event, it gave us all the sense of how it can be when we don’t invest those 20% of resources in innovation that could create a necessary leverage for times like those. It’s tough to revolutionize a company's operations entirely. But for most companies, like the ones who sell professional equipment, building materials, heating, etc., jumping from 0 to 1 is enough to stay in the game.

Sometimes investing in a single tool is all you need to create leverage. Companies who digitized one part of their business could finally take a breath and start working again. It is also our tool - Meetsales - that helps businesses to quickly and relatively cheaply create business leverage.

Let’s explain this. Meetsales is like a hub for sales conversations. It helps companies, specifically the ones from the B2B sector, sell high-value products.

Salespeople can 

• connect with buyers over video calls, 
• present products, 
• auto-generate an offer,
• process the order along with payment
• auto-generate an invoice
• automatically follow-up with the client
  
  

The software saves unnecessary commute time, allows you to connect with customers from around the world, but also helps sell products when person-to-person meetings are almost impossible (i.e.during lockdown.)

At this point, it’s not important what the tool does, but what you can do with it. Your business experience with the Meetsales technology can create business leverage. How so? Every conversation that you have over Meetsales can be analyzed and aggregated. It gives you an advantage over your competition - you earn a great deal of data to learn from, and a center hub of knowledge about your prospective clients.

It may bring to your mind CRM tools that managers use to get an insight about the work and performance of their teams - even if they work 100% from home. Yet, that's an insight into the company's operations. There’s no information about the customers beyond a laconic "sales close successful/unsuccessful".

Meetsales, on the other hand, focuses on all the data that can be captured during the call, including its content. This allows for a much more comprehensive analysis of the sales call at the end, and gaining understanding of the market and its needs. Plus, when an employee leaves the organization, the knowledge stays in the company, and that’s because there’s a dedicated tool for gathering it. The tool allows you to do more with little effort like a proper business leverage does.

Innovation and Technology as a way of future-proofing and creating business leverage

Innovation, especially if paired with technology, might sound like an empty platitude, but that’s because you hear it way too often these days. It’s often used to describe products, ideas or people which go one step ahead of anyone else. One can describe a candidate for a job as an innovative thinker, a company as innovative, or its CEO as an innovator (Elon Musk has been called an innovator many times; he even won awards for being such.) Is there a meaning behind it, though?

Innovation may be on par with the word creativity, for that matter - most people can give a simple definition of it, yet they think it’s reserved for specific cases. We would like to show you that innovation isn’t just a descriptor of interesting things and noteworthy people. It’s a process that can be used to create business leverage and future-proof your venture.

Technology is here to help. It acts as an enabler for innovation. We want to show you how, but before we jump into it, time to discuss business leverage.

What is business leverage?

Business leverage is anything that helps you achieve advantage in the market. It can be a technique, tool or resource (knowledge, workforce, energy, time, money) that helps you do more than others without giving a lot from yourself. Great leverage is exponential. Take opening a franchise, for instance. Franchising makes you proliferate the market way quicker than growing a chain of shops on your own.

Referral marketing can be a similar leverage to your business. It multiplies your marketing efforts for a fraction of the resources that were spent. In both examples, your business grows at a much faster rate than it would without leverages like those.

In this article, we want to prove that innovation and technology can create business leverages, too. Their deep influence in the inner workings of your company can make you unstoppable, and what’s more important, resilient in face of the future events that could disrupt your business (or antifragile for anyone who has read Taleb.)

Can business leverage help in future-proofing a business?

It depends. Some leverages can prove themselves time and time again, while others fail when a black swan appears at the horizon. What’s the key to strong leverage that can be trusted to last? Well, you need to keep learning about the industry and market while staying close to the most important people for your company - your customers. Thus, you need to zoom in (pay attention to your company) and out (observe the industry) and stay open-minded.

Thus, in order to make sure that you have a strong leverage, you need to test it at different levels (through gathering and interpreting insights you have about the industry and competitors) and track the market’s changing needs (by observing your customers). Technology can help you do that. Data analysis tools, CRMs, monitoring sales and marketing, they all exist to help you gain insight that improves your business leverage.

When you keep strengthening your leverage, you can secure your business against anything unexpected coming in the future. Think about it. Say your leverage is that you are using a network of people to distribute your product. When an unfortunate event happens in the market, you have so much data and insight that you have been gathering with tools that it will be tough to beat you down.

How to create business leverage with innovation and technology?

Based on everything that we’ve written so far, you’ve learned that innovation and technology can help you build leverage and make your business unshakeable. But where’s the practical advice that we’ve promised? Let’s discuss how you can actually use innovation and technology to get leverage.

Leverage allows you to do more with having less. More sales, more marketing, faster delivery with giving little from yourself. It won’t happen by itself. You need to take some action.What we would recommend is to keep innovating and investing in modern technology.

It doesn’t mean that you need to become obsessed with chasing newly released products and methods of doing things. It would drain your resources, so it wouldn’t be productive at all. What I am proposing is that you should follow Pareto’s principle when deciding what to invest in.

The so-called 80 to 20 rule is a great guiding point. 80% of the things you do at your company should follow standard business practices, which are based on your competition and other companies that you aspire to become. At the same time, 20% of all the activities, tools and methods that you follow should seek innovation.

It’s a healthy balance. As long as you listen to your customers and observe the market, those investments cost you little. Why? Because you know when they stop working and it’s time to let them go. For every innovation, there’s technology that will tell you whether something works or not.

Innovation doesn’t need to radically change our business. For some of you, it may be using SCRUM to develop products, while for others it may be trying a new way of selling, and with that, let us segway into the last section of this article.

Meetsales helps build leverage and future-proof your business

The events of 2020 have disrupted most occupations, especially B2B sales jobs who used to deal products through face-to-face meetings. Companies who weren’t tech-first had a hard time operating during strict lockdown rules. Some of them looked for solutions and turned to tools like Google Meets or Zoom to stay in touch with their colleagues and continue to do business.

Although Covid-19 wasn’t a black swan event, it gave us all the sense of how it can be when we don’t invest those 20% of resources in innovation that could create a necessary leverage for times like those. It’s tough to revolutionize a company's operations entirely. But for most companies, like the ones who sell professional equipment, building materials, heating, etc., jumping from 0 to 1 is enough to stay in the game.

Sometimes investing in a single tool is all you need to create leverage. Companies who digitized one part of their business could finally take a breath and start working again. It is also our tool - Meetsales - that helps businesses to quickly and relatively cheaply create business leverage.

Let’s explain this. Meetsales is like a hub for sales conversations. It helps companies, specifically the ones from the B2B sector, sell high-value products.

Salespeople can 

• connect with buyers over video calls, 
• present products, 
• auto-generate an offer,
• process the order along with payment
• auto-generate an invoice
• automatically follow-up with the client
  
  

The software saves unnecessary commute time, allows you to connect with customers from around the world, but also helps sell products when person-to-person meetings are almost impossible (i.e.during lockdown.)

At this point, it’s not important what the tool does, but what you can do with it. Your business experience with the Meetsales technology can create business leverage. How so? Every conversation that you have over Meetsales can be analyzed and aggregated. It gives you an advantage over your competition - you earn a great deal of data to learn from, and a center hub of knowledge about your prospective clients.

It may bring to your mind CRM tools that managers use to get an insight about the work and performance of their teams - even if they work 100% from home. Yet, that's an insight into the company's operations. There’s no information about the customers beyond a laconic "sales close successful/unsuccessful".

Meetsales, on the other hand, focuses on all the data that can be captured during the call, including its content. This allows for a much more comprehensive analysis of the sales call at the end, and gaining understanding of the market and its needs. Plus, when an employee leaves the organization, the knowledge stays in the company, and that’s because there’s a dedicated tool for gathering it. The tool allows you to do more with little effort like a proper business leverage does.