Check Your Ideas With The People That Matter

Daniel Priestley, author of ‘Oversubscribed’ and other books offers great advice and a method to ensure your business is properly evaluating ideas, and delivering on your best ideas only.

He advises sending out a survey to your existing customers and/or potential customers and asking “we're thinking of launching this new product/service within our range, and it's a little bit different - it's something new. What do you think of it?”

Could you then take it further; offering for people to be an early tester of the product or service? Would they sign up to early access if it became a real thing?

Actually get an understanding of the appetite for it. If it’s a tumbleweed, if nobody is interested - then maybe that's not such a good idea. But if there is an appetite, you can be a lot more confident that it’s something that to pursue. Either way you can say you’ve taken a more considered approach than just gut feel or snap judgments. You can evaluate the risk to your business with actual data.

A key reason why this is a useful practice is that as a leader it’s easy to let ego creep in when defining what is and isn’t a good idea. But there's zero ego in asking for neutral opinions and feedback. It’s true that if ego is severely at play, you might push on with an idea regardless - it takes humility and courage to potentially face the fact that your idea might be a bad one.

You can be extremely passionate about something - but if it's not something that people want, then there's no point pushing it.

If you do have a good idea, then you need the confidence to follow through with it. But you must also have the confidence to check with the people that matter if they think it’s a good idea first.

Watch or listen to this episode of the Content in Business Podcast