Sandra’s company has been using Brainstorm for a couple months now, and has collected a few hundred ideas.  Among those are great ideas for improving the manufacturing process, ideas for new products and services, ideas for making the office space more productive, and ideas related to a host of other topics. 

But Sandra has a very specific job to do.  Her mandate is to grow the customer base, so she would like to quickly identify and test creative ideas for bringing in more customers.

Sandra creates a Customer Acquisition Pipeline and has it collect all ideas that are tagged “customer acquisition,” “new customers,” or “acquiring customers.”  Just in this first attempt, Brainstorm identifies sixteen ideas related to her group!

 Sandra adds these sixteen ideas to her Pipeline, and also manually adds another idea that a colleague told her about at lunch the other day. 

As a seasoned business leader, Sandra knows that her team can’t effectively pursue 17 ideas all at once.  Pipelines help Sandra and her team focus by giving them the ability to rate and sort the ideas against the criteria that they deem most important.  Sandra’s team decides to estimate the value and effort for each idea, and to give each an overall score.  In addition, they decide to identify a point of contact from their team and create a field to suggest next steps. 

Sandra also knows that more customer acquisition ideas will be added to Brainstorm in the future, so she sets up a monthly Pipeline Review Meeting.  Each of the four members on the review team prepares for the meeting by making their own assessment of the effort, value, and overall score of each idea that has arrived in the last month.  In the meeting itself, they sort the new ideas by the overall rating and begin to discuss from the top.   

After a few months, Sandra’s team has settled into a productive cadence.  They have worked together with the idea submitters to improve the original ideas and to get test versions of several of them in front of real target customers.   A few of the better performing tests have been deployed on a large scale, and are showing great results.

And Sandra was right about more Customer Acquisition ideas coming in to her Pipeline.  Idea submitters are coming out of the woodwork now that they have strong confidence that the Customer Acquisition Team is taking their ideas seriously.  (Submitters always know what’s going on because they get email notifications when the team reviews their ideas.)  And Sandra has made a point of publicly recognizing strong idea contributors.  All of this has dramatically extended Sandra’s ability to efficiently tap into the creativity of the broad organization.

Next: How to create a pipeline