The chapter on Competing for Industry Foresight has lessons that will be valuable for sales professionals preparing for the future. Some select excerpts and annotated ideas:

• "Industry foresight gives a company the potential to get to the future first and stake out a leadership position … The trick is to see the future before it arrives" (This is true of sales professionals as well)
• "Industry foresight helps managers answer three critical questions:
  • First, what new types of Customer benefit should we seek to provide in five, ten or fifteen years?
  • Second, what new competencies will we need to build or acquire to offer those benefits to Customers?
  • And third, how will we need to reconfigure the Customer interface over the next several years?"

  (While the time horizon for a salesperson to prepare for his future may not be that long, all three questions are those that a salesperson too would benefit by asking himself)

• Two Principles to prepare to get ready for the future

  Two principles that Hamel and Prahalad suggest getting ready for the future are:

  • Escaping the myopia of the served markets (This amounts to looking at the future through the narrow aperture of existing served markets, a mistake that sales professionals are also prone to commit. The potential of the existing markets served by us can run out unexpectedly)
  • Escaping the myopia of the current product concept (Hamel and Prahalad cite an all too familiar example – Crowded copiers in offices. A product centric salesperson may conclude that what's needed is a faster copier and one with "codes" to stamp out illicit copying. But that perspective ignores the possibility of a bigger opportunity hidden in plain sight – the need for personal copiers, possibly

8 levers to prepare for the future

Expanding on this theme the chapter on Industry Foresight outlines 8 levers to prepare for the future:

1. Challenge price-performance assumptions

   For a salesperson this would translate to choosing the right Customer segment to target based on redrawn assumptions about price and performance. For example, can I sell smaller lots of a high performance and premium priced product, to gain more market share? etc.

2. Learn the art of asking questions like children do

   Children are best at taking knocks at long held assumptions as they come from a "Why Not" frame. For example, the innocent questions of a child "Why can I not see my photo right away?" resulted in the birth of Polaroid

3. Develop a deep and boundless curiosity

   Knowing more about many things, lets you transplant ideas for stand out success. "To create the future of the cosmetics industry, its senior executives need to know more about pharmacology" say Hamel and Prahalad

4. Be humble enough to speculate

   Experience of decades frequently becomes a baggage. Dropping the expert status and looking at things with fresh eyes can be a big help

5. Value eclecticism

   Hamel and Prahalad predicted - "Future is to be found in the intersection of changes in technology, lifestyle, regulation, demographics and geopolitics" How true it still is, even after three decades! Learning to see things from multiple angles is a key strength for all including for people in sales

6. Be a contrarian now and then

   The book memorably reminds us – "Foresight often comes not from being a better forecaster, but from being less hide-bound" It is easy to believe that our industry is complicated and unique. But business in all industries is based on handful of conventions which should be challenged once in a while so that newer and better ways of doing business emerge

7. Go beyond being "Customer Led"

   Customers may not always know all that they need as we saw in Spotlight. When Customers may have settled for faster horses, it took a Henry Ford to lead them into discovering the automobile as a means of transportation

8. Empathise with human need

   Keep your eyes on the Customer, watch him when using your product and feel what he feels. "… many times, the best foresight comes from deep-down Customer insight – insight that comes from direct exposure to Customers, not from second-hand market research" This is an idea that can be remarkably helpful in enhancing sales success

Francis Bacon, in his essay 'Of Studies' said – "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested"

"Competing for the Future" belongs the category that needs to be chewed and digested