Prioritize
As the market leader, Perry never has a shortage of opportunities or ideas to explore, but the next step to creating a new plan every year is to actually figure out what to incorporate and what not to. He uses an initial litmus to determine if an idea is even worth considering.
“Our true north — the beacon that guides us — is, ‘Does the idea help the consumers shop for cars easier?’” he says. “Does the information make it easier, more convenient for them to locate the car they want to buy and be smart about how they’re going to buy it, and if it helps consumers do that and if it helps a dealer or manufacturer be more efficient about how they explain their offering and influence car shoppers, we’re interested in it.”
If it fits that, then they have to dig a little deeper to see which ones can be most beneficial.
“It’s important to be as objective as you can and gather objective facts and information,” he says. “One of the things we try to do is whenever it’s possible, to go out and do some research about the potential impact of an idea, so we’ll go talk to consumers and dealers and manufacturers and ask them for their guidance on how valuable they think it is, so research is a very important part of it.”
Perry says sometimes it’s not easy to quantify the benefit associated with a new idea, but that’s where research comes into play. Ultimately, he wants to move on ideas that provide the biggest bang for the buck — affecting his consumer audience as well as his advertising clients.
“We try to make our best estimate or guess about the benefit to the consumer and dealer and try to quantify the amount of value that the idea provides to our customer and the amount of revenue the idea could produce,” Perry says. “We make our best guesses and then we prioritize accordingly. We also weigh in the cost and effort and complexity of implementing the idea — some are easy and some take months and months of work.”
Another way Perry prioritizes ideas is to rely on the people in his organization to help him.
“Gain multiple perspectives from inside the company from different sources,” he says. “Having a diversity of ideas and perspectives to debate the merits of different ideas is very important.”
When all the ideas come into the innovation garage, Perry doesn’t let them sit around for long periods of time.
“The suggestions get organized by department, and the department heads read them and use them to create his or her action plan for their department,” Perry says. “Then that action plan is communicated to the employees in that department.”
At the department level, ideas are reviewed and absorbed in about a week after all the information is gathered. A comprehensive report goes out to all the employees about the compiled results.
“Within a month, we’re back to our employees saying, ‘This is what we heard, this is what we’re doing, and you’ll be hearing more at the department-level soon,’” Perry says.
Then the department heads determine how the suggestions provided can roll into their goals that will help the company achieve its goals.
Taking all the input from the research, he then works with his team to rank order what opportunities to pursue.
“We’ve let our common sense guide us in how to create processes in the company that generate ideas, research them as objectively as possible, debate them from multiple perspectives, try to quantify benefits and then ultimately make a judgment call about where is the most bang for the buck,” Perry says.
