Why You Need a Good WUP

Brilliant new ideas are a lot like overnight successes in Hollywood: they actually take years of hard work and cultivation. The good news is that with the right process in place, you dramatically improve your chances of hitting on the Great Big Idea that sends your sales through the roof. The key, says Steve Farber, president of Extreme Leadership, Inc., is to carry a WUP with you at all times – a small notebook called a Wake-Up Pad in which you annotate information in four different sections. In his book, The Radical Edge (Kaplan Publishing, 2006), Farber explains the WUP’s four sections and their role as building blocks for radical, business-altering ideas:

Section 1: Scan and Eavesdrop. Spend some time taking things in. Skim the bestseller lists, magazine racks, and television listings to see what people are reading and watching. Scan the headlines of 20 newspapers from around the country and the world. When you’re at a restaurant or walking down the street or waiting in the airport, scope out the crowd you’re with and the people around you. Watch the trends in technology and trends in behavior. Notice things. Also listen to what people are saying at work, at home, in the supermarket, on the radio. What are your customers saying about the challenges in their work? What are your neighbors saying about theirs? Don’t make judgments, just record. Write things down objectively.

Section 2: Ponder. After collecting your observations for awhile, read through them, then stop and think about them. Ask yourself: What are the implications of this? What can I learn from that? Why are so many people doing X, and what might that mean for all of us? Maybe one day you were trying to get some work done on vacation but you couldn’t find anywhere to connect your laptop to the Internet and you wrote down that frustration in your WUP. So now you might ask yourself, “What are the implications of anytime, anywhere broadband Internet connections and what is that going to mean for the way we should sell our product in the future?” Again, don’t judge or edit your ideas, just write them down.

Section 3: Talk About It. Get together with other sales managers, with your mentor, with your sales team, with other visionaries in your circle and talk about your observations and ideas. Say, “Here’s what I’m noticing; what are you seeing?” List the things you want to talk about and kick around some ideas. “You’re doing this to create new ideas, new ways of serving your customers, and new ways of getting more business,” says Farber. “There’s no way to predict which conversation will lead to what new idea, but it will happen.”

Section 4: Do Something. Here’s where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. After you’ve observed, listened, pondered, and discussed, you need to start taking some bold actions. “Do something audacious, something that could change the world,” says Farber. Write down these four things in the last section of your WUP and fill them in as new ideas spark:

1. These are the things I’m going to experiment with…

2. These are the things I’ll change right now…

3. These are the commitments I make to the people around me and to myself…

4. These are the people I’ll need to help me get it all done…

Your WUP doesn’t need to be in a paper notebook. It could be on your PDA, a voice recorder or the digital recorder on your cell. The important thing is that you stick to the four-section structure outlined above and that you use it consistently. Once you get in the habit of using a WUP, you’ll not only find it the foundation for business-changing and life-changing ideas, you will find that you become much more adept at listening and observing – two critical skills for anyone running a sales team and meeting with customers.