Ensure Best Idea Wins

These whippersnapper creative sparks are discussing their indie-pop track, Love Me Right. Sung by the young lady (top) and the vibe from its canny producer (bottom).

Kudos to anyone baring their sticky drinks cabinet on a zoom call.

Always with a keen ear for the creative process, I got struck by a key aphorism;

"in any healthy creative relationship it's all about the best idea".

Not the senior’s idea. Not the one who shouts loudest. Not the one that protects the ego or the hierarchy. Just the best idea.

Quite the enterprise-grade solution selling crossover there.

In our space deals don’t tend to get won by the cleverest pitch or the slickest slide deck. They’re won (or lost) in the rooms where the real work happens. Discovery sessions that probe deep into context, war rooms with your own specialists debating approaches, calls herding the buyer’s technical and commercial stakeholders when all pulling in different directions.

Here the same principle applies. Or at least it should.

I’ve watched deals die because someone on higher rung insisted on their preferred way even when a quieter voice in the room had spotted the cleaner path. I’ve also watched deals come alive when the team deliberately killed hierarchy for an hour and simply chased the idea that solved the prospect’s actual constraint, over the one that looked safest on the (urgh) risk register.

I'm reminded of the "the treasured phenomenon of ‘collective effervescence’" from #27 of my 52 Ways To Get What You Want From Virtual Meetings.

Enterprise selling at this level is collaborative creation under pressure. You’re co-designing a solution with people who have competing incentives, incomplete information, and political realities. The moment you let rank or reputation decide the direction instead of the quality of the thinking, you introduce friction. Of sometimes fatal drag.

The healthiest relationships I’ve seen, both inside selling teams and between seller and buyer, treat every idea as provisional until a better one appears. That requires a certain kind of confidence. The confidence to let your own suggestion get binned without taking it personally. The confidence to elevate a junior’s insight if it genuinely makes progress. The confidence to tell a board-level sponsor that the elegant solution they fell in love with three weeks ago no longer 'fits'.

People I worked with decades ago, still remind me of my mantra around this, that ideas breed ideas. It is seldom the first idea that's the winner. Which is such a shame as that's often where thinking stops. Almost in relief at having something to hang on to. The real success comes from the idea sparked by the idea sparked by the idea.

When the best idea is allowed to win without being hamstrung by those precious, three things happen. The solution gets sharper. The people in the room stay engaged because they know contribution matters more than title. And trust compounds. Buyers notice when a selling team is more interested in solving the problem than in protecting internal faces.

For sure, it only works if the relationship is healthy to begin with. If the environment is political or fear-based, the best idea rarely surfaces. People self-censor.

I went through a phase running my own show of rewarding ‘breakthrough’ ideas at year-end. No overall winner, just the ones that cracked something and furthered sustainable success.

Because in the end, whether you’re cutting an alt-pop track or closing an enterprise-grade deal, the principle holds. Ensure the best idea wins. Everything else is destined to stay forever bubbling under.