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How to Use
Creativity to Fuel Your Selling
Appeared in DFW TechBiz,10/29/01
Sales professionals
must be creative. Creativity is the process for coming up with new ideas
that work for business. It involves solving customer problems, finding
applications for products, meeting customer needs, addressing competition
and prospecting for new customers. Needing creativity and being creative
are two different things. Understanding the creative process makes it
easier for people to tap into their potential and become
successful.
Back in prehistoric times, our brains needed to
perceive danger to allow us to make decisions quickly and ensure survival.
The quickest decision making process is to see an overall pattern rather
than examine each individual piece of information. If a prehistoric person
saw one tiger or another tiger, it didn’t matter. Even though both were
different, both meant “run.” We quickly learned that the tiger “pattern” —
large sharp teeth, loud roar and powerful legs — meant danger. Patterns
serve us well for survival, but they limit us for generating new ideas.
Creativity gives us a process to break our thinking in patterns and
develop new ideas.
Our senses are overloaded with information from
people, places and things. Only a small amount of the information we
process is stored in our conscious memory. The remainder is stored in our
subconscious memory. Our brains, then, are like our attics. There’s a lot
of stuff up there, but most of us have forgotten all the items stored. Our
attic material is only useful if we can retrieve it. Creativity allows us
to retrieve and use our treasure of stored information.
One source
of generating new ideas is tapping into the brain’s ability to associate.
The word “Thanksgiving” might trigger associations to other words like
“food,” “family” and “holiday.” If the problem is how to sell to more
customers, the question to ask is, “How can I associate food with selling
to more customers?” One answer is sending “food” as gifts to attract new
customers. Likewise, an association with “family” might lead to getting
referrals for new business from a customer’s relatives. “Holiday” might
trigger the idea of celebration and how one may specially acknowledge new
customers.
Creativity leads us to new ideas that would have been
quite difficult to develop without association. There are lists of trigger
words for technical and nontechnical problems. After the challenge is
defined the creative process and association guide you to many possible
solutions.
There are many barriers to creativity. Believing there
is only one right answer will diminish the ability to be creative. People
tend to judge prematurely and reduce the number of generated ideas. It’s
been said that nothing is more dangerous than an idea if it’s the only one
you have.
Challenge yourself to develop many answers, perhaps a
second and a third right answer. Do this by rephrasing the problem and ask
for many answers. These latter solutions might be even better than the
first one generated. Believing in creativity enhances the ability to be
creative. Learning other creative techniques will reinforce confidence in
those abilities.
Esther Dyson in her book “Release 2.0” wrote that
in the future, “Employees will be valued for what they can produce, not
for what they have produced. Most successful will be those who can design
innovations to help the company get or stay ahead. Employees will
increasingly need to be good at thinking.”
She speaks of being
creative. Salespeople who possess the skill of creativity, or generating
new ideas for their companies and their customers, will be the most
successful in the future. Why wait for the future? Be creative
today.
.......................................................................................................
Maura
Schreier-Fleming is President of Best@Selling (http://www.bestatselling.com/). She works with technical
sales professionals and business professionals on skills and strategies so
they can sell more and be more productive at work. Her column
'Selling Strategies' appears in The Insurance
Record.
(c) Copyright 2004 Maura
Schreier-Fleming. All rights reserved.
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