Use Your Head
It's not enough just to sell anymore. Now every potential client is looking for a few creative ideas to go with your sales pitch.
Most of us don't associate the word "creative"
with "selling." For some, "creative" conjures
up images of starving artists dressed in black, "trying to
make a statement" with paint and old auto parts.
"Creative" people wear berets and read The Village
Voice. Salespeople wear ties and read The Wall Street
Journal.
At least those are the popular stereotypes. But don't
salespeople create things, too—like opportunity? Don't
salespeople create demand for products and services? Customer
satisfaction? Wealth?
The nature of the sales process is, in fact, creative. A good
salesperson creates demand where it doesn't exist. He or she
creates a message (the sales pitch) using various media (face
calls, telephone calls, written presentations, slide shows) that
influence an audience (the prospect). A salesperson explores new
territories (cold calls), introduces new ways of thinking
(persuades prospects) and makes the world a better place (provides
customer satisfaction).
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OK, maybe I'm overstating the case a bit. Lots of perfectly
productive salespeople are nothing more than harvesters of existing
business—they take orders, fill out paperwork, collect their
commissions and go home. And they never break rules.
Those salespeople still play a role in our economy, although
they're on their way to being replaced by order-processing
technology. But I'm here to talk about creative selling, the
favorite activity of wild, vibrant, risk-taking sales
fanatics—the Michelangelos of sales. These people use the
power of ideas to create customer satisfaction and wealth for
themselves and their companies.
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