Sell Creatively
Author: Dave Donelson, President, Enterprise Learning Center

Sadly, many sales people block their creativity. They consider themselves nothing more than harvesters of existing business. They take orders, fill out paperwork, collect their commissions and go home. Those sales people play a role in our economy. Of course, they are well along the road to extinction by electronic data processing, but that’s another story.

I prefer creative selling, the favorite activity of vibrant, growing, selling fanatics. Creative salespeople use the power of ideas to create customer satisfaction and wealth.

What do we mean by ideas? They’re solutions. They’re ways for the prospect to use your product or services rather than a list of options. They’re the benefits the prospect gets from buying your proposal instead of the features of your product.

Create Opportunities

Creative selling is consultive selling with a bang. You do needs analysis just like in consultive selling, but you also create perceived needs that the prospect doesn’t know he or she has. Then you create solutions to those needs. You open your mind and create opportunities.

There are many advantages to Creative Selling. It’s not product-driven. It’s not even market-driven. It goes beyond that to become a market driver itself. Creative sellers don’t respond to the needs of the marketplace—they create new ones.

Beat the Competition

And what does that do to the competition? They’re out of the race before they even know it has begun. How can they compete to satisfy a need even the customer doesn’t know exists? The competition is forced to play a continual game of “catch-up?to the sales that the creative seller is making.

Ideas are powerful things. They don’t exist until you create them. And because of this, the price of an idea is determined solely by the perceived value in the buyer’s mind. There’s no competitive bidding. No price shaving for market share. Just the seller’s ability to create perceived value through understanding the customer’s needs and persuasively presenting an idea to meet those needs.

The creative seller builds a powerful relationship with the customer. When the prospect realizes that you’re bringing them an idea to use—giving them something of value before they give you any money—their ears immediately open. This relationship builds on itself, creating a bond between the buyer and seller based on the seller’s ever-increasing value as a resource to the buyer.

The creative seller gets easier access to decision-makers, moves earlier into the decision-making process, and is seen not as an adversary but as an ally. You become the idea resource for the customer.

Create More Opportunities

There are some great tactical advantages to selling ideas, too. One of them is that the prospect can reject ideas without rejecting you or your product. Traditional sellers walk into the prospect with a presentation listing the many reasons their product should be bought. The whole process is aimed at winning a debate with the prospect.

But if the prospect rejects your arguments, how do you get back in the door? After all, don’t you usually give all your best reasons to buy during the first presentation? But when you sell ideas, there’s always a reason for the prospect to see you again—because you can always come up with a new idea. You’re not coming back to make the same old pitch; you’re offering something new.

Another tactical advantage to selling ideas is how the prospect responds to them. The traditional seller makes a presentation full of information about his company’s product or service. So what does the prospect talks about? The seller’s company or his products, of course.

But when you talk about an idea that is unique to the prospect, they’ll talk about what you really want them to talk about: their needs, concerns, desires, and objectives. The more they talk about their needs, the better you’ll be able to shape your ideas to meet them. It’s a powerful feedback loop that works in your favor.

Creative selling isn’t the exclusive domain of a few sales fanatics. Anyone with a set of ears and eyes connected to an open mind can become a creative seller. All you need is the desire to learn, the willingness to try new things, and the drive to practice them until they work for you.

Copyright 2000 Donelson Sales Development Associates, Inc.








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To learn more about Creative Selling, visit www.elconline.com, the Internet’s only site offering live on-line sales and management training. And watch for Dave Donelson’s new book, Creative Selling: The Foolproof System to Unleash Your Sales Potential, available in your favorite bookstore.

Dave Donelson has worked with clients in fields as diverse as manufacturing, broadcasting and cable, publishing, construction, retailing, packaged goods, consumer services, and specialty line insurance.

His career includes local TV station management and ownership, national sales representative management, structural steel fabrication and construction management, and the creation and operation of his consulting firm, Sales Development Associates and the Enterprise Learning Center.

Dave’s client roster has included nearly one out of seven US commercial television stations. In addition, he has consulted on a variety of projects with companies and governmental agencies in the Middle East, Africa, South and Central America, and Europe. He is a frequent speaker on Creativity in Sales and Management.

He can be contacted at (914) 949-7483 or via email to davedonelson@elconline.com

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