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Be A Michelangelo Of Sales

Excerpt from Creative Selling: Boost Your B2B Sales
By Dave Donelson

Chapter 1 – Be a Michelangelo of Sales

“Creative” is an exciting, but sometimes frightening word. It conjures up images of wild haired artists dressed in black doing strange things with paint and old auto parts and weird musical instruments. Creative people are scary. They starve for their “art.”  Their goal in life is to alter the thinking of the audience for their work. They are the opposites of salespeople.

But just what are salespeople? Don’t they create things, too? Like opportunity? And demand for products and services? And customer satisfaction? What about wealth? Most of the salespeople I know certainly create wealth for themselves, their companies, and their customers.

And isn’t the nature of the sales process 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 alters the thinking of the audience (the prospect). A salesperson explores new territories in their craft (cold calls), brings new ways of thinking to their audience (persuades prospects), and makes the world a better place (provides customer satisfaction).

Okay, maybe we’re overstating the case a little 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. They never break rules and they hate new products because they disrupt the orderly nature of their existence. To them, new customers are generally a pain in the behind and it’s much more profitable to service existing accounts anyway. They say, “Don’t bother me with creativity. I’m too busy selling.” 

Those salespeople play an important role in our economy. Of course, they are well along the road to extinction by order-processing technology, but that’s another story. We’re here to talk about creative selling. The fun stuff. The favorite activity of vibrant, growing, wild haired selling fanatics. Our kind of people. Risk takers. The Michelangeloes of sales.

These people practice creative selling. Whether they know it or not, they’re using the power of ideas to create customer satisfaction and wealth.

The Creative Selling System

I’ve had the immense pleasure of studying, practicing, and teaching creative selling for many years. I’ve worked closely with, managed, and observed thousands of salespeople, both creative and not. That experience led me to develop the Creative Selling System. Creative selling unleashes your idea power—your ability to make more sales and create more personal wealth by selling ideas instead of products. That’s what this book is about.

The “system” part of Creative Selling System doesn’t sound very creative, does it? To let you in on a little secret, it’s the “system” part of our approach that makes it work extremely well—because a system is nothing more than the repeated application of proven techniques to accomplish a desired end. And our system repeatedly applies creative selling to the goal of producing more sales.

The Creative Selling System is a framework that enables you to be a more effective, efficient salesperson. When you work within that framework, you apply creative techniques to every step of the selling process from prospecting new accounts to servicing old ones. You use your personal creative talents (and we all have them) to solve problems and create opportunities for your customers.

You’re probably going to find that you already use many of these techniques. You wouldn’t be studying this material if you weren’t a creative salesperson currently. Or at least didn’t suspect that underneath that beige tweed order-processing exterior lurked a wild haired sales fanatic waiting to break loose. What you should expect to get from this material is the ability to recognize these methods when you use them, to understand why they work for you, and to learn to use them more frequently and effectively.

We begin with the basic assumption that you are a pretty effective communicator, know your product or service, and are interested in professional growth, job satisfaction, better customer service, and making more money. These are pretty safe assumptions because almost everybody in sales has these qualities.

We also assume you are willing to invest your time, money, and effort to achieve these goals. Nothing good happens without effort, especially in sales. Learning to use the Creative Selling System is the same. As we have advised thousands of salespeople, if you’re not willing to invest the time and effort to practice, you’ll never reap the rewards. If that’s you, stop reading and go do something you really want to do. Life’s too short.

If you’re still with us, that’s a good sign. It means you have an open mind. And an open mind is the single most important component of creativity.

Creating New Business

Now here’s what we’re going to do: We’re going to explain the Creative Selling System almost entirely in the context of selling a new account. Our focus will be on developing new business. Not because existing accounts aren’t important. The same techniques you use to sell new accounts will work even better on the ones you already have! We also know that developing new business is important to your career.

When you sell business-to-business (B2B), you have to constantly work on new accounts because your old ones are never 100 percent secure. Their plans change. Their business changes. Their customers change their habits. Their competitors “zig,” causing your customer to “zag” in response. And every change in your customer’s business has the potential to change their relationship with you and their need for your products and services.

Your competitors are always there, too, nibbling like ducks at your existing customers. Contradicting what you say, bringing in new products, even—horror of horrors—undercutting your prices! Even the smallest competitor can hurt you by taking away an account here and there. And a big one can devastate your sales and income like an elephant stepping on a grasshopper.

If you’re not constantly working on bringing in new accounts, your sales and commissions are going to wither away. And that may not be a problem that’s way out over the horizon. In some industries, customer loyalty is so tenuous that they experience 40 percent account turnover year-to-year. In other words, they have to replace nearly half of their account base every year just to stay even.

In most companies, there’s another reason the salesperson should be developing new business. That’s because it’s their job. Almost every sales job description includes the direct or implied function of introducing new users to the company’s products. If the orders just came in, there wouldn’t be any need for salespeople. All you’d need would be an order-processing department. So you should think of new business development as job insurance.

But the main reason you should work on new accounts is that it’s fun. The work, the challenges, the risks of failure are tremendous. But there’s little in life that matches the excitement, the edge-of-the-seat suspense, the joyful exhilaration of creating an opportunity and closing a new account.

It’s because you did it yourself. Sure you had help from your boss and other departments in your company but, ultimately, the sale happened because you made it happen. You created it. And creativity is fun.

Creative Selling Principles

Now, down to business. There are three principles to creative selling that we adhere to. They guide every strategic and tactical decision we make.

The first principle is that we focus our efforts on the largest potential prospects. Sounds obviously simple doesn’t it? If you only sell the biggest accounts, you’ll sell more and work less. It’s much easier said than done. This step requires immense discipline and will really tax your creativity, as you’ll see later.

Principle two is that you must know the customer’s business before you can effectively sell them. Sure, you can stumble across some people who need your product if you make enough calls. But you’re not really selling them, are you? You’re just filling the order they were waiting to give you. To accomplish one of the goals of creative selling—changing your prospects’ perception of their needs—you have to know what’s going on in their minds to start with. You have to know enough about their business to identify needs that they didn’t even know they had until you made your presentation.

The third principle is that you must sell ideas instead of product. What do we mean by ideas? They’re solutions. They’re ways for the prospect to use your service rather than the service itself. They’re the benefits the prospect gets from using your product instead of the features of the product.  Selling ideas instead of selling product means you have to present your product in the context of the prospect’s needs, not just lay out a list of reasons for them to buy your deal.

What’s we’re talking about here is consultive selling with a bang. You’re going to do needs analysis (see principle two: know your customer) and then create a way for the prospect to use your product to satisfy that need. That’s the essence of consultive selling. The difference seems kind of semantic, but it lies in the application of the creative process to need identification and satisfaction.

In creative selling, we’re going to create perceived needs even when the prospect doesn’t know he has them. Then we’re going to create solutions to those needs even when our company doesn’t sell a specific product or service that directly applies. We’re going to open our minds and create opportunities.

What makes creative selling so successful isn’t the one instance when it’s used to bring in a new piece of business. It’s when the system is used over and over again to create a stream of new business. When the creative process becomes not the exception but rather the rule itself. When your customers start relying on you as a continuous source of ideas to help their business. That’s when you really create something of note, mainly a whole lot of satisfied customers and a great deal of wealth.

The Pieta didn’t make Michelangelo famous or rich. It was his entire body of work—the statue of David, the design of St. Peter’s, the ceiling of the Sistine chapel—which branded him a superstar. Your repetitive success in sales will do the same for you.

Creative Selling Advantages

There are many advantages to using the Creative Selling System. It’s not product-driven. It’s not even market-driven. It goes beyond that to become a market driver itself. The company that consistently practices creative selling constantly opens and widens its market by creating new opportunities in the undiscovered needs of its customers. Creative sellers don’t respond to the needs of the marketplace—they create new ones.

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 the customer doesn’t even know exists? The competition is forced to play a continual game of “catch-up” and “me-too” in response to the sales that the creative seller is making.

The creative seller builds something else of immense value: a super-strong relationship with the customer. When the prospect realizes that you’re there to talk about their needs (not about your need to sell something), they’re much more open to listening to your proposal. When they see the amount of your time invested in their success, they’ll be willing to hear you through completely. And when they discover that you’re also bringing them an idea to use—giving them something of value before they give you any money—their ears will open even wider.

This relationship will build on itself, creating (there’s that word again) a bond between the buyer and seller based on the seller’s ever-increasing value 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. The creative seller becomes the idea resource for the customer. The buyer turn to the seller not for more products, but for more ideas on how they can enhance their business.

Ideas are powerful things. They’re scarce. They don’t exist until someone creates them. They can be copied but only after the original idea has been created and sold. And because 1) they are in short supply and 2) the competition can’t come into the market until after the initial sale, the price of an idea is determined solely by the perceived value in the buyer’s mind. 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.

There are some great tactical advantages to selling ideas, too. One of my favorites is that the prospect can reject them. That’s right, the ease with which the customer can say no is actually an advantage to idea selling. Let me explain.

Traditional sellers walk into the prospect with a presentation listing the many reasons their product should be bought. They present their case to the prospect, giving arguments and evidence much like a lawyer in a courtroom. They then listen to the opposing case (objections from the prospect) and rebut them as best they can. The whole process is about winning a debate with the prospect.

Now, in my limited experience in a courtroom, there are basically three people involved in a typical case: the judge, who hands down a decision based on the merits of the arguments which are presented by the other two people, the plaintiff and the defendant. This is very different from a sales situation, though, since the “judge” in this case also happens to be the opposing attorney! Not that he can’t be objective, but the odds aren’t with you. That’s one reason closing ratios are typically so low for many salespeople.

But losing the case—or getting a “no” from the prospect—isn’t the toughest part. It’s the fact that once this “judge” hands down the decision, it’s pretty final. There’s not really any appeal in sales and it’s pretty hard to come up with a new case and get back into the courtroom with it.

You usually give all your best reasons to buy during the first presentation.  To get a second chance to pitch your product, you have to first overcome the prospect’s attitude that he’s “heard it all before.” You have to offer something new to get back in the door.

When you sell ideas, you’ve always got a reason for the prospect to see you again—because you can always come up with a new idea. Remember that an idea isn’t a product—it’s a use, a solution to a discovered need. So, as long as you can come up with different ideas, you’ll be able to get back in to see the prospect with them. You’re not coming back to make the same old pitch; you’re offering something new.

Of course, part of your presentation includes the reasons your product will satisfy the prospect’s needs. You do need to make your arguments. But if you structure your presentation the way we suggest, the prospect will focus on the desirability of your idea instead of on the reasons for buying your product or service. Your “arguments” will go unanswered. And you’ll have the opportunity to present them again as you come back over and over again with new ideas. Same arguments every time, just new ideas to get you in the door.

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—which is unique to the prospect—they’ll talk about how the idea applies (or not) to their business. Which is what you the seller really want them to talk about. You want to hear the prospect 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 Customer Relationships

We’ve found in years of working with clients in hundreds of different lines of business that they all want and need ideas. I’ve yet to meet a businessperson that’s truly not interested in hearing an idea that will make them more money or solve a problem they’ve been struggling with. They’ll present plenty of obstacles to the salesperson, of course, but deep inside nearly every business manager or owner there is a desire to do better. And a willingness to beg, borrow, steal, or even buy ideas on how to do better from any source available.

When you become identified as the “idea seller” by your prospects, you’ll be surprised at how many doors are opened to you. You’ll stand head and shoulders above the dozens of salespeople clamoring for attention from your prospects. And that’s an enviable position to be in.

The more ideas you present to a given prospect, the more feedback you’ll get. The more you learn about their business from that feedback, the more needs and opportunities you’ll see, which in turn will lead you to even better ideas to sell them. And the stronger your ideas become, the better they will work for the customer and the more satisfied your customer will be. Satisfied customers are repeat customers, which are the most profitable customers of all.

Creative selling isn’t the exclusive domain of a few wild haired sales fanatics. You don’t have to know about brushes and paints to be creative. 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 and the willingness to try new things. And the personal motivation to practice them until they work for you.

The Creative Selling System isn’t a get-rich-quick formula for easy success. We don’t offer any magic wands to wave or secret potions to entice your prospects to buy. But the Creative Selling System is foolproof. It can be used by anyone. All you have to do is follow the steps we’re going to outline for you.

Are you ready, Michelangelo?