The Need for Sales Innovation- Mark Donnolo, Author of The Innovative Sale

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Rain Today's Marketing and Selling Professional Services podcast. I'm Michelle Davidson, editor of Rain Today. And today I welcome Mark Danolo, author of the new book the Innovative Unleash youh Creativity for Better Customer Solutions and Extraordinary Results. Mark is also a managing partner at Sales Globe, which is a leading sales effectiveness consulting firm. And over the past 25 years, he's worked with IBM, Comcast, AT&T, Office Depot, KPMG, Accenture, and Verizon, among many Fortune 1000 companies. So welcome, Mark. Thank you for joining us.

Great. Thanks, Michelle. Good to be here.

Now, when I was looking through your book and thinking about sales and creativity, which is a key part of your book, I'm thinking creativity isn't one of the words that comes to mind when I think of salespeople. But you say it does apply to sales, specifically to functional creativity, and that people in sales need to be creative. So my first question is, how does that work? How are salespeople creative and why is it important?

You know, it is kind of a funny combination when you put them together. And we haven't heard a lot about sales creativity or sales innovation, but when we ask the question of people, and we've done some research recently where we ask the question, how important is it to be creative in sales? And about 85% plus of the people that answer that question come back and they say it's really important. But we know that the majority of people also just move through the sales process and they move through by rote or by kind of their left brain rules. And so the idea of creativity and the idea of innovation really blends with the need to differentiate and the need to come up with a better answer for the customer. So one way I think about it is what I hear back from our clients. And I'll get calls every week or so and a client will ask a question about how should the sales process look in our space and how do other companies in our space approach the sales process for a certain segment of accounts as an example? And they don't want to know how other companies approach the sales process. What they want to know is, what should I do? So there tends to be this pattern of replication. So what we tend to do is, is we find how others are doing it, or maybe we think about how somebody did it before at a prior company on our team, and we tend to replicate, we tend to repeat. So there's a big space, a big opportunity to think about how to do something differently. I think the challenge with innovation and the Challenge with creativity is the idea of innovation has been so overplayed that it's kind of become a little meaningless in business. I think about this example of a company that I went to one of their sales meetings about a year or so ago, and it was over in London at Heathrow Airport. They have a big conference facility there. And it was a sales innovation meeting. And I went in, and we were with a whole bunch of senior executives, and they were working on sales strategies and customer approaches. And as we walked in, it was a very traditional space, but they had done the innovation thing. So they had set. Set up whiteboards on pods, and they put little pods of chairs in front of the whiteboards for people to sit at, and they would watch the speaker in front of the whiteboards talk. And it was a PowerPoint free zone, so they couldn't use PowerPoint. So that was to promote creativity and promote innovative thinking. But behind the speaker, as they talked, they had one of these sketchnoters that was an artist basically drawing as the speaker was talking. So they were illustrating what the speaker was saying, and the speaker would kind of look over his shoulder as he was talking and wonder what was going on. So it was an innovative environment. And in the center of the room, they had beanbag chairs and they had oversized books and puzzles. And the idea was, after the executives got done with these sessions, they would go off to the beanbag chairs and hang out and have innovative conversations. Well, what happened was they were all heading to the coffee stations at the breaks. They were going to a place that was familiar. They were trying to find conference rooms, and they were trying to do what was familiar to them. So we had kind of a veneer of innovations. I think it's important to talk about the data difference between that kind of expressive creativity and, as you phrased it, functional creativity. How do you actually put it into application?