The speaker (SalesGlobe Sage) argues that sales organizations often copy past solutions instead of creating new ones and that superficial 'artistic' creativity (ambience, expression) won't change how teams think. He introduces 'functional creativity'—creativity with specific objectives and constraints—and outlines teaching points: set objectives, understand constraints, redefine problems, use divergent thinking, and generate practical solutions; closes with links to SalesGlobe and the book The Innovative Sale.
Chapters
Sales innovation starts with a question, and the question is a very simple one. It's why? Why do we tend to replicate the same old solutions and do the same old things? When we're trying to develop a new sales strategy or come up with a new customer solution to win a deal, we'll tend to look at how other companies have done the same thing in the past. We might acquiesce to the alpha dog in the room who talks about the way we used to do at IBM. And so we tend to repeat the same old things, thinking we're going to get a competitive advantage. I get probably a couple calls a week from companies and they'll ask a question like, how do companies in our space organize around major account sales? Or how do they design the sales process? And they don't want to know. How do companies in our space design the sales process for major accounts? What they want to know is what should I do? So they're searching for new solutions in the same old places. So how do we develop a way for people in sales organizations to come up with new ideas? I tend to think about it as a left brainer's approach to right brain thinking or right brain creativity. I went to a meeting last year, it was last fall, and it was at Heathrow Airport in London. And it was a sales innovation meeting. And the company was a high tech company. They had a lot of their top executives in and their whole sales leadership team. And it was in a very traditional ballroom. And we walked in and they had all the crown molding and all the traditional accoutrements you would expect to see in an old building. And they revamped it so it had kind of an innovation setting. So as you walked around, there were these big whiteboards, and they were on wheels, they were rolling whiteboards. And they were sitting in front of rows of chairs in different pods. And as people got up, they did their presentations in front of the whiteboards. And it was a PowerPoint free zone. So that was supposed to promote creativity, get people off of kind of going through the slides one after the other. But behind them as they talked, they had an artist. And that artist would draw pictures and they would draw along the way. As that person did their presentation, you would notice the people presenting would tend to look over their shoulders at the artist guy to see what he was doing. That was supposed to create some innovation. In the middle of the room, they had beanbag chairs, they had big toys, they had oversized books and puzzles. And the idea was the executives at their breaks between these Presentations and these work sessions. They were supposed to go hang out in the middle of the room and they were supposed to have innovative conversations about their strategy. Well, what really happened, they started to move off at the breaks and they moved off to where? The coffee stations around the perimeter of the room. So what was happening here was the company had the right intention. It was trying to free up thinking a little bit, but it was creating a veneer of innovation. It was doing this thing we think of as artistic creativity, which is about expression. And it tends to not tell people how to think differently. And these people really didn't know what to do differently. It tended to just create an atmosphere. So what we're talking about in sales innovation is not artistic creativity. We're talking about this thing called functional creativity. And functional creativity is very specific. It's got an objective. You're trying to get something done like hit a sales goal or win a deal. And it's got constraints. There are certain things you can't do. Constraints might be that we've got certain cost parameters or certain pricing or certain timing or resource constraints. And through those objectives and constraints, we create a more innovative possibility. Through the innovative sale, we're going to teach you how to be more functionally creative within a sales situation. Not just artistically creative, to come up with an environment of creativity. So we're going to talk to you about how to set an objective, how to understand your constraints, how to redefine your problem, how to do divergent thinking, and how to come up with solutions you wouldn't otherwise think about. We're going to help you change the way you and your team think. You can check us out on salesglobe.com and you can get the book the innovative sale on Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.
