The Undiscovered and Underutilized Edge in Complex Selling — Creativity

In this keynote (or longer format workshop) Gregg explores an untapped area in improving sales productivity – creativity. Good sales people are creative and have always been, but many sales people under produce because they don’t use creative thinking to solve their sales challenges.

Objective: Teach sales people creative thinking techniques they can apply to any sales challenge.  Sales people will walk away from this session with ideas they can use right away. 

Key Learnings

1. Learn what’s missing from sales methods, creative thinking to solve sales challenges, and why addressing that missing can make a huge difference in sales results.

2. Learn the basics of how to use creative thinking to come up with new ways to initiate relationships, discover hidden needs, sell more complete solutions, differentiate your sales team from the competition, and ultimately close more business.

Most sales methodologies are long on analysis – which is important and required to understand challenges. Unfortunately most methods don’t instruct sales people in how to think up solutions to the challenges analysis identifies. The assumption is everyone already knows how to do this. This is a poor assumption because many sales people don’t know how to access their imaginative power. Instead of innovative approaches sales people often resort to “tactics” that often backfire or weaken relationships.

Gregg’s sales creativity techniques can be used in conjunction with any sales methodology.  Gregg is familiar with Miller-Heiman’s Strategic Selling, SPIN, and the Sandler Sales System and can point out how creative thinking can integrate with and enhance those methods.

Gregg was a highly successful salesperson in the cable TV industry, and then in a 15 year career in the computer software industry. He sold big ticket networking and manufacturing systems to Fortune 500 companies. He continues to sell and deliver marketing research and ideation services to the corporate sector. He uses the creativity techniques he teaches.

Gregg takes sales people through a deliberate creative process that has them look at sales challenges differently. He has sales people shifting perspective, doing deeper exploration and fact finding – towards a better understanding of the challenge. Then he shows how to generate ideas that address the challenge, both alone and with teams. Finally he has them thinking creatively about ways to get into action with their best ideas, motivating themselves and their prospects.

This workshop is designed for salespeople and sales management teams to expand the conventional wisdom of what sales is. Drawing on theories of deliberate creative process, Gregg relates the new tools to established sales theory. The participant will create authentic ideas that will help them to reach specific solutions to real challenges. Participants in this speech or workshop should bring a sales relationship or challenge they would like to move forward.