“Every Ancestor to an Action, is a Thought” - Ralph Waldo Emerson  


    Unfortunately, many salespeople don’t use their creative abilities to their full potential. Most make canned presentations, take orders, fill out paperwork, collect what little residual they have built and go home, repeating the same cycle day after day. This type of status quo salesperson plays a role in our industry and economy, but in my opinion, like the dinosaur, they are on the path to extinction. A creative salesperson is a different type of animal; they use the power of ideas to create customer value and long-term wealth. What do I mean by ideas? Quite simply they are solutions. Creative salespeople frame their offer in a way that shows the merchant that they will derive a direct benefit from the use of their product or service. It’s focusing on solutions rather than features.

Create Big Opportunities

    Creative selling is consultative selling while kicking it up a notch, as Emeril Lagasse from the Food Network would put it. You still perform a needs analysis just like in consultative selling, but you also focus on perceived needs that the prospect doesn’t know he or she has. Then you create solutions to fill those needs. You open your mind and create big 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 not only respond to the needs of the marketplace—they create new ones.

Beat Your 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. Didn’t everything created today begin in the mind of someone first? And because of this, the price of an idea is determined solely by the perceived value in the buyer’s mind. If the idea is good enough and presented persuasively enough, often price-cutting can be eliminated completely. The driving factor is the salesperson’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 perk up and their mind begins to open to new possibilities. This relationship builds on itself, creating a rapport between the buyer and seller based on the seller’s ever-increasing value as a resource to the buyer. This is true consultative – partnership selling.

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 salespeople walk into the merchant with a presentation listing the many reasons their product should be bought. The whole confrontational 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 for buying 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 stale 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 their company’s product or services. So where does this put the focus of the conversation? Away from the customer’s needs and on the seller’s company or products, naturally.
    But when you talk about an idea that is unique to the prospect, they’ll talk about what’s important to them: their needs, concerns, desires and goals. 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 tool that let’s you enter into their world.
    Creative selling isn’t exclusive to a few but available to all with the proper mindset. All you need is the desire to learn, the willingness to try new things and the drive to practice them until they start to work. The merchant services industry has ample opportunities for you to demonstrate your creative side. New solutions and products are being developed constantly to help business owners solve their most complex challenges.
    Open your mind, get creative and you will break the bonds of mediocrity!