What is Creative selling strategy? How can you make big money by Creative selling strategy?

Selling calls for a creative selling strategy right from its very first step. Every step of a selling process requires creativity.

1)  First is- Knowing who your customer is. One might think that’s easy just read the statistics and trends. Well no, it is hard but smart work. Requires the precision of the stroke of a painters brush! You need to understand your customer.

Starting from understanding their needs, while the “explicit needs” are spoken and easy to understand; it takes all sorts of innovative analysis on the salesperson’s end to read the unspoken “implicit needs”. These are never told by your customer directly. Let me give you an example, I go to a market to buy a phone. While my explicit need here is ONE to ‘buy a phone” my implicit needs could be MULTIPLE and UNDEFINED, I myself might lack clarity on them. For example- I could be looking for a phone that matches my status or I might not be able to manage my phone very well I need a sturdy body or my nephew keeps on playing games on my phone I need its battery to last long.

This concept lies adjacent to the understanding of customer demographics along with the more important psychographics. Quick and reliable search of demographics of an individual customer or market has been made quite easy by the technology. But understanding the psychographics will again require you to understand the customer/community mentality, preferences, restrictions, social pressures, psychological needs. This could include extensive research on the individual’s background or how a community as a whole came into being. Whipping up new ideas to know your customer better will also help in pre-empting their implicit needs intuitively. Here comes your creativity!

Creative selling ideas in identifying your customers’ Requirements:

• You could connect your product to the customer in a story, you could say, “This phone is for the Chic tech lovers, the multi-taskers who don’t shy away from investing into a value for money product.” All along as you narrate this, you can keep a keen eye on your customer’s reaction. It will instantly work on your customers psychology and simultaneously inform you if a sale can be made.

• Another creative personal selling tool is to do a “Won sales analysis” or existing customers’ analysis. This is described beautifully by Craig Elias- he talks about analysing the demographics and psychographics of your existing customers. Know why they chose you! How you/your product changed their life. And what had triggered them to look for a solution that you/your product provides. If you analyse these minutely, it can give a great insights about your customer’s requirements.

2)  Next is, creating awareness/increasing visibility about your brand is an essential component of selling. This requires being visible. This is what advertisements do. “Out of sight is out of mind”. This calls for you to make your business so visible that you are the only brand they can remember. This gains their credibility. When everybody knows your brand even if they have never been your customer they will end up recommending you to their friends and family! And a good word of mouth is the most reliable testimonial for any customer. As a sales and business coach I have experienced that some of my biggest clients are those who got to know about me from word of mouth! But still me and my company work continuously towards expanding our visibility.

Let me tell you from my personal experience- Recently, as sales and marketing coach my team has been trying to advertise for our  brand on Facebook for quite some time now. But it seems like some of the words being used by us in our advertisement are not agreeable to Facebook. So they keep rejecting it, so used our creativity and designed completely a new ad which go through immediately and gave us very results.  And it is the creativity of our professionals that well get us out of this roadblock. Do you see now? The finer details of the words, and visuals of advertisements call for creativity! Building credibility also requires introducing oneself in the right, most effective manner.  Based on the clear understanding of customer psychographics, explicit and implicit needs- your choice of words, mannerism and body language all can be innovated using creative selling ideas.

Creativity in branding communication:

• Place a user generated content for advertisement of your product– If one of your customers takes the time out for advertising your services. Nothing else can say more about your credibility.
• You can also create online magazines- These are just a type of fancy blog. You can not only showcase your products but also write directly or indirectly related articles. Heck you should not even shy from going controversial! You are bound to gain more traffic and visibility.

3) Creativity in Selling through Questioning – Use SPIN approach:

• A time-tested technique is the “SPIN”-sales method. Each of the components requires creativity. Understanding of the “S” situation of the customer calls for asking the right questions. Asking the right questions is never easy. Heck it is more difficult than giving answers! You need to be subtle and crisp and simultaneously not seem like interrogating. It is an articulate job that requires creativity. Further the understanding of the “P” problem not only requires empathy, but simultaneously also calls for judging the customer’s requirements. The “I” impact exploration will help you convince your customer that your product is the best for them. And finally, “N” need, this is where all your research comes handy. Your creativity in questioning the customer correctly will help you cover all of the above efficiently.

4) Your sales presentations also need to have “creative selling ppts”:  Regularly used stencils and patterns are monotonous; these lose potential to grab customer attention. Continuous improvisation with highlighting the features of your product that fulfil customer needs in a non “in your face” manner is essential. Several tactics can be used to make a presentation memorable.

Ideas for making creative selling ppts:

• Take Polls-the most impressive presentations are the ones where the participants feel engaged. Taking interesting polls is one innovative way to bind their attention. You poll might not be too serious or directly related to your product.

• Give Souvenirs- Handing out a souvenir at the end of your presentation is another creative attention grabbing idea. You could give an e-book or a rubic’s square with your company logo or even a pretty bright coloured pen. I doesn’t have to costly, but definitely has to be unique!