# data[].attributes.body
-Prepare sales training presentation

-Print any handouts if necessary

-Explain sales incentive

# data[].attributes.body
Create Sales Incentives

-$20 amazon gift card

Sales Training Presentation

Help Operations Team with sales form if necessary

# data[].attributes.body
-Why would I want these headphones?

Well, all of the money raised is going to a good cause to help wounded

veterans in our local area.

-I don't need another pair!

Its always nice to have a back up because you never know what will happen!

-I hate the colors!

Our colors represent our country which these veterans laid their lives down to protect.

-I need to save my money for video games

# data[].attributes.body
(Wording subject to change/improvisation)

Howdy Ho, How are you doing today? Who cares!

Do you mind showing me your headphones? (See below if they do have headphones)

You don't have headphones?! Aw shucks! Gee whiz, I bet you wish you did have some.

I would hate having to type a paper without being able to listen to music.

Have you heard of the new Freedom Phones?

(Pull out Freedom Phones)

We are selling these in order to raise money and awareness for injured soldiers in our area.

They are $____, would you care to help our cause?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
9 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Most of us don't associate the word "creative" with "selling." For some, "creative" conjures up images of starving artists dressed in black, "trying to make a statement" with paint and old auto parts. "Creative" people wear berets and read The Village Voice. Salespeople wear ties and read The Wall Street Journal.

At least those are the popular stereotypes. But don't salespeople create things, too-like opportunity? Don't salespeople create demand for products and services? Customer satisfaction? Wealth?

The nature of the sales process is, in fact, creative. A good salesperson creates demand where it doesn't exist. He or she creates a message (the sales pitch) using various media (face calls, telephone calls, written presentations, slide shows) that influence an audience (the prospect). A salesperson explores new territories (cold calls), introduces new ways of thinking (persuades prospects) and makes the world a better place (provides customer satisfaction).

OK, maybe I'm overstating the case a bit. Lots of perfectly productive salespeople are nothing more than harvesters of existing business-they take orders, fill out paperwork, collect their commissions and go home. And they never break rules.

Those salespeople still play a role in our economy, although they're on their way to being replaced by order-processing technology. But I'm here to talk about creative selling, the favorite activity of wild, vibrant, risk-taking sales fanatics-the Michelangelos of sales. These people use the power of ideas to create customer satisfaction and wealth for themselves and their companies.

Think of Creative Ideas
Ideas are scarce. They don't exist until someone creates them. They can be copied, but only after the original hits the market. Because there's nothing to compare them to, the price of an original idea is determined solely by perceived value. There is no competitive bidding or price shaving for market share-just the seller's ability to create perceived value by presenting the idea as a solution to the buyer's needs.

This excerpt was reprinted from Dave Donelson's Creative Selling: The Foolproof System To Unleash Your Sales Potential.

Motivate Your Customers

Now let's talk about motivation. Why do customers buy from you? Is it because your product or service is the best on the market? Is it because you have strong relationships with your clients? These things can't hurt, but you need more than just a good widget to sell to a customer. You need ideas, because ideas are motivators.

The first step in coming up with ideas to wow your clients is to find out as much as possible about their businesses. I like to build a file for each prospect that contains everything I can find that pertains to his or her business. That file doesn't only have to contain items related to your product or service; it should cover anything you can find about the prospect's business, market and customers. And the information should be gathered as if you were the prospect. Ideally, you'll learn to think like your client.

Use a little library or online research and a little common sense, and you'll be able to answer your questions pretty accurately. If you want to know the dollar volume of the prospect's market, for example, visit the U.S. Census Bureau's Web site. If you want to know how many locations the prospect operates, check the Yellow Pages. This kind of information is readily available at no cost to you.

Regardless of the type of business the prospect operates, ultimately he or she sells something. So find out who the prospect's customers are and why they buy this type of product or service.

Once you've learned about the basics of the client's business, you can develop a client goal to be reached or a need to be satisfied. Then it's time to get down to specifics on how to reach that goal. That's where ideas come in.

Creative sellers with open minds have an endless market for their ideas. But most people don't consider themselves creative enough. Some of us actually have lots of ideas but are hesitant to use them because we're afraid they won't be good enough. The problem with that kind of thinking is that it puts the onus of judgment on the wrong person. The salesperson or business owner shouldn't judge the merits of an idea-leave that to the prospect. If the customer thinks it's good-it's good! Put your idea in front of him or her using the best presentation skills you have, and let that prospect make the final judgment.

This excerpt was reprinted from Dave Donelson's Creative Selling: The Foolproof System To Unleash Your Sales Potential.

The Merits of Brainstorming

To come up with ideas to sell, you need to continually practice brainstorming. The techniques I'm talking about are the same ones you use in a group meeting, only I explore their use on an individual level.

Here are the steps: Start by writing down your prospect's goal. On the page below the goal, make a list of ways your company's products or services can help the prospect reach that goal. Follow the ground rules of successful brainstorming while you're writing.

Next, review the ideas and combine or extend them, creating new ideas. Again, don't be judgmental. It's not time to throw out bad ideas. This combining and extending process should add ideas to your list, not remove them.

There are several ways to stimulate your brainstorm production. Look inside the company for internal solutions. Many companies package their products or create bundles of services designed to meet the needs of certain categories of customers.

Another good source of ideas that come out of brainstorming is free association with nonrelated concepts. This is a fancy term for taking an idea from someplace else. One of my associates monitors TV commercials and magazine ads to see if there's a slogan or concept he can use as an idea springboard. For example, he'll take a slogan like "You're in good hands with Allstate" and come up with "You're in good form with Diet Rite." He's not stealing ideas, just using them to spark his own.

Another way to start the process is by examining past sales to similar customers. See if you can determine why customers made those purchases. Talk to the salespeople. Pick their brains about the circumstances that led to those sales.

Brainstorming 101
You don't remember brainstorming basics from B-school? Here's a quick refresher:

1. There's no such thing as a bad idea. Write it down even if it's impossible. Make sure to write it down if anyone in the room says, "We've never done that before." Reserve judgment until later.

2. See how outrageous you can be. Associate freely and write it down. The wilder the idea, the better. Crazy ideas spark more ideas-mundane ones are dead ends.

3. Fill the page-then start another one. Quantity is your goal because the more ideas you list, the better the odds of finding a good one.

4. Don't stop when you come to the "right" idea. There could well be a better one waiting to come out.

Choosing an Idea

The next step is to choose the one idea you feel most confident presenting. It should open a clear and direct path to the prospect's goal. Judge the idea by its ability to achieve that goal.

There is one final check to make before preparing the presentation of your idea: See if you can clearly express your idea in a sentence or two. Try to say it aloud without taking a breath. If you can't, re-examine the idea to see if it's too complicated. Overwhelming a prospect with a proposal that you can't explain in simple terms is a sure way to lose a follow-up call.

Now that you've come up with the ideas, pick one and pitch it. That's right, pick one-any one. It doesn't matter which idea you choose as long as you know your company can deliver it. You can't choose one based on your knowledge of the customer's likes and dislikes because you haven't met the prospect-so just pick one and go with it.

That's when you'll learn the secret to creative selling: Your real goal on the first call is not necessarily to sell that first idea-it's to gather as much information about the prospect as you can so subsequent ideas hit the mark.

As you gather information, you're accomplishing several other things. You make a strong first impression by showing a willingness to invest your time in a study of the prospect's needs. You establish yourself as an idea resource. If you bring prospects something of value, they are likely to see you again. Above all, your idea will provoke a discussion about the prospect's needs. It's through such discussions that you learn what they will buy from you.

Engineering A Sale

My friend Matt is both a salesperson and an engineer-a very unusual combination. Matt had a prospect who was responsible for the public structures owned by a county government, everything from playground equipment to bridges.

Matt specializes in the structural analysis of communications towers. This prospect sent out a request for proposals (RFP) for inspection of the county's communications towers, which are used for two-way radios and other communications systems.

Matt looked beyond the RFP at the entire assortment of structures his prospect managed. Instead of just submitting a proposal for the towers, Matt also pointed out that the county bridges were subject to the same stresses (weather, materials deterioration) as the towers. These stresses were potentially dangerous, so Matt proposed an inspection of the bridges using the same rigorous professional methods his firm applied to the towers.

This wasn't covered in the RFP, but Matt made the sale by creating an opportunity to study a potential problem that hadn't existed in the prospect's mind. He then created a solution to the need by designing a service that his firm didn't normally provide (bridge engineering). My friend's mind was open to the possibilities and he used creative selling techniques to create an opportunity.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
9 min read Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Most of us don't associate the word "creative" with "selling." For some, "creative" conjures up images of starving artists dressed in black, "trying to make a statement" with paint and old auto parts. "Creative" people wear berets and read The Village Voice.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
From sell-outs to used-car salesmen, it's no secret that selling gets a bad rap. It's so uncool, in fact, that it's one of the positions startups have the hardest time filling with young employees.

"The concept of selling isn't cool," says Steven Osinski, a sales expert at San Diego State University and former entrepreneur who successfully off-loaded a marketing company to Monster.com in the nineties. "But the truth is so many businesses have gone under because they don't know how to sell. You can have the greatest product or service on the market, but without sales strategies, you'll never get it off the ground." Particularly for entrepreneurs, getting a handle on basic sales strategies can be more critical to the success of a venture than the development of its products and services.

"It you think about today's startups and selling, there are really three fundamental sales that every founder has to make, whether he considers himself in a sales position or not," says UNC Kenan Flagler Business School professor Dave Roberts, who runs the university's sales program. In his view fundraising, recruiting talent are both sales campaigns that entrepreneurs should not ignore as they can help to prepare them for the more traditional sales in their company's future. For one thing, they can help to steel the entrepreneur against the rejection they'll undoubtedly face down the road.

"Selling the concept of the business to potential investors is the founder's first sales campaign," he says, "you're using the sales skill-set differently at this point but there are similarities to the hard sales you'll be doing in the future." Take hiring, he says. The competitive landscape for tech talent is a critical moment for leaders to practice their sales pitch. "As a small startup you're up against a lot to get people to come work for you," he says, "Especially big companies. You've got to sell your company-and hard."

After all that, of course, there's the more traditional sales episode of convincing clients to buy your product. But let's be real-hopefully by that point you've sold the company hard enough that you've on-boarded a stellar sales professional or two. Either way, the experts agree that these are the five most critical sales skills to pick up along the way.
Forget What You're Selling
What seems like the most counter-intuitive advice is what Roberts calls the hardest lesson for any sales professional to learn-but an especially fraught one for entrepreneurs. "I find that entrepreneurs struggle to overcome their own product," he says. "The problem for founders, is that they've developed this product or service, they've lived and breathed it for months and couldn't be prouder of it." But all that pride-while well-deserved-does not serve entrepreneurs well in a sales pitch.

"The reality is that customers are more demanding and more aware of the competitive landscape than ever before," he says. "Leading with the product is absolutely putting the wrong foot forward." Instead, entrepreneurs should master the art of approaching every sales pitch with questions about the needs of the prospect and the industry. "What every client is really looking for is help," he says. If you can identify that need and meet it, then you're a problem solver, not a salesman. And if it happens that your product meets their needs, so much the better. The relationship, Roberts stresses, is every bit as important as the sale.
Referrals
You must religiously plan, whether or not it means scheduling in your weekly calendar or Outlook, to ask for referrals consistently, says James Berkeley, a management consultant, who estimates that more than 80% of his current clients were won through a referral. What may seem a tactic of an old-boy's club is actually commonplace--and putting a plan into action is key. "Start with your 12 highest potential relationships," Berkeley says, as these will be the people you initially ask to make referrals, whether they're current or past clients, former colleagues or personal or professional friends. up: "Map out who their peers are within their organization, who are their firm's best customers, who do they take advice from, who in the referral's professional or personal community would reasonably have a need for your expertise and respond to a request to meet you."

Once you've diagrammed the end-game (the referrals you'd like to receive), you can better prepare to make the ask of your network. Tactics can vary, Berkeley says, but the one constant should be face time. "Ask in person, at your next meeting or failing that call," he says. No matter what: do not email.
Cold Calling... Or At Least Lukewarm
They call it "smile and dial"-the standby practice of making as many calls as possible in hopes of serendipitously striking sales gold. But what's tried isn't always true, and modern day salesmen agree that the days of cold-calling have all but ended. "Cold calling is old fashioned," says Roberts, but reaching out to unsolicited sales leads is not. Instead, sales people rely on technology to research potential leads in advance, in hopes of making every call hot. Or, as Roberts puts it, at least lukewarm. "Aim for hot calling," he says. "Learn enough to position your approach towards the needs of the industry or the customer."

A lot of entrepreneurs panic in the early stages of sales, he says, whether they're looking for investors, potential new hires or clients. As a result, they pursue "anything with a pulse," leaving their efforts seeming desperate, erratic and lacking in focus. Taking the time to research each prospect before pitching them a business helps entrepreneurs in two ways: in familiarizing themselves with the prospect to better tailor each pitch but also to buy time to consider whether the prospect is a great fit and worth reaching out to in the first place.
Finding The Hot Button
Osinski lays out an exercise he uses with his students to illustrate the sales concept called the hot button. Standing in front of the class, he holds up a water bottle he says is for sale. For each student who offers to purchase it, he asks them what their reason is for buying. "It's recyclable," one says. "I'm thirsty," says another. "It's an attractive bottle," a third. The different reasons individuals have for buying the same product or service are their hot buttons, also known as their pain points-and it's every salesman's mission to uncover it.

Echoing Roberts' advice to approach every prospect with questions, not a sales pitch, Osinksi goes one step further to uncover the hot button. "It's about the balance of open and closed questions," he says. "Approach with closed-ended questions to put the prospect at ease and make them comfortable, then gradually introduce open-ended questions to help them reveal the holy grail."
Putting Networks To Work
Networks afford professionals the ability to develop credibility and legitimacy in relationships more quickly than they ever could on their own, and for entrepreneurs that street cred can often lead to revenue. But while entrepreneurs often excel at networking-just take a look at the iCal of any founder you know and it will be jammed with openings, launches and meetup events-Roberts says they often struggle to break outside of their comfort zone. In other words, entrepreneurs networking with other entrepreneurs, while fun, is not where sales-focused founders should be focused.

"Most founders in the startup sector are looking to drum up business with very little brand equity," he says. More often than not entrepreneurs can't rely on the equity of their young company name or even their own name-unless it's Zuckerberg, Gates or of course--which makes the people and businesses they align themselves with absolutely critical. "You've got to expand the network," Roberts says, "Expand beyond your peer groups into networks and industries where your product has a need." For founders hoping their company leaves the ground, he says, those are the relationships worth establishing-and fast.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Five Sales Tactics Every Entrepreneur Must Master

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From sell-outs to used-car salesmen, it's no secret that selling gets a bad rap. It's so uncool, in fact, that it's one of the positions startups have the hardest time filling with young employees. "The concept of selling isn't cool," says Steven Osinski, a sales expert at San Diego State University and former entrepreneur who successfully off-loaded a marketing company to Monster.com in the nineties.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Discover recipes, home ideas, style inspiration and other ideas to try.