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Use these creative selling ideas to pump sales even in this economy

Use creative techniques to generate ideas to increase your sales whether selling face to face, in print or on-line

Dear Friend,

We were in the market for a house and looked at several properties. Gail (not her real name), one of the real estate agents, showed us an attractive home but it had some disadvantages. She asked us to view the house a second time. While inside the kitchen we admired the spacious feeling and the view onto the garden. Then we became aware of another couple talking in the lounge. Suddenly we wanted the house more than ever. We put in an offer to purchase right away.

The real estate salesperson created urgency in her prospective buyers by creatively closing us. She increased buying pressure by bringing in another couple to view the house at the same time. She moved us rapidly from merely interested prospects to committed buyers desperate not to lose the sale.

Using your creativity as a sales person can help increase your sales in this economy. Knowing how to use creativity in selling can stop you leaving money on the table. Creativity in selling works not only for face to face selling but also in other forms such as in print or online.

How creative is your selling? We don’t mean creativity in the unsavoury sense of being devious or manipulative. Short-changing or deceiving a customer is not selling, it is dishonesty. Selling to be successful requires an exchange of value at an agreed price.

You can use your creativity to generate ideas for all phases of the sales process: understanding your customer, knowing your product or service, prospecting, qualifying, approaching the customer, presenting, closing the sale and after-sales follow-up and service.

Understanding your customer’s needs involves use of your creativity whether you are a kitchen table business owner or web entrepreneur. Who are your customers? Where are your largest prospects? What are their needs? Where will you find new customers for your product or service? Who will be your future customers? What motivates them to buy? You need to find out more about your customers and their needs. This requires creativity because you must come up with ideas to constantly stay in touch with your customer needs to grow your market.

Creativity is also required when you look at finding new uses for your products and services. In what ways are your customers using your product or service right now? What other ways could your product or service be used? What benefits of your products are most in demand and by whom? Needs change over time so you must keep current. How will you find out? What methods can you use to survey your customers?

Prospecting requires much creativity. How are you going to find out where your prospective customers are? What ideas can you come up with for generating leads? How much will leads cost you? What lead generation methods work best for your product or service?

Qualifying becomes very important in a tough economy – to increase sales and minimise your risk. If you don’t quickly qualify a prospect, you waste time and money. You need to know up front whether your customer needs your product and can afford it. What ideas can you use to quickly and effectively qualify prospects? Generate a list of questions you could ask prospects.

Presentations require creativity in providing proof of performance of your product or service. How can you sharpen your product or service presentation? Have you mastered the sequence of presenting benefits in your presentation? Do you have too many selling points, overwhelming your customer with detail? Are you able to switch from your presentation to a trial close immediately you sense a buying signal?

Handling objections benefits from creativity. Generate a list of your major objections for your products or service. Write down how you will handle each one. Make sure you have at least three answers for price in this economy.

Closing is arguably the most creative part of selling. How many closes do you have? Some top sales people have more than 25 closing techniques. How many do you have? You need at least 10 closes you can use at any time. You need to sharpen your closing because every sale you lose goes to your competition.

In this post we have mainly covered personal selling but remember that selling in print or on-line requires that you go through the selling process and determine how you can sharpen your sales process and offer (presentation). Instead of breaking your prospect’s preoccupation with a question such as in personal selling, you need to grab their attention with a headline that draws them into your sales letter, direct response ad or website copy. Closing is similar to conversion online so you need to be just as creative with various approaches to induce customers to buy from your website.

Whatever ideas you generate to increase your sales, make sure you test them. Some sales approaches work for years regardless of economic conditions or buyer behaviour. But make sure that your selling methods are up to date and effective.

Stay focused on creating value.

 

 

Chesney Bradshaw

Founder of ideaaccelerator.co.za

PS To maximise your business work on increasing customers, total purchase value and frequency of purchase. Just imagine if you could come up with 25 ideas for all three areas – you would increase your sales and profits exponentially.

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How to generate ideas to deliver astonishing customer value

Dear Friend,

Walk into retail shopping centres these days and rows of shops have gone to the wall. What went wrong? Did these business owners know what they were doing? Did they stop creating value for their customers?

Very often we can trace the downward spiral in a business to the customer value proposition. A what? A value proposition really just means all the benefits a customer receives in return for payment.

The danger of an iceberg is what lurks underneath – in business poor customer service signals a value proposition that’s somehow got lost along the way. Here are some warning signals:

• Call centres that force you through menus and make you wait and then the personnel have no clue how to solve your problem.

• Websites run by marketing experts who don’t answer queries on simple things like shipping charges.

• Household repair service contractors who take down your details but never get back to you to set up time to meet with you to assess your needs.

• A clothing shop that sells you long-sleeved shirts with buttons that come off after the first wash.

• A daily newspaper whose subscription “service” is so cumbersome that it takes weeks to finalise a simple annual subscription.

• A credit card company that tires to lure you into catalogue purchases with little understanding of your needs, aspirations and lifestyle.

Some of the larger businesses that allow these things to happen can get away with turning customers away but for the smaller business it can be deadly.

When you drive under normal conditions you might glance at your dashboard to check key indicators like fuel and oil. But driving alone on a country road at night wouldn’t you watch your dashboard with a much sharper eye? Isn’t it amazing how some businesses riding through the economic storm don’t keep their eyes on their dashboard, constantly looking at key indicators — customer satisfaction levels, cash flow, debtor days (see financeglossary for a good example) and shrinkage levels.

One restaurant owner I interviewed recently told me that she watches her shrinkage by conducting daily stock takes, closely watches portion size slippage and works overtime to come up with ideas to attract more customers.

A smaller business may find it relatively easy to brainstorm the key indicators for their business — and keep their eyes fixed on what they believe is crucial for the survival of their business. Whatever the indicators selected, customer value is vital. Lose your focus on this one in a changing market and you will soon find yourself in serious trouble. Customer value parity is useless in today’s competitive market.

Smart business people who want to thrive in any economic conditions practice these methods to keep their business healthy:

• Spend time using proven methods to generate ideas to promote their business and achieve higher sales volumes in low-cost, high return ways.

• Ask for advice on how to implement systems that reduce shrinkage in their business if their own methods are not effective.

• Recognise that when economic times are tough to implement controls to stop debtors endlessly delaying payments with easy-to-implement practices.

• Resist dishing out generous discounts to all customers regardless whether the customer buys before a certain deadline or buys in bulk.

 • Communicate to employees how they can contribute to repeat business through providing superior service and value.

• Focus their energies on filling the sales funnel. If they run a restaurant, as an owner recently told me, forget about tinkering endlessly with your decor — find ways to attract more customers (get to know what they need and want).

• Ensure that their products and service have the best real and perceived value for their customers.

• Talk to business people from other fields, other industries, to find out what’s working well for them.

A mechanical cheeriness isn’t going to win over sceptical customers. To add value requires a deep understanding of your customers’ needs, customisation and a delivery system that offers quality and perceived value quickly flexibly and competently.

Don’t blow your relationships with your existing customers either — repeat customers, your backlist, have already been paid for by your upfront marketing and advertising acquisition costs.

Co-creating customer value requires listening to customer needs, wants and desires. Creativity and imagination are needed to identify new opportunities for creating customer value. Anticipate customer needs through brainstorming or use of other idea generation methods to produce breakthrough ideas for superior customer value.

Stay focused on creating value.

Chesney Bradshaw

Founder of ideaaccelerator.co.za

PS Breakthroughs happen when you combine your understanding of your customer’s needs and expectations with creative ideas to solve their problems. Read similar posts on creating value and generating ideas for income and profit in the ideaaccelerator.co.za archive, while they are still freely available.

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Get more, much more, out of what you’ve got

Money
Image by lalunablanca via Flickr
How much money do you leave on the table when pricing your services and expertise? Are you charging enough for your service or expertise? Do you often feel that you have over serviced clients but have been underpaid?

If any of these questions get your blood churning you might want to consider your current pricing strategy. Are all your services priced the same or do you charge different hourly or project fees for high level work? Routine work may only warrant standard industry rates but as the level of your value in your speciality rises, fees may need to be adjusted upwards. Complex, specialised work that requires a high-level of technical expertise and judgement would attract the highest hourly rate or project fee. Geographic market location, market position and size of client also have an influence.

The most audacious example of a high fee strategy in a field that requires a high level of judgement, creativity and strategic thinking I have come across is that involving a brand naming company. The agency did not particularly want the business from a client so decided to put in a bid at an outrageously high project fee. Work from similar companies was priced in the $15,000 range. The agency put in a bid for $150,000 – and won! Much is at stake when renaming a company and the company thought the highest priced solution would give them the best advice.

Continue reading “Get more, much more, out of what you’ve got”

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Finding time to create #4 Ignite your creativity

How do we inject more creativity into our business – conceptualising, planning, implementing — and find the time to do so? Working in fixed time slots is seemingly impossible with today’s demands on our time. Tablet computers, smart phones, e-mails and the Internet are all meant to save time but our e-mail boxes are brimming every day and continuous disruptions from associates in company cubicle land have become the norm. Finding time to create before the workday begins has its merits but it’s not always easy to do with morning traffic, urgent and “unforseen” crises and cell phone calls. Continue reading “Finding time to create #4 Ignite your creativity”

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Finding time to create # 3 Generate value upfront

Inside the money machine
Inside the money machine. Image by Yodel Anecdotal via Flickr

Times like these draw the best out of us. We need to dig deep and pull on our inner resources. Wealth and value creation take on a new importance. What are we doing to increase our sales? How much money are we leaving on the table? How can we get our products faster to market? What innovations on the backburner can we fast forward? Are our selling and promotion campaigns achieving the results we require? How can we transform our hobbies and interests into money making opportunities?

It takes more than hard work in tough times. Innovation is more important than we think. Joe Vitale points out in “The 7 lost secrets of success” that Bruce Barton, the second “B” in BBDO (the famous Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn agency), became chairman of the board of BBDO in September 1928 when the agencies became one. The agency had 113 clients, 600 employees, and billings of $32.6 million in their first year — the first year of the Great Depression. Can you believe that? A business based on ideas making truckloads of money in the worst of times.

You may have all the best intentions in the world. You may have decided that you want to be more creative and produce more ideas to benefit your personal or business life. You may be inspired to create more ideas. Now what? You’ve got your week laid before you and have decided that you will spend a half an hour each morning to produce ideas.

Monday comes – you wake up late. Monday evening you are too tired to think creatively about generating ideas. Just as well because you can’t force creativity. Tuesday comes around and you have a meeting at eight o’clock and will to wake up half an hour early if you want to produce ideas. Perhaps you could find a quiet place with the right atmosphere to produce ideas. And so it goes.

Viewing producing ideas as some activity that you have to do at set, allocated times can be too forced, out of kilter with the inner human creative process. For those who are extremely self disciplined, it can help to allocate a set time. Creativity can’t be viewed as some add on to your life: it needs to be part of your way of living. Let me explain.

Almost anything you do every day can benefit from creative thinking. If you are planning a project, an event, a consulting proposal, a creative work such as a painting, a photographic shoot – all of these will have greater impact with pre-thinking, visualisation and imagining possibilities. You need to build creativity into important tasks in a seamless way.

With many tasks to do in a week, how can you find time to produce more creative ideas?

How do you integrate creativity into the most relevant or high impact processes where you hope to achieve amazing results? You are planning an important project. Do you just go ahead in the usual way? Perhaps you need to rethink what you’ve been doing. Is it still relevant? Does it give you maximum impact? Is it the most cost-effective way? Have you maximised the benefits for all involved? Will it make money?

By sitting down perhaps in a quiet place such as a coffee shop before you start dashing out your list of activities for your project, you could brainstorm, mindmap or perform a clustering exercise for 10 minutes. Right there, before you begin your project you can engage in a creative process. If you’re not familiar with using creativity tools like freewriting, you may not benefit from your first few attempts. Try it a few times and you could be amazed at the ideas you produce.

Why go to this trouble? With stiff competition for better, smarter and more cost-effective ways of doing things that stand out, you need to raise your game.

You can inject creativity into just about anything you do if you want superior results. Use creativity tools and techniques before you start anything important – a proposal, a sales letter, a business strategy.

Find out what works best for you. By placing creative processes at the forefront of your routine and new projects, you stand a much better chance of producing outstanding, profitable results.

Idea Prompt

1. Evaluate your projects. Make a list. Prioritise your top three projects.

2. Take your most important project and freewrite for 10 minutes on ideas to create more value. Or, if you don’t have time to look up what freewriting is all about, just list 21 ideas fast.

3. Select your best idea and include it in your project to generate greater value.

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Finding time to create #2 The secret of 10 minutes focused attention

Starting up again (3 of 4)
Image by Unhindered by Talent via Flickr

Under pressure, time never seems to be on one’s side. You have many projects to complete but they all seem to merge into an endless torrent of deadlines, one after the other. Work piles up. One of your projects you have given little time to. You just can’t seem to get around to sitting down and getting to grips with it.

You finally decide you will spend just 10 minutes on it. You sit down with your file, your notes, calculator, pad and pen and think through what you are going to do. Suddenly, you have the solution. Ideas come to you and you become interested about completing the project. You make a list of people to call, tasks to complete, resources you will need and a workflow plan.

You are surprised how quickly you sorted things out after just not being able to get around to kick-starting your project. It only took 10 minutes and you were thinking that it would take you hours.

What’s going on here? Why did tackling this project seem like such a mountain to climb? What lessons does it hold for creativity, ideation and innovation?

Under stress it is hard to bring ourselves around to work on projects that we may believe only offer us marginal prospects for gain. How do we know that these projects we have placed low on our priority list have low value until we examine their potential and possibilities? We often tend to put these projects on the backburner because we just have too much to handle. We don’t recognise that money likes fast action when it flows and we can’t let things wait for weeks or longer.

Another thing is that we try to do some of the thinking about a delayed project in our heads. That’s fine up to a point but the result is that we can become overwhelmed carrying all the details in our brain. It’s much easier to sit down relaxed with a piece of paper or an electronic screen and put down all our thoughts where they are easy to see. The whole project becomes more manageable.

The other important insight is that with a white-hot focus we can block distractions and concentrate our minds and imagination on one project, giving it our full attention. Our mind can process information so quickly in this way that it seems unbelievable.

Brief periods of concentrated attention can help you speed up and complete projects at a rate you may have previously thought impossible. A timer (on your cell phone) or a kitchen timer — but without the distracting ticking sound — helps you block out well defined time periods of, say, 10 minutes to work on important projects. It is not necessary to complete the phase of your project in 10 minutes. If you haven’t completed what you set out to do in 10 minutes, start another 10-minute session — and another, if necessary. The main point is to focus your mind with a laser-sharp intensity so that you can give your full attention to the task at hand.

Concentrated periods of 10 minutes or more may seem artificial, even contrived. But when you try them out, you will find that your ideas flow more rapidly. Ideas you never thought of may well rise to the surface of your conscious mind. You will also be simply amazed at how fast your mind can really work and the outstanding results that you are able to produce when you coax your mind into working for you.

Idea Prompt

As a brief exercise, time yourself for two minutes and think about all the main elements that you will require for a project. Next, write down the tasks on a mind map (or on a program such as PersonalBrain), cluster map or simply use a list – whatever works best for you — in two minutes. Think again about your list of items without looking at your map or list, going through the items in your mind for two minutes. Do new items crop up? After the two minutes, place them on your map or list. (You may find ideas popping into your mind the next day — add them to your map or list.) Review what you have achieved in eight minutes. If you haven’t done this exercise yet, do it now and see how incredibly well it works. Should it not work the first time, try again on another project.

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Finding time to create # 1: Why it matters

Stopwatch
Image by wwarby via Flickr

You want to increase the impact of your work but it’s almost impossible most of the time to raise your game. You believe you should be more creative in your work but can’t find the time to sit down and think. You must start a new project but you don’t want to outline your thoughts at your desk because it just doesn’t feel creative. You try to find the time to get started but you just can’t.

What’s going on here? What’s preventing you from being more creative in your work? Do you need to be more disciplined? Is it because you haven’t established a routine and you are all over the place? Could it be a psychological block? Is it really about not having time?

It’s got harder to find the time to be creative because of the growing number of distractions in the workplace. Some studies say we get interrupted at work every eight minutes. Distractions make it much harder to focus and concentrate on important work, the work you get recognised and rewarded for and which gives you the greatest satisfaction. It’s a lot easier to turn to lighter tasks and amusements. No matter how much you convince yourself that social media will be significant in the future, your important work remains the core of your value to yourself and the marketplace.

So where do we look? Time management. This could be the panacea we’ve been looking for. But wait. We remember all those times we tried time management programmes and what happened? We found that it’s almost impossible to control our time despite keeping detailed time-planners when so many other things demand our attention – e-mails, follow-up work on projects, proposals, projects, people calling us on our landlines and then on our cell phones when our landlines are engaged, sms’s, BlackBerry messages and even tweets to get our attention. Do we really control our time or do interruptions control us?

We know we are smart – we can get a grip on this time thing and take charge of our lives. Our next search takes us into the whole personal qualities trap. We are out of control because we need more self-discipline. We’ll work ourselves out of our trap with better personal qualities. Soon we begin to realise that self-discipline is not enough. The onslaught of distractions, the demands, the deadlines, keep coming. We begin to feel overwhelmed. There must be a better way, we say to ourselves.

If you doubt the need for creativity just consider the challenges of modern living and working. Creative thinking is required more than ever in the past. Economic decline and stagnation means the need for better products and services, more cost-effective marketing with better results. Natural resources under threat requires new thinking for cars, homes, architectural design, consumer appliances and industrial processes. Sustainable products need to be made with less and be functionally superior. Design becomes far more important in a marketplace with many similar products vying for attention. Media and entertainment requires innovation to new forms of pleasurable distraction such as computer games, social media, downloading music, podcasts and videos.

In the next blog post, part of a series on “The secret to finding time to create”, we will further explore what prevents us from making the creative process part of our personal and work lives.

Idea prompt

Below are some questions that may help you to understand better your existing beliefs, processes and habits. Think through the questions that intrigue you and write down the answer to the question that most affects your life right now:

  • What associations do you have with being creative? Does the word “creative” disturb you?
  • What does being creative mean to you – wild thoughts and ideas or coming up with something fresh and amazing that can be put to use?
  • How important is it to you to be more creative in your personal and business life?
  • Where and when do you come up with your best ideas?
  • Where could you benefit most from being creative in your personal and professional life?
  • How well do you control distractions?
  • What controls your time?
Related articles

Creative Distractions (lisarivero.com)

The Prisoner’s Dilemma: The Key to Creativity (blogs.forbes.com)

How to Lose Yourself in Your Writing (lisarivero.com)

Successful time management. (xemion.com)

4 Creative ways to Start Your Day (leadershipfreak.wordpress.com)

How To Enhance Creativity Part 2: Unlocking The Secrets Of The Unconscious (entrepreneurs-journey.com)

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Exploring the outer limits of e-book prices

Scan of modern reproduction of The Birds of America (edited and color-corrected)Exploring the outer limits of e-book prices Imagine you could acquire advice to make money, save money, gain knowledge, enjoy happier relationships and be more healthy. If your interest in any one of these areas is high, you might be willing to stretch your budget to the max and buy the advice whether in a magazine, book or from a trusted and respected professional adviser.

Without the means to pay for such specialised knowledge, you would probably ask advice from someone you know or try to find it for free from the Internet or a free downloadable PDF. But would this information be of high enough quality to make a significant impact in your life?

What if you require more in-depth, well-researched information laid out in easily digestible chunks that rapidly add to your knowledge on the subject? What if the information could help produce ideas for new additional income or shape your life in ways you never dreamed possible?

What would you be willing to pay for such information? How high would you go?

The answers to these questions depend on how hungry or desperate you are to gain the information and what impact or difference you are seeking in your life. When, for instance, you need to pass a crucial exam that would make a meaningful difference to your life and livelihood, you may up the stakes. I once paid what I thought was an outrageous price for an international book on finance. It was a crucial primer on a subject that was new to me but I knew that it would help me to pass the subject for my degree in business administration.

Books rise in price depending on the value of their content and how rare they are.

I thought the book on finance was outrageous until I came across the e-book for “Comprehensive Structural Integrity” at $18,304. Value is in the eye of the beholder. This book must contain very specialised information to sell at this price. Perhaps the main buyers are professional firms.

Another e-book that has an astronomical (if that’s the correct word) price of $6400 for the Kindle edition. It’s titled “Selected Nuclear Materials and Engineering Systems”. One buyer was pleased with the purchase. “I had to sell my car and take out an equity loan on my house to buy this book, but it was worth every penny,” the buyer wrote on The Digital Reader.

Some books hold high intrinsic value because they are so rare. A copy of “Birds of America” recently fetched $11.5 million in an auction in London. This book – a 170-year-old collection of life-size bird paintings – is hardly expected to land up as an e-book. Comics have high value when they are rare and in mint condition. A copy of “Action Comics #1”, published in June 1938, which introduced Superman was bought by an anonymous buyer for $1,000,000 in February 2010. Another copy was sold for $1.5 million at an auction in the same year. Another comic book has joined the $1 million club. A copy of Amazing Fantasy #15 (Aug ‘62), the first appearance of Spider-Man, sold for $1.1 million on 7 March in a private sale.

The costs of publishing e-books may be lower than conventional publishing but the expenditure involved in researching and writing the book can be huge. An enormous investment in time is required. The specialisation and writer’s reputation (which also require enormous investment over time). It’s expensive and time-consuming to promote e-books, despite what pundits say.

Some consumers show price sensitivity to e-book’s higher than $9.99 but what is the real price of a specialised e-book? What if the book is written by a specialist in the field with proven success? We’re not talking about a textbook with generalised information but by an expert who has practised what they have written about and taught it successfully to others who have benefited significantly from it.

An e-book, whether it’s price (excluding the highly specialised exceptions such as the two mentioned above) is a fraction of the cost of a seminar hosted by an author. A day’s workshop with the author would be extremely rich and rewarding. Two authors recently held a three-hour morning talk at a cost of $370. The book on the subject cost $15. It’s hard to argue against the impact of seeing and experiencing the authors in-person but the book gives you valuable and actionable information that you can refer to repeatedly and at any time.

How much would you pay for an e-book that offers you proven techniques for producing ideas? How much would you be willing to pay for a book prepared after hundreds of hours of research and years of successful application? What if this book could lead you to produce streams of income, give you greater personal freedom and peace of mind? What if the book could shave off years of painstaking trial and error and heartbreak.

Whatever the price of such a book, the potential value from such a book is inestimably higher than the initial purchase price will ever be. Ultimately it’s for the customer to decide.

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Don’t read this if you already have a money machine

How do you make cash flow from your start-up produce or service business? Your idea for a new business may be like no other (or so you think). You’ve put a lot of creative thought into producing your product or service. But how much thought and research have you put into your business model?

What’s that? A business model? If you have already turned your dream business into a money machine, don’t bother to read on. But if business models sound like gobbledegook , you may find yourself reading every word of this post. 

A business model is really the way that you go about offering and selling your product or service to customers. It allows you to maximise the money you receive for your idea, leaving nothing on the table. Before you get carried away at the many variants and flavours that business models come in, remember this: the best business model delivers a fantastic product or service to your customer at an unbelievable price. 

Ideas for income streams need to be based on innovative business models. Competition is incredibly fierce, especially on the Internet where business models can be copied and implemented within 24 hours or less. Many Internet businesses are probably not generating the revenue streams that owners would like.

Coming up with an innovative business model can take as much creative thought as your original breakthrough idea for a product or service. 

Many basic business models have been around for a long time. Selling products from a stall or store where customers come to collect their goods goes back a long way. Another is advertising – newspapers and magazines offer content to a target market. Advertisers are attracted to promote their products and services in a focused environment of potential buyers. Subscriptions, another well used business model, can be found behind many products and services, not just editorial products. Insurance — you pay a monthly or annual fee for an unanticipated financial or asset (cars, household goods, homes, aircraft, yachts, just about anything) loss. Another business model is monthly annuity income – even telephone companies charge a fixed monthly rental – in addition to usage charges. Tolls dip into pockets and extract their share but be careful with this one as customers don’t like to knowingly have money taken from them in this way. 

There are many business models and ways of looking at them. Any one of them can help you to better understand business models, especially if it sparks an idea to innovate yours. For kitchen-table start-ups taking an idea from pure concept to implementation means coming up with an innovative business model that will make money and be acceptable to your customers. You just want to flip the light switch, not have to delve into all the business theory.

That said, a useful business model definition is detailed in the article “Reinventing Your Business Model (HBR, Dec. 2008, p. 50 – 59). The business model consists of four interlocking elements that create and deliver value: customer value proposition, profit formula, key resources and key processes. The first two parts define value for the customer and the company and the other two describe how to deliver value to the customer and company.

To rethink your own business model ask yourself these questions:

 1.     What value does my product or service provide?

2.     How will my business make a profit?

3.     What resources will my business need to deliver my great product or service?

4.     How can my business effectively operate to deliver great value at an unbelievable price?

Let’s put business models into perspective – to remove some of the mystery. What sort of business model does a company have that goes from a market cap of $288 million in 2002 to $9.18 billion in 2010? We’re talking about Netflix. It sells movies by mail order and over the Internet. The business model to begin with has been mail order but in recent years with the introduction of Internet streaming Netflix sells through a subscription business model ($9 a month subscription fee). Revenues have risen from $272 million in 2003 to $2.1 billion in 2010.

Take a look again at the questions above: value for both business models (mail order rental business and Internet streaming) is important to the customer, profit comes from delivering value through effective mail order operations and innovating technology to video stream at a price acceptable to people who wish to watch movies direct from the Internet. (By the way don’t confuse a business model with a revenue model. A revenue model is the number of products you sell x the price.) 

Even established companies challenged by the economy and competition will be looking at innovating their business models but understandably with caution. Start-ups have the advantage of being able to trial, run field tests and even test markets to prove their business models. 

As you go about devising your business model, try not to be led astray through visions of making unrealistic pots of money. Unless your offering makes sense to both you and your customer, you will unfortunately sit with a credibility gap. Remember the dot com meltdown – vast sums poured into Internet businesses but when you looked at what some ventures purported to do, their stories did not add up. Selling products with shipping costs higher than what you could buy at a street level outfit only made sense to investors desperate (or crazy) enough to find any way to get a piece of the dot com action. 

Producing ideas for profit is critical because businesses begin with an idea. But ultimately, a vital ingredient, if your idea is to fly, is your business model.

If you think your business model is a cut above the rest, why not enter the first international business model competition.

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How to free your creativity to generate ideas

Warning: using your creativity is risky. © C Bradshaw 2011

Need to produce ideas to start a new venture, come up with a product or service or promote your new business? Do you want to release your latent potential? Is there a low-cost way to quicly learn how to produce ideas almost instantly?

A simple but effective technique for producing ideas has been around for some time and it is finding new applications in business whether you run a kitchen table outfit, small business, consulting practice, work for a corporate or in manufacturing.

Before you stop reading because you erroneously believe you are not creative or that this technique is for creative people like artists and writers, consider its new applications for business. Let me explain.

Silence your internal critic

The technique is freewriting and involves writing quickly without stopping for a set time (ten minutes or longer once you’ve got used to it) without regard to spelling, punctuation or grammar. Even writing gibberish or babble is OK. In fact, you don’t need to write complete sentences — just keep your pen or keyboard moving as fast as you can but without rushing. The process of freewriting helps you to prevent your internal critic getting in your way while you are creating and generating new ideas. Your internal critic can be useful afterwards when you need to evaluate, assess and judge.

Freewriting is private but it’s up to you to share what you’ve written. Private writing frees you up to write anything you want without constraining or censoring yourself for an audience even if it is only one person.

Standout practitioners

Some standout practitioners include Julia Cameron (The Artist’s Way), Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones) and Peter Elbow (Writing with Power). These breakthrough books lead the field. The Artist’s Way has broad application — it can trigger ideas for creative works but its freewriting and other tools can help to shape, refocus and transform your life. Bruce Ballenger and Barry Lane (Discovering the Writer Within) promote freewriting to release creativity and spark fresh ideas.

Freewriting can be useful for any person, artist, writer, advertising specialist, scientist, business person, manufacturer or consultant.

Creativity can’t be commoditized

A recent addition to the freewriting field is Accidental Genius by Mark Levy, founder of the marketing strategy firm Levy Innovation. Levy covers using freewriting to explore ideas and concepts for writing projects (blog posts, articles and books) but also for a wide range of applications in business.

Freewriting can be used to generate ideas for marketing, promotion and sales to name just a few. What I found helpful were some of his applications like researching new products, investigating business opportunities and exploring your best ideas.

His suggestions for freewriting are helpful to generate new products and services, develop business plans, devise business models and ignite marketing programmes. Levy also shows how you can use freewriting to keep your focus on what you want to make of your life.

All this guidance aside, the real test of your freewriting progress is to come up with your own ways to use freewriting to create ideas and to solve problems or explore solutions. Your first freewriting forays may not generate breakthrough ideas but repeated attempts (at least three times a week) should yield pleasant and profitable surprises.

Open up your thinking

Levy’s methods are also useful for consultants and trainers who wish to help clients unlock their creativity and help them to solve problems or come up with new ideas. He advises to teach freewriting to a client, a colleague, a team, an audience. “Don’t, however, just teach it as an intriguing skill,” he says. “Teach it to them as a means to open up thinking about a specific problem.”

Freewriting is a valuable technique for coaxing those ephemeral thoughts and insights, teasing the unconscious to delight with epiphanies. It is one of hundreds of many creative techniques that can help you to draw valuable insights and ideas from your effervescent unconscious mind.

Knowing which technique to use in a given circumstance or to meet the particular needs and interests of an individual or team takes experience and understanding. Freewriting whether performed on your own or under the guidance of a creativity consultant or ideation expert enables both entrepreneurs and corporate employees to sharpen their ideas for starting new ventures, revitalizing their business and winning new customers.

 

Copyright 2011 Bell & Cray Business Research™. This material used with special permission from Bell & Cray Business Consulting™. Bell & Cray Business Consulting™ is a division of Bell & Cray™. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be duplicated or re-disseminated without permission.

Copyright 2011 Bell & Cray Business Research™. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be duplicated or re-disseminated without permission.

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