Tag: creativity

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The power of generating low-cost promotional ideas: a fight-back strategy

Come up with your own free, easy and low-cost promotion ideas that can help you to lift sales in a difficult economy

In this rough and tumble economy, some business people sit, like frogs in a pot immobilised with the water temperature rising. Even when the temperature hits boiling point, they remain in the pot. If the frogs suddenly stumbled into the pot of boiling water, they wouldn’t hesitate to jump right out. Why then don’t small business people react quickly when they recognize warning signs?  

Many business people seem to stubbornly believe that they can rough it through the difficult economy doing business in the same familiar way, despite turnovers in some cases plummeting by a third or more. Small business has such a high mortality rate in “normal” economic conditions but when economic activity declines, the mortality rate rises.

Riding high and spending less

During the good times small business owners were riding high. They spent less on their marketing as customers walked in and bought whatever they wanted. Small business owners were spoilt as they had to do little personal selling or advertising.

Now, when times are tough and small business owners and entrepreneurs are more concerned with meeting personnel expenses and covering overheads they are even more reluctant to spend money on promotion. Yet clients and customers are holding onto their cash, waiting for times improve, hanging onto their homes, cars, computers, household appliances for longer, repairing them instead of replacing them.What should store owners and small service businesses do?

Ignore selling and promotion at your peril

Even though small business owners have seen turnovers drop many are wary of spending money on promotion. Some are trying to play it cheap by bringing in well meaning family and friends to help them promote their products and services. Other owners knuckle down on the technical areas and processes in their business, ignoring selling and promotion at their peril.Promotional ideas need to work

Little do those businesses who use retail space or have high visibility and walk-in customers realise that if they don’t do something to promote their business and lift sales, they will be forced into operating the business from home to chop overhead. Running a business from home ironically means needing to acquire a whole set of new marketing skills.

How do you go about promoting your business in a stormy economy where every cent counts? Small businesses and entrepreneurial enterprises cannot pour vast sums on vague institutional (image) advertising with no way to measure sales. Entrepreneurs need to generate sales — even when advertising in traditional print media, adverts have to be “keyed” and have special phone numbers specific to adverts. This way they can measure their advertising conversion. A small travel agent told me recently that she had a separate phone number for each advert to measure response. If the newspaper, magazine, radio or television advertising didn’t pull, it had to go.

Test, test, test

Promotional ideas that work are specific to each business and the mind or emotional triggers of their customers. Small business owners need to brainstorm ideas that they think will work for their business. Try some no-cost, low-cost ideas out first and see how they work. Remember to test, test, test. As Claude Hopkins said, “Almost any question can be answered, cheaply, quickly and finally, by a test campaign.”

To get fighting fit in this economy small business owners and entrepreneurs need to focus their attention on attracting customers to their business through a variety of low-cost, no-cost promotional ideas. Idea generation techniques can be effective as can meeting with fellow business people to share and swop ideas. In the next article on www.ideaaccelerator.co.za we’ll look at tips, strategies and other ideas to promote your business. In the meantime, take a look at what your competitors are doing as well try to spot other businesses that seem to be doing well no matter how hard the harsh economic winds blow.

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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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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 # 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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Recognise these six mental blocks to innovation?

INNOVATION: Spinning rock relics into cash. Photo: © Chesney Bradshaw 2011

Being blocked in our ability to produce ideas and innovate can feel like being sucked into a narrow tunnel, a dark passage, a deep cave – where we can remain trapped for what seems like an eternity.

How can we snap out of our unfortunate trance? What are some of the psychological and emotional obstacles blocking our state of creativity, our flow of ideas?

Here are six mental blocks creators and innovators need to recognise and overcome their mesmerising spell:

1 Coveting the status quo

We don’t want to disturb the existing order, the way we have always done things. Trapped in the bliss of our comfort zones, the dull grey hue of existence becomes a pale but safe substitute for the risk of being energised and feeling alive.

2 Fear of not being good enough

Low levels of self-esteem become a self fulfilling prophecy. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage,” says Anaïs Nin. What will it take for us to believe that we are equipped for life’s challenges? Yet another degree, another course, another pile of books? We need to discipline the inner critic before and during our idea generation. Silencing it altogether is unwise as we need it later when we evaluate our ideas and prepare to introduce them to our customers and communities.

3 Analysis by paralysis

We become obsessed by the detail, believing that if we plan out things thoroughly and painstakingly we will have enough bases covered to succeed. But where’s the action? Analysis can be a violent intellectual act, the opposite of synthesising, creating something new. Isn’t the Ready, fire, aim approach more effective than Ready, aim, aim, aim, splutter?

4 Fear of change

Change can be filled with discomfort and uncertainty. Pain avoidance protects from harm. We miss the dynamic of embracing the new and experiencing personal growth. Mastering the art of handling the scary onslaught of change is not easy but what price do we pay for avoidance?

5 Ego needs (embarrassment)

We may not believe that we can make a difference; that our ideas, our thoughts, our presence possess value. What we cast out to the world will come back to smack us in the face. Who do we think we are? Our ideas will be ridiculed. You’ll only make a fool of yourself, we hear our family members say, threatened by our temerity to venture outside of the norm.

6 Secure identity

Holding safe our identity we stay trapped in untenable situations, positions and roles maintaining an image of ourselves that we may erroneously believe others respect us for. Being aware of how our identity stands in the way of seeing ourselves differently allows us an opportunity to redefine ourselves.

Remaining stuck because of any of these mental blocks can be a serious impediment to our growth and well-being — and our ability to create and innovate. It takes self-awareness to recognise the mental and emotional traps that hold us back from becoming what we yearn to be. Sometimes our lives require risk — putting ourselves on the line. As a creator in advertising, art, architecture, choreography, design, literature, music or any other human enterprise, we would do well to consider the words of Ray Bradbury, “Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down”.

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A simple yet powerful idea

At the beginning of the 1980s I worked as an editor for a supermarket business magazine. I spent some time meeting people in the industry, storeowners, store managers, buyers, operations personnel. I worked afternoons for three months in a Spar in Midrand learning the basics of supermarket retailing from a Greek storeowner who was passionate about retailing.

 One evening my publisher and I attended a function at the Pick ‘n Pay hypermarket in Boksburg. Raymond Ackerman came over to say hello to my publisher who introduced me, saying I had recently joined him to cover the supermarket beat. Raymond said he and his managers would make themselves available if I needed any information from Pick ‘n Pay.

Some may have looked at such an offer cynically in those days when there was much publicity about him as being the consumer’s friend and his philosophy of consumer sovereignty. I interviewed many managers and executives while I was a business writer on a financial weekly but no one made such an offer to assist.

It is difficult for people today to comprehend just how inaccessible executives were those days. Public relations or corporate communications was in its infancy in most companies, many of which didn’t even have a formalised function or relied on public relations agencies.

Over the years I have seen how that small gesture represented more – it was part of an attitude and philosophy that had a strong foundation. Although the Pick ‘n Pay managers at the time were tough, they were all accessible.

I never had an opportunity to thank Raymond for that gesture, which was singular for me.

On 13 October 2010, I had the privilege and honour to sit next to Raymond at a lunch to raise funds for orphans of HIV/AIDS through Noah. He was there to talk about his new book “A Sprat to Catch a Mackerel”. During the lunch, I mentioned his gesture way back in the early 1980s and how it touched me. He said it was a long time ago but he would like to know if he and his managers had lived up to his promise. I said that they certainly had and, in fact, and gone beyond what I had expected. He talked briefly about consumer sovereignty and the importance of practising social responsibility.

After Raymond talked about his new book, I reflected on how over all those years all the CEOs who were prominent at the time were now mostly forgotten. Almost none of them stood out. What was the reason? Was I missing something?

Then it hit me.

I was fortunate in recent months to be exposed to a session on strategy and management by an expert who lectures at St Gallen University in Switzerland. He held a discussion on the “why” of marketing and positioning. We were shown a video by young American who passionately explained how leaders such as Steven jobs and Martin Luther King had developed a compelling “why” behind their approaches. They understood why it was so important to stand for something greater than the “what” of their message, product or company. If you’re interested in the video, I attach the URL link here How great leaders inspire action. It seems to go to the heart of what Raymond Ackerman had grasped way back in the 1950s and 1960s.

Customer service, serving people, to be real and credible, has to be part of a deep belief system acted out in a sincere and positive way.

P.S. I am interested in ideas, producing ideas and the commercialisation of ideas. Raymond Ackerman bought four Pick ‘n Pay stores in Cape Town in 1967 from entrepreneurial retailer Jack Goldin, the person who started Clicks in 1968. I interviewed him only once — for a financial weekly when Clicks was considering branching into the United States. It is interesting that Goldin devised ideas for starting these two businesses.