YourSalesManagementGuru by Ken Thoreson, Acumen Management Group
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Creativity Is Critical for Sales Leaders
In many of my writings and workshops, I have often spoken on the need for hiring creative salespeople and for sales management to offer creative solutions to problems. I believe creativity is critical to building a sales culture of high performance. The good news is "creativity" can be learned and enhanced in everyone.
I recently read a book titled Perfect Phrases for Creativity and Innovation by Karen Eriksen, published by McGraw Hill. I picked up the book because in my keynote program, "Gourmet Living," I normally mention adding creativity to your life to enhance both personal and professional success. Reading this book quickly added ideas and insights that can be easily implemented immediately. This is a sample of the first four chapters:
- Creativity Begins with Me
- Motivating Teams to Be Highly Creative
- A Structure for Creativity: Idea Management and Implementation
- Discovering the "Magic"
Each of these chapters (there are four more) provides concepts, phrases and tools to help the strategic sales leader improve their personal creativity, but the book also includes a process to coach individual performance. What I found extremely valuable was the chapter called "A Structure for Creativity" in which the author identifies 11 steps to lead a team through a creative problem-solving event. Eriksen breaks down the concepts into the detailed steps within each of the 11 categories. As a bonus she includes tools to assist both the leader as well as the participants in improving their ability to be creative. While all of these steps are somewhat fundamental, the added elements of stimulation for generating creative solutions are the meat within the book.
If you need to improve your own creativity quotient and increase your organizations ability to solve problems more creativity, read this book.
Posted by Ken Thoreson on April 16, 2012