The business of being creative
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“Creative people suck at sales, and sales people suck at creativity, so you need to hire both.”
Had I heard that remark ten years ago, I’d likely have given it a pass, but hearing this just days ago in a presentation, it made me wonder if the speaker was working in the same marketplace as the rest of us today.
To fully explain what I mean, |NAME|, let’s first talk about the sales side of things.
We’re all in the selling business now.
Selling is no longer something you can afford to outsource to shore up a perceived lack of skills.
You might still do so to address capacity issues in your business, but that’s solving a different problem. Individually we all need to build up our selling skills today. But here’s the really good news: most of us already have the innate ability to do so.
We just haven’t learned how to do it properly.
Most creative people are uncomfortable with sales because of what they think it means.
The majority of us had our opinions about it shaped by a 19th and 20th century method of selling anything to everyone—go ahead, insert your favourite cliché of the pushy huckster right here. It’s an approach that’s all but vanished from the marketplace today.
Selling is about understanding the problems that people have and helping them solve those problems (I’ll come back to that point in a moment). You don’t need to be a pushy extrovert to excel at this. But you do need empathy.
Today, most of us connect with far more people in doing our daily work—more now than at any other time in history. And whether we realize it or not, a growing amount of our time is spent trying to move others closer to an idea or to a specific action that we want them to take.
Dan Pink, author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, cites a study in his book that found “people are now spending 40% of their time at work engaging in non-sales: selling—persuading, influencing and convincing others in ways that don’t involve anyone making a purchase. Across a wide range of professions, we are devoting roughly 24 minutes of every hour to moving others.”
We’re all in the creative business now, too.
Just as selling has evolved, so too have assumptions about creativity.
Your capabilities here are neither defined nor limited by whether you’ve mastered the fine arts (e.g., writing, music, drawing). Don’t let anyone try to convince you otherwise. Creativity is about being good at finding connections between things and of being ready to take chances at things where you might fail.
You can do that, |NAME|. We all can.
Just as selling is about solving problems, creativity is about finding the right problems to solve. And why should sales pros care about honing their creative chops? Because the market today is hungry for that kind of skills fusion.
Buyers today have the same access to facts about products as sellers, putting an end to the information asymmetry of the past. But buyers also want deeper insight into what they’re buying. And as this 2014 McKinsey study (http://www.mckinsey.com//Insights/Business_Technology/Accelerating_the_digitization_of_business_processes?cid=DigitalEdge-eml-alt-mip-mck-oth-1405) notes, they also want a better buying process.
That means doing some digging and finding new connections to create fewer steps, bolder methods and foster easier decision making. You do this by exercising those creative muscles.
Time for some fresh thinking.
Sales and creativity are not a dichotomy. Nor are they super powers reserved for the select few.
They are skills: both of which you need more than ever today in your own work and in growing your business. Get better at each through practice (http://thinkitcreative.com/blog/six-ways-to-remain-creative-and-passionate-about-getting-things-done/) , by taking chances (http://thinkitcreative.com/blog/the-art-of-taking-chances/) and by getting some coaching help where you need it.
In turn, this will teach you new things about your customers as well as your product or service, giving you a renewed sense of purpose to your work and helping you deliver a better buying experience to your customers.
As Thich Nhat Hanh—one of my favourite writers—says often of things that merely seem difficult: “this is not hard to do.”
Very best, Patrick
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