Page 176 - THE DO-IT-YOURSELF LOBOTOMY Open Your Mind to Greater Creative Thinking

CHAPTER 17

Selling Creative Ideas

Requires Its Own

Creativity

It’s one thing to come up with a great idea. Conceiving, so to speak. It’s
quite another thing to give birth to it and raise it to maturity. And the
trickiest part of that postconception routine is getting others to
embrace the new idea, what we commonly refer to as selling it.
When I address groups on the topic of creativity, I often ask, “How
many of you sell?” Unless I’m working with a sales force, I almost
always encounter only a smattering of hands. Most people don’t con-
sider themselves salespeople. They don’t take selling seriously, they
don’t approach it consciously, and they wonder why so many of their
ideas don’t see fruition because other people won’t buy them.

AN EPIDEMIC OF UNREALIZED CREATIVE IDEAS

As consultants, my fellow creative thinking coaches and I work in all
kinds of companies, in a wide variety of industries, under all kinds of
conditions.

One thing that’s common to all companies is that the quality of the
ideas that come out of the other end of the machine, on average, is
never as good as the quality of the ideas the people actually conceive.

We often call this the creative sell success rate. In many ways, it is to
people in business what batting average is to baseball players, what
box office receipts are to the movie industry.