Page 180 - THE DO-IT-YOURSELF LOBOTOMY Open Your Mind to Greater Creative Thinking

21 Tips for Selling Creative Ideas 171

learned decades ago that if you don’t want to sell it, everyone wants to
buy it. We used to hide certain not-for-sale items behind a door in our
house, only to find that more than one antiques dealer who called on
us would discover it there and try to talk us out of it. After a while,
when we really wanted to sell something we’d just “hide it” behind
that magic door.

21 TIPS FOR SELLING CREATIVE IDEAS

All the tools covered in this book can play a role in helping you sell
your ideas. Of course, there is a great deal more to selling than just the
Do-It-Yourself Lobotomy tools in this book. And although I don’t pro-
fess to be an expert on selling in the strict sense of the word, I do have
some valuable tips to pass along that just might help you raise your cre-
ative sell success rate.

Are They Really Your Best Ideas?
The first tip for selling your best ideas is to make sure they are your
best ideas. I see so many people wasting their energy—exerting their
brilliant sales effort or even their lousy sales effort—trying to sell bad
ideas. That’s like building an elaborate restaurant business around a
lousy chef.
So the first tip to help you sell better ideas is to actually have better
ideas. Sounds pretty basic, doesn’t it? Well, I can tell you that I’ve had
a good many corporate clients, including ad agencies, ask me to help
them with their sales hit rate when in reality the first thing they need to
do is improve the product they’re selling.

When It’s Time to Sell, It’s Too Late to Sell
Many years ago I facilitated an international forum of top managers in
one of the major service industries. We covered a plethora of topics:
attracting and motivating the best people, defining and articulating
corporate vision, and so forth, all kinds of issues that top managers
typically focus their energies on. We also covered selling, which of
course is the lifeblood of any business. When the dust settled on three
days of exploration, the major concept that kept resonating within this
group was summed up in these few words, “When it’s time to sell, it’s
too late to sell.”
To a person, we all agreed that the biggest part of selling was the rela-
tionship the company had with its clients. If they had a great relationship