11/20/2023-Holiday Week Productivity

Persistence is important in sales, but it’s the ability to create ideas for your customers. While it’s a little slow this week, tap into your creativity and let your mind run wild for your clients.

There is nothing like the feeling of the start of a holiday week, right?

Whether you’re working or not, it feels like more oxygen gets into the lungs during these short weeks. Often, more air leads to idea creation for persistent account problems.

It’s inevitable during these holiday weeks that you aren’t red-lining your odometer, but you can still be productive. Rather than dealing with the fire drills that dominate a normal week, now you can slow down and dream up solutions that might move you forward from places you’re stuck.

If you’re working this week and your calendar is sparse, devote a chunk of time to thinking.

Review your #1 account and ponder what an outlandish, fantastic, stupendous idea would be for them. It could be applied to outreach that gets you access to a big-shot KDM or an idea that frames your offering more attractively.

Whatever.

Find a ball to throw against the wall, tip your head back….and…thump, thump, thump the ball against the wall a few times.

Let the thinking wash over you.

Dream big. Don’t limit yourself. And don’t forget to write the ideas down when they come so they don’t disappear.

One of the best parts about being in sales is the broad range in which the job challenges you: sometimes, you gotta be a bull (persistent, assertive), and other times, you must dance gracefully like a ballet dancer (objection handling).

Certainly, it pays to be creative. Creativity applies to how you prospect all the way through to how you present your offering and yourself.

Often, sellers get in a rut and forget to scratch their creative itch. Understandably, it’s hard to do that kind of scratching when you’re constantly running to meetings, prospecting, updating your CRM, and putting out fires.

This week, you have time for creative thinking. So, start your brainstorming session by focusing on one account. Ask yourself these questions, and you’ll effectively jump-start your creative juices:
1. What idea would blow their minds? (Yes, that’s a general question…but start there.)
2. What would your offering look like that would rev their engines?
3. What would make them ‘tell their friends’ about you?

Yeah, fine…each of the above questions is a variation of the other…but the point is to push your brain by asking big questions.

If you are still stumped after working with these questions, bring in a friend and brainstorm with them. Shoot for the moon; you might just land somewhere in between!

Ya know that saying, "…there’s no such thing as a bad idea…"?

Hmmmm….that might not be true.

This 2-minute clip from deep in the SNL vault proves there are bad ideas…lots of ’em. But don’t let these ninnies distract you from devising a few good ideas for your clients.