The Secret of Great Salespeople

Selling things can be hard work. That's why good sales and marketing people are highly valued in any business. The most highly prized salespeople are creative and innovative people who never seem to run out of ideas to try in promoting their product.

But sometimes that can be even harder than anything else. If you work in sales and marketing, coming up with fresh strategies for selling whatever it is you sell can take up much of your time and energy.

But it doesn't have to... Not any more.

Here are three ways you can come up with winning sales and marketing ideas every day.

First. Look around you.

Check out what others are doing successfully and apply their strategies to your situation with your own fresh perspective. This is one of the most common approaches salespeople take. The advantage of this approach is that if it worked for someone else it is a proven approach. The drawback is this "me-too" approach can quickly be perceived as stale by your market (which may or may not limit it's effectiveness, of course.) Some markets go through buying fashions, so it can be important to make sure you don't look outdated if you apply this approach.

Second. Copy your own success.

Check back over your own best and most successful campaigns in the past and consider how you could refresh, revive and repeat them. Can you translate a successful off-line campaign from the past into an online campaign, for example? Can you take something that was effective with Product A and repeat it for Product B? Can you update the language, style or some other feature of an old sales strategy to make it more relevant now? If a strategy has been successful for you in the past this can be a very powerful way to come up with another winning sales and marketing approach.

Third. Do something completely new that you hadn't thought of doing previously.

How do you do this, you might ask? Well it's not so hard if you start a collection of different approaches and ideas that other people have come up with. You want to include everything in your collection, from the mundane and obvious through to the esoteric and outrageous, even if you can't quite imagine using them.

The purpose of your collection is to have a secret source of ideas that will challenge and stimulate you to think outside the box. We all tend to fall into thinking ruts and this can be a huge trap for salespeople who are expected to be innovative and creative. Your collection allows you to tap into other people's ideas, so it becomes easier to modify, adapt and apply their ideas in ways we would never otherwise have considered.

So start your own collection of other people's sales and marketing tools, ideas and strategies. You never know when they will be just what you need to help you create your own winning approach to your own sales situation.