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Creative thinking

Solve Your Sales Challenges With Creative Thinking

Sales & Marketing

What would you do if you found that in one month you would be running out of product to sell for the rest of the year? You might start to panic. In fact, some real estate professionals in hot markets today are faced with this situation as there are simply not enough homes on the market to sell.

So what do you do if you’re caught in this dilemma? You sell smarter and need to think creatively.

Examples of Creativity

When there aren’t enough homes to buy, people are afraid to list and sell their homes. They’re afraid they won’t find another home to move into. Here's how one real estate agent saved her sales with the help of creativity:

Create product to sell. While a realtor can’t magically make houses appear, what this creative realtor did was find a product to sell. The realtor found neighborhoods that her prospects wanted to move to, and then knocked on doors to find homeowners who might be interested in selling. Once she found possible sellers, she then had products to show her customers—she just created product to sell.

Make the deal work. In this scenario, what the realtor did was figure out a way for her customer to stay in his home for a few more months to give him the confidence to find a new home. She changed her contract to include a 2 to 3 month built-in lease clause. Her seller was relieved, most home buyers were able to live with that condition, and she didn't lose the sale.

Think Creatively

You can’t possibly think of every sales obstacle you’re going to face when you sell. However, I promise you that with creative thinking you will be able to come up with solutions that will address any problem.

Did you notice that in the case of the realtor not having a product to sell, it looked like her selling would have to stop? Instead, in the first case, she simply created a process of finding more product to sell. In the next situation, she made a deal more probable by adding in more time. Both solutions were creative solutions.

Part of being able to generate creative solutions is to be open minded and less judgmental. Most creative thinkers know it takes time coming up with great ideas, and it's important to be open minded about every idea and delay judgment--oftentimes one idea leads to another which leads to another. You might miss out arriving at a final great idea if you judge the first idea as inadequate and dismiss it too soon.

Your tough sales situation might not be the same as this realtor’s situation. Just know that no matter what sales challenge you face, there are solutions that will generate more sales. The only solution that won’t work is to give up without creative thinking.

Profile: Maura Schreier-Fleming

Maura Schreier-Fleming is president of Best@Selling, a sales training and sales consulting company. She works with business and sales professionals to increase sales and earn larger profits. She is the author of Real-World Selling for Out-of-this-World Results and Monday Morning Sales Tips. Maura focuses on sales strategies and tactics that lead to better sales results. Maura is a sales expert for WomenSalesPros. She is part of their group of top sales experts who inspire, educate, and develop salespeople and sales teams.She speaks internationally on influence, selling skills, and strategic selling at trade association and sales meetings, demonstrating how her principles can be applied to get results. She successfully worked for over 20 years in the male-dominated oil industry with two major corporations, beginning at Mobil Oil and ending at Chevron Corp. She was Mobil Oil’s first female lubrication engineer in the U.S. and was one of Chevron’s top five salespeople in the U.S. having sold over $9 million annually. Maura writes several columns to share her sales philosophies. She's been quoted in the New York Times, Selling Power, and Entrepreneur.