The Art of the Sale
Or marketing. Or brand story. Or consumer happiness and actualization. Or any other quasi-sexy title currently saturating LinkedIn bios. No, you actually work in sales. Yup. Sales. Like vacuum cleaners and cars. And the good news is — this is okay. In fact, it’s kind of great once you accept and embrace it.
The hard but liberating and often un-talked-about truth is that ideas do not exist if they are not sold. In fact, an unsold good idea is completely worthless in our business. It is noise. Pap. The water under the bridge that leads to boring war stories and sour grapes. Talk to any creative who has done it for any reasonable length of time, at any reasonably successful level, and they will opine ad nauseum about the great ideas they had that got away. Too good. Too risky. Too awesome for the client. Or the category. Or the agency. Or the industry to handle. Misunderstood geniuses all. Yeah but no.
The Job — The job of any grown-up professional creative is not just to think up compelling ideas; it's to create ideas and put them to use in the world. The gap between thinking and making? Selling.
“Opening up the ownership of an idea is key to selling that idea.”
So, how do you, and to whom do to sell? The short answer is always and to everybody. You first have to sell an idea to yourself. Does it work? Can it work? Is it useful, special, on-brief and awesome? Or is it derivative, boring, uninspired? Any good creative thinker has an acute internal mechanism where you sell yourself on the merits of the idea in question. This is an important step. Your internal editor, your cynic, your most insecure self will try and kill the idea. This voice will question your conviction, your belief in the idea. And this is a good thing. This is healthy tension, a noble struggle. Some ideas are derivative and uninspired. That internal monologue is important to weed out the ideas that don’t deserve to live. If you can sell yourself that an idea is good, viable, and worthy … then you are on to the next step — selling your creative partners and team.
All creative groups and teams work differently, but there is always some sort of group, team or partner that you must sell in order for your idea to even get to the client. This is an important step in that you are trying to persuade and gain adoption of your idea. This is informal selling — these are your people — you do not need to be polished or foolproof. But you do need to be passionate, articulate and clear. In this phase, reference is key. Showing a piece of film, playing a song, or referencing an image or a scene from a movie can help sell what you see in your head. This type of selling is about getting your coworkers (who are often also your competitors) as excited about the idea as you are. Bring them into the process, allow then to co-create, tag, build, evolve and make your idea their idea as well. This is often controversial in a business that believes in putting one’s name on an idea and claiming ownership. But opening up the ownership of an idea is key to selling that idea. Sharing the idea, and the ownership of the idea, is the essence of collaboration. And collaboration is most definitely a type of sales.
So, you’ve sold yourself and you’ve sold your team. How do you sell the client? Well one good idea is to sell the idea long before you present it. The worst time to sell an idea is in a creative presentation meeting. In those meetings, the client’s guard is up; they will most likely have to comment in front of their boss when you’re done talking, and it is a lot easier to say no than yes in that setting. It’s a bad bet. So, change your odds. Pre-sell the idea in casual conversation, in non-meeting situations, in passing, in chatting, in being a human being talking to another human being who happens to be your client. Find, or calculatingly create contexts when you and your client can just talk. In those talks, do not present. Just talk. Talk about the idea in big, beautiful, broad strokes. Talk about the idea with lots of room for client interaction, involvement and even initial threads of ownership so that when the idea resurfaces, in a more fully realized fashion, the client's impulse response is "Oh, yeah! We talked about that." Familiarity breeds affinity. Conversation is a better selling technique than presentation. Clients are people. Treat them that way and you will sell more good ideas.
And, when you actually do present your idea, there are some techniques that actually work — or, at least, have worked for me over the years. These are five cheats, hacks, tricks, maneuvers that might be useful the next time you try and sell an idea you believe in.
Make it personal.
There is a reason that the President recognizes someone in the gallery, has them stand, tells their stories, during the State of the Union. We are hardwired for story, especially personal stories, specific stories. The universal specific works. So, embrace it and employ it. Don’t tell a story. Tell your story: how you happened on this idea. Better yet, how it happened to you and why this idea means something to you. Be honest. Be open. Be vulnerable. Show a little piece of yourself before you show the idea that came from … well … you.
Cite the brief.
Some briefs are great. Some are less so. But either way, they matter. The brief is the ask. And if you don’t understand the ask, you cannot attempt to provide an effective answer. So, devour the brief, and just as importantly, demonstrate that you have devoured the brief. Give the brief (and the folks who wrote it) some credit. Talk about the part of the brief that was helpful, useful, even (on occasion) inspiring. Quote the brief, use it to set up your idea, hold the brief in high regard, but even more, use it as weapon to achieve your objective.
Cite the client.
If you listen to your clients — like really listen — they will tell you everything you need to know. So, listen. And, then, when you are selling your work, play back what you heard. They will be equally surprised, impressed and flattered that you listened to them, and even more surprised, impressed and flattered that you played back what you heard in a room of their peers and superiors as you present (sell) your idea. Repeat the thing your client said that you found insightful, meaningful, prescient … the thing they said that got you thinking, or scared the hell out of you, or made you kill an idea but eventually led you to THIS idea. This will put your client on the pitch team. Suddenly, it's not just your idea, it's your idea — the collective your, you and the client — and it's because you listened to them and what they said led you to this.
Shoot holes before they do.
No idea is perfect, which means your idea isn't perfect — it's okay to admit that. In fact, a great way to sell an idea is to admit that it is not perfect — that is, like all great ideas, it is flawed — but still worthy and absolutely worth pursuing, not in spite of but because of that. Clients are smart enough to know that too good to be true is too good to be true. So, don't oversell. Maybe even undersell and have them root for the little idea that could ... and can ... and will.
Give the backstory while you tell the story.
Hint at how the sausage was made. Let them peek behind the curtain and see the carnage of ideas that didn’t make it. Let them know that good, well-meaning ideas were sacrificed and slaughtered in order to get to this meeting. Let them know that you were vicious in ending the lives of lesser ideas — maybe even show some of them. Let them know that, on their behalf, you have done horrible things to innocent ideas in order to bring them the one you can (and will) sell them.
So, there you have it — like it or not — you are in sales. Two rules: 1. Only sell what you love, if you don’t love it, don’t sell it. Because then you are selling your soul. And you won’t get it back. 2. It’s not the art of the sale … the art is the sale. Because selling well is an artform.
About Steve Simoncic
Steve is Partner/CCO at Morning Walk. Steve takes a decidedly blue collar approach to the craft of solving business problems through data and creativity. A writer by trade, a creative director by choice, and a strategist by default, Steve has had the privilege to work on some of the most successful brands in the world including McDonald's, General Motors, Samsung and Disney. He spent his formative years at Leo Burnett and the last 13 years at MW where he is helping clients build healthy Performance Branding Ecosystems. Steve also writes plays, literary fiction and punk-country songs for his band Trickshooter Social Club.