Simply put – it’s CREATIVITY. Through many years of hiring and managing sales teams (and working with clients who do so), sales reps are usually evaluated on their ability to hit their quota in the past or their presentation skills or their overall tenacity. I rarely, if ever, have seen someone really test the creativity of the candidate.

Now when we think of creativity, we have a romantic notion of this spontaneous process that yields crazy off the wall thinking. Nothing could be further from the truth! Scientists have tested subjects’ creativity by giving them everyday objects and asking them to reimagine them being put to a different use. Most subjects could only suggest the objects be used in ways they are already used. But some subjects were actually able to create a new identity and purpose for the objects.

What this showed scientists is that creativity is not spontaneous at all – it actually requires cognitive effort. We need to overcome the distraction of the current object and its purpose, and then we need to utilize bits of our memory and past experiences to create a new future in our minds. Interestingly, the same part of the brain responsible for recalling these memories (the hippocampus) is also involved in creating the new future vision.

So how does this relate to B2B sales? In working with 100’s if not 1000’s of sales reps who were trying to close large accounts and large deals – the ones that were able to close the most deals and the biggest deals were the ones that were able to be creative. They would brainstorm on how to penetrate a large account and then how to create a stronger relationship. They were constantly focused on what we call “out of the box” thinking which is really just being creative.

I remember working with one client who was competing against several other SaaS competitors and the customer was having a hard time differentiating between the solutions. So they invited every vendor to come back and pitch to them one more time so they could understand if there was any functional difference or one solution offered any more value than the other. Since I have been through this dog and pony show many times and Oracle and SAP, I talked the client into flipping the script. If nothing else, the goal at this stage was to be different and memorable. So, I asked the client if they could simplify their presentation and then ask one of their best references to deliver it.

Not surprisingly the client was shocked and extremely resistant to the idea. However, they eventually relented, and the presentation was a huge hit. After we had won the deal, we asked the client for feedback and just as I suspected, all competitors were neck and neck up until the final presentation. The client was surprised when we asked our customer to run the presentation but this really showed our customers were so impressed by the value of our solution that they were willing to go to bat for us and help us win new business.

We always tell our sales teams to “envision success” and to see a future where we are all hitting our quotas without really knowing that this is a way of exercising our creative muscle. The larger the account and the deal, the more creativity required to stand out from the competition and to make your value understood.

This is as easy as creating brainstorming sessions where sales teammates can collaborate with each other and offer up creative ideas for helping to open or close accounts. When sales is comfortable with the brainstorming session – another crazy idea is to invite marketing along to get a fresh perspective and to build a better working relationship. All that cognitive effort will really pay off with more closed deals and larger contract sizes. Your competition wont know what hit them!!