What is brainstorming? What does it mean to you? What does it actually mean? Who uses it? And why should you care? Let’s start off with a Dictionary.com definition shall we…

Brain•storm•ing
Spelled[breyn-stawr-ming]
–noun
a conference technique of solving specific problems, amassing information, stimulating creative thinking, developing new ideas, etc., by unrestrained and spontaneous participation in discussion.

Origin: 1955–60

OK. So, and just incase you haven’t got it, brainstorming is a way of coming up with ideas, the whole point of which is to throw everything out there so that you can chew on it and see what you come up with.

Some of the things you come up with will be nonsense (unrestrained and spontaneous). Some will be great. Some will be rubbish. And some might be useable somewhere at some point… or not.

Brainstorming is a fantastic technique, not only for the ideas and concepts that it throws up but also for the way it can and should involve everyone (participation). Brainstorming is a “safe” task to perform for everyone involved because you can do and say no wrong.

Apparently, no-one bothered to tell Lord Sugar, Nick Hewer and Karen Brady this and tonight, and not for the first time, they introduced “blame culture” to brainstorming on the TV show The Apprentice (when one of the contestants was blamed for the failure of a task due to coming up with the idea in a brainstorming session).

As a business leader, as an entrepreneur and as a salesperson you have to harness the power of your team and their ideas… without blame and without censure. Your team need to feel that they can say anything, that they will be heard, that their participation will be valued and that they will not be disciplined for saying the wrong things.

And then they will get involved. They will share their ideas, the good and the bad. Censure them and they will shut up and then you will get nothing from them.

Once you have ideas, it’s down to you to work out which ideas work, which don’t, develop the right ones, lose the bad ones, do due diligence and take the right decisions and actions.

Rant over.

Related posts:

1. Remembering The Power Of Now
2. Are Good Salespeople Born Or Made?
3. How Can I Get Motivated When My Team Are Demotivated?

This year I have decided to cover The Apprentice a little differently. Partly I thought that it was time for a change but also with a large percentage of my newsletter list based around the world I decided that it was also necessary. In my weekly newsletter I may or may not pick up a theme from The Apprentice, like I did this week, but I am moving the Apprentice review and tips into a video format and you can either watch this here on the blog or on Youtube Sales Training Channel.I think this will end up being more fun for those who care and will be better for those who don’t want to know!! Enjoy!

Transcript of Video below…

“Don’t tell me not to reach for the stars when there are foot prints on the moon. I am the best of breed. I am a champion thoroughbred. I am one of a kind. I am a natural born business man. I have a core of steel. I take cut-throat and ruthless to a new level. I am unstoppable. When I do business I mean business.”

Yes, of course The Apprentice is back and I am back too. Sir Lord Alan has got a new format this year and I have got a new format to0. I thought for a change this year we should do things on video so that you could get my tips and my round up, my sales tactics and my personal development ideas a little bit more quickly and in a little bit less time.

So what about Sir Alan’s new idea? Well, this year rather than offering a 100,000 pounds salary and a job, Sir Lord Alan is offering 250,000 pounds to go into a business partnership with him, to set up a business with him. Only it’s a little bit of a strange one right from the start because Sir Lord Alan really is looking for someone he describes as a winner, he doesn’t want to be the Patron Saint of Losers but he also said that this is going to be a very uncivil partnership… not maybe something that I would be looking for in a business partnership with somebody. I don’t know that I want to go into it with them approaching it in that way but off course these are not ordinary people and this is The Apprentice.

We didn’t get to meet our people very much this week other than to say, “Wow! We’ve got some big egos in there,” but off course nothing new there. Sixteen new people, 8 new girls, 8 new boys, all vying to win the opportunity to work with Sir Lord Alan. The first task this week was to buy some fruit and veg, to add some value to those fruit and veg and then to sell them in the streets in whatever format they wanted to try and make back more money than they spent. Sir Lord Alan gave the teams 250 pounds each and off they went, boys versus girls.

The boys this week decided to call themselves Logic not the most original of names I have to say but probably better than the other one they came up with which was Ability. The girls decided to call themselves Venture. These names that they use, they seem to all of them melt into one after nine years or whatever is now. The other two options they came up with were Platinum that was probably even worse and Galvanized which would have been bizarre, “Hi! We’re from team Galvanized.” Sounds like somebody has done it to you, sounds quite scary.

Anyway the two teams set off, the boys deciding that they were pretty much going to juice everything. They were going to buy a whole load of oranges and make orange juice and they were going to buy a whole load of tomatoes and make tomato soup. The girls on the other hand were maybe a little bit more ambitious, they decided to go with a fruit salad and then a vegetable pasta so a little bit more cooking there although we actually didn’t see any of that go on.

I think rather than giving tips today, I am going to give you three tips that came out of it for how to fail at selling!

So here is Tip 1: Don’t Do Any Planning.

Edward, the project manager / team leader for the boys today, he just didn’t want to plan, he didn’t want to do anything, he just went out and spent his money. They bought like crates and crates of oranges and they couldn’t squeeze them all, they just didn’t think it through. So make sure you don’t plan if you want to make sure you fail, that’s tip number one.

Tip 2 for failing: Have No Ambition.

Even though the girls won they only spent 170 pounds and you could say, “Look that’s realism they didn’t have time to make 250 pounds worth of stuff”. But you know what? Realistically speaking they should have done, they should have made the time, they should have spent the money because they should have invested to make more. So I felt, you know what, not very ambitious.

Tip 3: Miss Core Selling Hours!

What a nightmare! The boys were still in the office mid morning making their orange juice. Why? They should be out there selling it at 8 o’clock in the morning, goodness gracious! And the girls weren’t out selling pasta at lunch time. Who can sell veg. pasta in the middle of the afternoon? Answer, not anybody really.

Anyway the results came in and the girls won. They actually turned I think it was a 170 pounds into 592 pounds. The boys, I can’t remember 250 into 390 something like that. It was a straight forward as there was nobody to bring back really. Edward the team leader, he was running away from been an accountant. He’s done his accountancy and he was pained to say that he wasn’t an accountant and was out to try to prove that he wasn’t so he just didn’t do any planning. The result was a slam-dunk and Sir Lord Alan kicked him out really without any thought. Fine, he made a song and dance out of it.. you know, the eleven second gap to wait till he said, “You are fired,” but Edward was always going to be the one getting the chop.

The best piece of advice today came from Sir Lord Alan and it was what he said to Edward at the end. He said to not be ashamed of what you do, “Don’t be ashamed of what you are best at doing”.

I think that’s great advice for salespeople.

When I am going around, I meet a lot of salespeople, a lot of salespeople who are embarrassed to say that they are salespeople. If you met them at a party and you said, “What do you do?” they say, “I am a salesperson” (quiet voice / looking embarrassed) and they are not proud of it. You need to know your market, you need to know what you do, you need to know that you add value, you need to care about your clients and you need to be proud of being a sales person.

We’ve had a tough time in the economy recently and being a great sales person is what will get you out of it. Hey! You know what? That’s it from me for this week. Bob along to my site, see my other posts at my sales training blog and I will see you again next week.

Related posts:

1. The Sales Apprentice 2008: Sales Training & Business Development Tips From The Hit TV Show, Part VI
2. The Sales Apprentice 2008: Sales Training & Business Development Tips From The Hit TV Show, Part VII
3. The Sales Apprentice 2008: Sales Training & Business Development Tips From The Hit TV Show, Part VIII

As a sales motivational speaker, I sometimes find myself moved by the story behind the story in films. Last night, I watched the film Click with Adam Sandler and Kate Beckinsale. I’d seen parts of it before but not the whole film. In it Michael Newman (Adam Sandler) is an architect who lives a fairly normal life with a wife, children and a job. One night he finds a ”universal remote control” which can skip parts of his life that he finds boring, upsetting or otherwise does not want to take part in.

At first, Michael uses it to skip a fight with his wife and then a common cold and a family dinner. He thinks that it is amazing allowing him to move ahead to parts of his life that he loves and avoiding those that he doesn’t. Promised a promotion in work in a few months time Michael doesn’t like the wait so decides to skip ahead to the promotion only to find that he is now in marriage counselling and that his dog has died! As it turns out, whilst he is “skipping” he lives his life on “auto-pilot”, for example, at a family dinner he chose to skip he just sits there, not really taking part and not really involved.

Suddenly, his life starts to skip forward without him pressing the remote at all and he loses many years of his life. The remote control has a “memory” and will skip parts of your life (e.g. sickness, arguments, etc) that you have skipped previously. Michael finds himself years in the future, a CEO of his own company but also obese, distanced from his children and divorced. When Michael falls and hurts his head and then suffers years of illness, the remote, having learnt that he wants to avoid illnesses catapults him years into the future. His wife is remarried and he has little left in his life so he uses the remote to skip forward to the next “happy time” in his life and arrives at his son’s wedding only to find that even then events do not transpire how he would wish…

I won’t tell you any more about the film incase you haven’t seen it but for a casual night’s TV watching this film turned out to be a poster child for personal development and a road map to success….

How many people do you know who live their lives on auto-pilot? How many colleagues do you know who sit in the office wishing their lives away? How many friends do you have who do not seize the moment and make the most of every day?

As a sales training expert, I see salespeople, business owners and professionals who prospect, cold call, attend sales meetings, give sales presentations, negotiate and attempt to close deals all on auto-pilot. Sure, they’re there physically but a part of them failed to turn up. Worse, your brain is like the universal remote control and once it realizes that you are not giving 100% to something it will become programmed to act that way in the future and you will find yourself sleep walking through your life.

Don’t get me wrong here… everyone has down days, everyone has days when they would rather be in bed and everyone has days when they wished that they’d not bothered. No problem with that, just make tomorrow a better one. The real problem comes when those days become habit, those days become commonplace, those days become the norm for you.

What will be the compound effect of those auto-pilot days? What will you miss out on? Where will you end up? What won’t you achieve in your life?

Most people exaggerate what they can achieve in a day or a week and underestimate what they can achieve in the longer term. The compound effect of giving 80% versus giving 100% will be massive in your life but you may well not notice until you have fast-forwarded and it is too late…

Related posts:

1. The Power Of Saying, “I Was Just Thinking About You”…
2. The Times On Success For Jessica Ennnis
3. What Would You Achieve If You Knew You Couldn’t Fail?

The world has changed. Did you notice? Do you care? Or are you carrying on in your own little selfish, self-centred reality bubble? Seems to be that many people are in the latter group.

I am currently taking a break in Spain and many here are talking about the threatened air traffic controller strikes of 20 days in May and 30 days in July. For a country dependant on tourism and a group of people reliant on those self-same tourists to “employ” them this is incredulous. Did they not notice the global economic meltdown, the ash clouds, the waning holiday figures and the crashing house prices on the Costas? Apparently not.

Like many, the Spanish air traffic controllers are only seeing things from their own perspectives. They don’t care (or think) about where their salaries come from or the impact of their behaviours. This is little different from many of the threatened strikes in the UK or the behaviours of salespeople who think they can just carry on behaving in the same way and expect the same results that they always did…

Life has changed, so has business and so has sales. You need to change too. If you don’t change your behaviours and adopt strategies that add value, strategies that recognize the challenges of your clients, strategies that focus on reality as it is now… then you and your business are doomed.

Over the coming weeks I am going to be sharing wih you strategies that just don’t work anymore and new strategies that you have to apply if you want to make more sales than you ever thought possible…

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In January you will, no doubt, get a flurry of goal-setting articles and emails from people like me. They’re great but the truth is, they’re probably too late! You should be thinking, dreaming and planning now so take this opportunity to share your dreams and goals below. A goal written down and shared in public will be far more powerful than one you keep hidden away, scared to share in the darkest recesses of your mind! Share your goals for 2011 below…

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