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Sales Made Easy 7 in a series.

We’ve spent the last few weeks discussing my four-word rules for business success. My goal remains simple: I want to give you easy-to-implement tools, tactics, and techniques to improve your business.

Each rule is only four words long because, often, that’s all it takes to make a huge difference when building your brand and business.

If you missed any of the rules, you can find them easily. Just point your browser to my blog site at https://www.bruceturkel.com/blog and click on the rule you’re interested in.

Sales Made Easy 7

But first, a story:

I have a few friends who are comedians. One problem they face is that people constantly expect them to be funny.

While I’m not so funny, it’s still a problem that I understand well.

One problem with being known as “creative” is that people often expect me to be a constant source of new ideas.

At the same time, people who do not see themselves as “creative” somehow feel the need to explain their perceived shortcomings to me. “I don’t have a creative bone in my body,” they’ll tell me. “I can’t even draw a straight line.”

Ironically, there’s nothing inherently creative about drawing a straight line. All you need is a ruler, a pen, and a bit of coordination, and you, too, can draw a perfect line.

However, the ability to draw a straight line is not the only common misconception about creativity. Most people also think that really creative ideas are big, boffo, game-changing concepts.

But if you spend time looking at great creative solutions, you’ll find that most of them are not the big, never-ever-heard-before ideas you might think they are. Instead, many creative breakthroughs are much humbler. Often, they are simply new combinations of old things put together in fresh ways or even revolutionary combinations of new and old things.

Sales Made Easy 7

Take eBay for example. Despite its incredible success, eBay was simply a combination of the old and the new (auctions and bazaars combined with the Internet).

Facebook? If you went to high school in the seventies or eighties, you can see how Facebook is a simple combination of old and new as well (slam books plus the Internet). And then, Instagram is simply Facebook with enhanced video.

Understanding this redefinition of creativity can reduce some of the intimidation that creating new ideas might cause. It can also show you real opportunities to motivate your entrepreneurial self and create sales strategies.

After all, if you looked at creativity this way, maybe you would have come up with eBay, Facebook, or Twitter (X?) yourself (After all, Twitter is just the notes we used to pass in elementary school published on the Internet).

All you need to do is look at new and emerging technologies and figure out ways to incorporate them into old, proven situations. Seen this way, confusing new concepts such as AI, Bitcoin, consumer genetic testing, Bluetooth, etc., can now be recognized as the next great business or sales opportunity waiting to be discovered and sold.

Sales Made Easy 7

This way of monetizing new technology and creating opportunities is why my four-word rule for sales success #7 is Old Things. New Combinations. 

To put this to work for you, look at all the exciting new whiz-bang technologies, figure out how they can fix old problems, and then show your prospects how your new hybrid idea can save them time, money, or effort.