If you can dream it, you can do it. Walt Disney

Idea Champions is nothing short of inspiring, challenging me again and again to champion change in my company and within myself. Lorraine Papenberg, Orange & Rockland Utilities  MORE

"This is really, really good stuff." — Seth Godin

"In tune with corporate America." — CNN

Sales organizations are too easily hooked by the myth that "to go ten times faster you have to pedal ten times as hard." The smart sales force realizes that when the "pedal faster" virus takes over, it's time to pause and shift gears.

"Pedal harder" sales organizations run up their cost of sales needlessly. They fail to consider cost of burn out, cost of tunnel vision and loss of flexibility. Everyone in the organization gets more frantic, more territorial and more competitive with each setback. The result is not higher revenues – it's failed imagination and crumbling relationships. Before you know it, there's no soul left for customers to relate to.

What do smart organizations do instead? They shift gears even when there isn't a crisis. If there's a better way, they want to know about it - yesterday. They have one overarching goal: to constantly awaken the native intelligence of everyone on their team.

And that's our goal too. For 20 years Idea Champions has helped organizations profit from their employees' natural desire to be savvy, imaginative and adaptable. We're successful because we believe in the innate gift each person brings to a team effort - and we respect it. Our interventions work because everyone has fun discovering their natural swing.

Which brings us to our resident selling guru, Farrell Reynolds. His work with sales people of every stripe and kind is legendary. Farrell built and ran Turner Broadcasting's sales organization and became its President. He did the same thing at the New World Communications Group. And he has the experience, intelligence and scar tissue to earn the respect of any sales team on earth.

His workshop is called "Undiscovered Genius" and it distills the knowledge and wisdom gained through 35 years of dealing with national clients, media buyers, marketing directors, account managers, creatives and the world's largest consumer companies.

Farrell has successfully reframed and finessed the thorniest of customer objections. The way he does it is by teaching people how to sell ideas. "People don't want to be sold anything," Farrell says, "and they don't want to buy anything from you. They want help making better decisions. They want a vision of something improved, a new door opened. Usually that involves liberating them from a limited mindset. And that means transcending their own limits."

Farrell doesn't just download a theory about selling. His goal is to make you feel it. Thus his collaboration with martial arts master Ron Rubio, Idea Champions' resident warrior trainer, whose eye-opening demonstrations further ground Farrell's key learning points. Working with Ron, participants learn timeless principles of power and energy that help them think on their feet. And by so doing, they gain a visceral sense of what fearless presence is and how to keep cultivating it.

What You Will Learn:

• Overcoming the commodity barrier to sell distinction, ideas and value
• Assessing needs and selling the contribution ideas can make
• Communicating the benefits that meet prospects' needs
• Determining to whom an idea should be communicated
• Learning the universal value elements to be embedded in each idea
• Handling and countering stress
• State-of-the art presentation techniques
• Reducing fear levels in the face of conflict and resistance
• Listening - the single most powerful sales tool in the world
• Making the distinction between "pitching" and true consultative selling

Deliverables:

• Pre-workshop, online team polls
• Two one-day seminars on Selling Ideas: Overcoming Commodity Classification In Order To Sell Distinction and Value.
• A list of ten target accounts and incremental revenue goals for each account. Cross-functional teams for each target account will be established.
• Monthly progress and coaching sessions for each team to assess progress against target accounts, problem solve, reinforce key learnings, overcome objections, and increase teamwork
• Team sharing of best practices and ideas via Ingenuity Bank, our idea management software
• In person auditing of client calls, when appropriate.
• Self and group assessments at six and twelve month intervals
• Semi-annual auditing reports