Creativity and Sales Exercise: Sell a Lot of Stuff

Purpose

This is a creativity exercise in a form of a template that you can customise in a variety ways. The format is that the group comes into possession of a large number of a certain used old product. The groups need to think of creative ways to sell them. Naturally, teams that can work together and use systematic creative methods have a higher chance to come up with novel ideas.

Objective

Provide a sales pitch and think of creative ideas to monetise a large quantity of used old products.

What You Need

One scenario card for each group. These are provided below.

Setup

• Divide the delegates to groups of 3.
• Give the groups a scenario. If you have up to three groups, give the same scenario to all. If you have more, give different scenarios, but make sure that each scenario is given to at least two groups.
• Ask the groups to consider the scenarios and come up with creative ideas to make monetise them.
• Explain that they should come up with a 1 minute sales pitch that they would provide at the end of the allocated time to everyone else in an attempt to sell their products.
• Allocate 10 minutes for this exercise.
• Bring everyone together and ask them to provide their pitch. Ask delegates to discuss the suggested ideas and emphasise on novel ideas.
• Get groups to vote for the best team who had the most creative ideas.
• Follow with a discussion.

Timing

Explaining the Exercise: 5 minutes

Activity: 10 min creative ideas + 15 min sales pitches = 25 minutes

Group Feedback: 10 minutes

Discussion

How did you approach the problem? Was your team functional? What systematic methods did you use to come up with creative ideas? What was so creative about the winning team’s ideas? How do you think they came up with those ideas? Did a systematic approach help?

Scenario Cards

Write the following on a number of cards and distribute as Scenario Cards:

“You have come into possession of X for free. Propose a strategy and a sales pitch to make as much money as you can out of them.”

X can be as follows. Customise as you see fit:

• 5000 used old vacuum cleaners
• 10000 old out of fashion gloves
• 20000 broken mobile phone LCDs
• 5000 used old washing machines
• 10000 old small capacity USB sticks