Here is an interview with Bill Bodrie on a subject you will not find much information about. It's on creative thinking and brain storming. This information if used properly will increase your value as a marketing consultant in a big way. But first, I want to tell you a little bit about Bill’s background. Bill is an expert in marketing, creativity, innovation, and peak human performance with wide international experience in a variety of fields. Bill holds a Master’s Degree in Engineering, an MBA from Cornell University, and a Master’s Degree in Clinical Nutrition. His background before becoming a private consultant includes positions as a management for Booz Allen and Hamilton, engineer for Eastman Kodak and IBM, investment strategist for Citibank Asia, director of research for various Wall Street firms, and direct investment specialist for Hong Kong and China.Bill, now living and working between New York, Hong Kong, and Shanghai on a variety of exciting projects, has written a number of management marketing and mind training books including Kuan Tzu’s Supreme Secret for the Global CEO, How to Write a Million Dollar USP and a variety of health, peak performance and business efficiency, and mental training e-books. In this next recording on creativity and brainstorming, you’re going to learn a lot of practical advice that you can use in your consulting business. This recording is about sixty minutes. It’s in two parts, broken down to thirty minutes each. Enjoy!


Hi, this is Michael Senoff with HardtoFindSeminars.com. Here is another interview with Bill Bodri. Bill has done a series of interviews for HMA consultants, and this guy is just amazing. I want to tell you a little bit about Bill’s background. Bill is an expert in marketing creativity, innovation and peak human performance with wide international experience in a variety of fields. He holds a Master’s degree in engineering and an MBA from Cornell University, and a Master’s degree in Clinical Nutrition. His background before becoming a private consultant includes positions as a management consultant for Booz Allen and Hamilton, Engineer for Eastman Kodak and IBM, Investment Strategist for Citibank Asia, Director of Research for various Wall Street firms, and Direct Investment Specialists for Hong Kong and China. Bill is now living and working between New York, Hong Kong and Shanghai. He has written a number of management marketing and mind-training books including Kuan Tzu’s Supreme Secret for the Global CEO, How to Write a Million Dollar USP, The Claude Hopkins Rare Advertising Manual and Study Guide. In this next recording on creativity and brainstorming, you’re going to learn a lot of practical advice that you can use in your consulting business. This recording is about sixty minutes. It’s in two parts, broken down to thirty minutes each. Enjoy!

Michael: Hi, Bill, nice to have you back here. What are you going to teach me today?

Bill: Well, I’m going to teach you something that they never teach you in these marketing courses. They don’t even teach you in school whether it’s high school or college, and this is how to be an innovative thinker, how to do brainstorming, how to create new products or get new ideas for marketing or advertising. It’s not really just limited to marketing and advertising. This is where I made most of my money. Wall Street firms used to hire me to come up with rules that they would program into computers to tell them when to buy or sell.

So, what I want to teach people is you don’t necessarily need this for just marketing, but you can use this in your life in so many different areas. It’s how to do brainstorming and really come up with innovative ideas, but we will shade it a little bit towards marketing, but you can use it for its full affect.

Michael: They’re systems and techniques that will allow you to come through with breakthroughs?

Bill: Yeah, and the big thing is to think deeply. There’s a Chinese Sage called Kwanza and he said, “Look, if you want to really solve a problem, just think deeply about it, and then finally you’ll come up with a breakthrough that sort of defies convention.”

Actually, though in the marketing field, you just need incremental improvements. You just add a little tweak on a proven and established concept you borrowed from somebody else. That’s really what you need in the marketing.

The big thing is basically try to get a systematic process of idea generation or checking off possibilities for marketing. So, for instance, your HMA consultants – you go into a business and you’ll have a checklist, “All right, let’s talk a look at the copywriting – did we change the heading on this?” “The guy sending out a letter, did he sign his name or did he hand address the letters, or use a machine to do that?” Do you know what I mean?

Michael: Yes.

Bill: You set-up a checklist for everything. You start checking it off. “Okay, let’s do the USP first.” “Let’s do sales training.” Or “Let’s do database mining.” You just check them off, and all of a sudden, if you get the guy to implement just checking this off, you’re an innovator going in there even though everything is old stuff to you, but you will see the business improve by leaps and bounds.

By the end of this conversation, I’m going to give you a systematic way before sitting down with a group of people in a company and getting those best ideas.

Michael: All right, let’s do it.

Bill: All right, but before we get there, what I want to tell people is usually you don’t have to think, “You know, I can’t create new ideas.” Most everything you see that’s an innovation in marketing, or what we call an innovation is basically you’re robbing and duplicating something.

Okay, you’re running a pizza place, and you see something that the dry cleaner is doing or the carpet cleaner is doing, and you just copy it and you change it for your business. It’s not like you have to brain storm something else and test it and improve it and systematize it. That’s one way of doing it where you get a bunch of people in a room and you do it yourself. You brain storm new ideas, and you test them, and then improve them incrementally and you systemize it.

That’s what I’m used to doing because I’m used to do that just by myself, or you can do that with a group. What you can do is just take any marketing idea that you see that’s applied to another industry and apply it to the industry that you’re consulting for or if we have somebody who’s running their own business who’s listening to this, you just do that for your own business.

This is sort of the idea of benchmarking in a way. It’s like one of the first things we want to talk about. Xerox is the one that invented this. Mike, I’m sure you’re familiar with benchmarks.

Michael: I’m not.

Bill: All right, well, benchmarking is just known as best practices where it’s similar to this, but a little different, where you have certain practices in your business like let’s say order fulfillment, shipping, advertising, what have you – and, what you do is you go out and you compare your practices with those of a firm that’s considered the best at that particular practice even if it’s not in your industry, and then you just copy them and you improve it with adaptation.

Michael: I like that.

Bill: Xerox is the one that invented this. Big firms will do this. They’ll say, “Well, our order entry department is really lousy.” So then, they’ll go and they’ll go L.L. Bean or somebody who’s very good at order entry or something of that nature, and they’ll say, “What are they doing? Let’s go back, reengineer our process, and just make it as good as possible using the other guy as a benchmark.”

Michael: And, Xerox did this?

Bill: Oh, Xerox, yeah, they invented this and they did this in many, many different areas and this spread to the auto industry, everywhere. And, for the little guy that you’re consulting for, well, if you’re a marketing consultant, you’re seeing so many firms out there and you know who’s doing better at one phase of the business than another guy. So, you just tell them what to do.

Or, if you’re trying to do it yourself, just read a lot. That’s the benefit of reading Forbes Magazine or Entrepreneur Magazine is that you read lots of stories and then you can do benchmarking naturally.

Small firms, Mike, they need good consultants like the HMA consultant because they’re worth their weight in gold. The clients don’t want to pay money, but if you can show them how they’re going to save money using you, you can prove that you are worth your weight in gold because clients hire consultants for two things. One is their experience, and then their innovative abilities. Basically, the innovative abilities are just what I said. It’s not that you have to brainstorm something out of the blue. You basically have the ability to take something from another industry and apply it to this new industry that you’re working with, and that’s why marketing consultants are very, very important. They can tell you what’s wrong, and if you have a client with various models with a higher likelihood success, you still have to test everything.

But, a client needs somebody from the outside usually to come in and do this. They have a clean way of looking at things, and maybe it’s not necessarily that you’ve been in the pool and spa industry so you know what everybody’s doing so you just take that same experience and give it to another pool and spa person. It’s you might be in the landscaping area, and see something that the gardening guys or the pool and spa people are doing and take that concept and bring it in, and that’s what’s innovation. You’re not innovating. You’re just borrowing.

Michael: Why is it so hard when you’re the business owner, and it’s your business, it’s so hard for you to do it on your business?

Bill: Too close to the problem, or you’ve been doing a certain thing a certain way and you don’t want to change. People hate change. Okay, so they hate change. Second is a lot of people that have too much problems with implementation. You know, it’s a dirty secret in the success tapes business, the motivational crowd business that 95 percent of the people who even bother to buy these tapes don’t do anything with them.

Michael: Ninety-five percent?

Bill: Ninety-five.

Michael: Never listen to them or never implement?

Bill: Never listen to them.

Michael: Never even get through them?

Bill: Yeah, never even get through them, and people are busy, or the people that want to do it, they’re busy or they just don’t have time or they just don’t see it. Some people don’t see it. It’s a whole smorgasbord of problems. Everybody has their own weakest link or set of weakest links and if you just improve those weakest links, whatever they are, and sometimes they’re really trivial things like just change the headlines on your ads. It’s a trivial thing – boom! all the business goes up.

Those people need somebody to tell them to do it. They’re busy. They’re tired. They just don’t know that’s what killing them.

Michael: I’m the same way. I’m sure you’re the same way as far as we know probably hundreds of things we should do for our businesses to make improvements, and my philosophy is I know myself good enough that I am simply not going to do it myself, and I hire out.

Bill: Oh, yeah.

Michael: And, it gets done.

Bill: You know what it is? You have to create the habit of hiring out because people say, “I don’t want to spend money on that”, but you know the difference is you might go to Elance or Rentacoder for $50 or $200 and you get it done, and the return is $10,000 or $200,000, and the money you wouldn’t have. But, you don’t want to pay that out of pocket expense.

Michael: Well, let me give you an illustration. I did an interview. This is with a gentleman named Sam Bowman, and it’s up here on the HMA University page, and this guy was trained by Richard through the HMA system almost seven years ago, and he’s in Nashville, Tennessee. For all these years, the way he got clients is he hired out a telemarketer to make the calls. He started doing it himself, him and his wife cold-calling business prospects, but it wasn’t working. He looked in the Yellow Pages. He hired it out. He trained a teleprospector, and he did the numbers on this, and four hours of teleprospecting to cold leads within the geographic and the financial categories of the ideal prospect that Richard recommends you to go after, he was able to book a good solid appointment with four hours of calling.

Now, he paid his telemarketers fifteen dollars an hour. So, that’s sixty dollars a day. He could close fifty percent. So, for every two appointments he went on, he would close one for an average contract between $10,000 and $15,000. So, by hiring it out, even though he paid sixty dollars a day, look what it brought him as long as he went on the appointments.

Bill: Yeah, and when you think about it, he was hiring out what he’s weakest at, or what would zap his motivation, zap his energy, that would just have this overhang on the roof of his business.

Michael: Yeah, that’s right.

Bill: And, that’s one of the keys. If you’re bad at something, hire it out to somebody who’s better at it.

Michael: And, don’t look at it as an expense. It’s an investment. Him hiring it out was the greatest return he probably has ever made in anything.

Bill: There are all this mental tricks you have to play with yourself. It’s like making cold-calls. If you know that you’re going to go through a hundred cold-calls before you get two sales, and each cold-calls is worth fifteen dollars on average versus what the final sale is you’re making on it. You play this mental trick is you go through the cold-call and you say, “Well, I just made fifteen dollars” or “I just made forty dollars” even when they said no because you know by the laws of averages, you’re going to closer to the sale. And, if you look at it that way, it’ll keep you motivated.

You know, marketing when we’re talking about the human factor, is a lot of psychology like this, and you’ve got to use all these little tricks to get you going, and you can take these tricks and you can tell them as an HMA consultant, you tell them to the people out there, you say, “This is what you tell yourself.” And, they’ll go, “Thank you.” Because they’ll use it. Your clients will use it, and it will help them increase their sales, and that came from you.

Now, we were talking about suggesting programs initially, and we’ll get to that at the very end of this call, but what I wanted to mention now besides the benchmarking is the people who are really best at this are the Japanese. What they do is they have a system to get the really best ideas from the people, but the key to all these systems is you have to reward people with recognition.

So, you can try to put people under deadlines, under pressure so they can come up with great ideas because that stimulates more right brain activity, but if you want really good ideas, create some type of suggestion with some type of brainstorming program where people are recognized when they come up with a great idea.

If it’s up to you, yourself, always have an idea notebook. A lot of people tell you, always carry around a little notebook you can put into your pocket with a pen so you can write down your idea or if you get up at night and you wake up with a brain storm, write it down. I don’t know how many times – I keep a pen and paper by the bed, but sometimes I couldn’t find the light switch. So, you wake up with a great idea, and you know it’s a good idea but then you forget it in the morning because you think you’re going to remember it. You’ve got to write the idea down, otherwise your good idea is going to be lost forever.

Michael: Give me an example of recognition and how to benefit from that because I just did it. It was the last interview I did with Richard, and I sent out an email to about a thousand people on my email list knowing that I’ll be interviewing Richard about marketing consulting, and this also went out to the HMA consultants, and the person who came back with the best two questions would win $500 worth anything on my site that they could use to buy off my site. And, I got so many great questions that I picked and used for the interview, and yeah, it cost me $500 in trade, but the quality of that interview is far superior than if I had never offered the gift, number one, but I also offered the recognition by posting the two names of the winners up on the site for everyone to see.

Bill: And, this process, too, of asking people for ideas – in the e-book field we call that posting a fly-catcher page where before you even write a book for instance, you put up a one-page website which says, “Hi, I’m thinking of writing a book on orchids, and I’m just completing it. I want to make it the best possible. So, I tell you what. If you just write down” – and you leave them a big box – “the biggest question on orchids and send it to me, then when my book is done, I’ll send you a copy for free.”

What you do is you grab all these ideas from people. People are doing that in the seminar business. People are doing that to create products. They say, “What’s your biggest problem?” And, they’re putting up all these pages or on email links. People are coming in with all these products ideas, and then people go out and they just go to Rentacoder or they go to Elance and have somebody create the product and they go and what do they do – they just go sell it.

Michael: That’s right.

Bill: It’s so easy to do that when what you’re doing is you’re coming up with some systematic way to grab other people’s ideas. Now, if you have to do it yourself, people always say, “Well, what to do to become more creative, and one thing you do is you try to listen to music.” For some reason, music from Mozart, your classical composers, is really good for stimulating people’s brains and creativity. There’s all sorts of studies that have proven that. People think it’s because of the relative dominance of high frequencies in that type of music.

So, if you want your kids to be geniuses, you’ll play Mozart and all these classical composers in the background.

Michael: Have that proven that? I mean I have for my kids all the videos – the baby Mozart, Baby Einstein.

Bill: Lots of studies, if you play Mozart and classical composers before they do an SAT test or while you’re studying for a test, their scores are much, much, much higher than versus not having music or having rock music. In fact, when you do these tests and you play classical music versus let’s say rock music and then you put this in front of a plant or even in front of animals – I don’t remember how they tested animals, the growth is usually stunted for the animal or the plant with the rock music, but with classical music versus no music at all, there’s always a growth spurt.

Michael: Interesting.

Bill: So, the growth is amplified. So, there’s been lots of stuff that actually proves that.

Now, one of the things that people need to learn how to do is mind-mapping, and mind-mapping is a way for improving a business or a marketing campaign, and it was created by Tony Buzan of Learning Methods Group, and it’s based on the fact that a brain works with concepts in sort of an interrelated, integrated manner. What you do is you get a piece of paper and in the center of the piece of paper you write in a word and you circle it.

Let’s say you’re talking about orchids growing, growing orchids. You put that in the center, and then what you do is you branch out on that page. You use a whole page with lines and you have one branch that comes out and you’d write the word “water” and circle it. You’d have another branch that comes out and would say “sunlight” and circle it. And, every circle that you do, branches out to branches that you might control or tinker with so that you can come up with a whole sort of brain or mind-mapping of what you can, or the factors that you can fiddle with in order to increase orchid growth.

Anybody can go to a website and find a picture of mind-mapping, and immediately you’ll know what I’m talking about. You don’t have to buy any of these fifteen, twenty dollar books because in one minute you’ll understand what it is. You can do that for let’s say a marketing campaign where you take the key concept of the marketing campaign and you draw a mind-map of it, and it’s sort of an individual brainstorming process where you’re connecting your thoughts without any rules, and you’re getting all your ideas out on a really quick fashion before you lose them, for you to figure out all the factors you have to tinker with for a marketing campaign where you’re trying to create a new product.

When people have – touch upon some really strange topics here, but we’re talking about innovation and creativity, a lot of people purposely train themselves to be able to dream a solution to their problem, right? And, Thomas Edison would always sleep on it. I mean, he would sleep on his problems. In fact, what Thomas Edison used to do when he’d have a difficult problem, he’d sit there in a chair and he’d try to get into a state where he’s half asleep, half awake, and he’d be holding ball bearings in his hand.

Michael: He really did this?

Bill: Yes, and what he would do is – all these guys at the turn of the century would do this because it works if you train yourself. It doesn’t work the first time, the tenth time or the thirtieth time, but if you get into the habit of doing this, you can get into this.

What he would do is when he would fall asleep, he would sort of be in this hypnotic state, is his hand would sort of open up and all the ball bearings would drop on the tin plate below, and that sound would wake him up, and he’d sort of be in the middle of the state between sleeping and dreaming, and what he would do is he would try to use that state to solve his problems.

Michael: Wow.

Bill: And, there’s lots of ways were people learn to control their dreams after a while. They try to do what’s called lucid dreams in order to learn how to solve their problems. Quite a few people, a lot of scientists, have solved problems that way through their dreams.

Mike, you know the sewing machine needle?

Michael: Oh, the sewing machine needle.

Bill: Yeah, the sewing machine needle was invented by the inventor of the sewing machine. One day he was working on this problem for years, and he had a dream of cannibals holding spears in their hands chasing him. He looked in the dream and he could see the spears all had holes in them.

Michael: Wow.

Bill: And, when he realized, “Hey, the spears had holes in them” he woke up and realized, “Oh, I’ve got to make the needle.”

Michael: That’s wild.

Bill: And, German chemist, Kekule, he dreamed of a benzene ring with a snake biting his own tail, and that’s how he was able to finally come up with what was the big problem in organic chemistry what a benzene ring looked like.

Michael: Okay.

Bill: Now, there’s other sort of mental imaging type processes that a lot of people do. There’s the process of visualization. Edison had a contemporary called Tesla who was far more inventive than Edison, and Tesla what he could do was he just practiced his imagination so good that he could envision a lot, entire inventions like a machine and see how all the parts fit together.

Richard Feynman, for instance, he was a Noble Prize winner in Psychics, and what he used to do is he practiced so that he could visualize all these mathematical formulas in his head and solve them in his head by actually seeing them on a chalkboard and using different colors for parts of the equation.

So, there’s all sorts of visualization techniques that people have to learn to use, and it takes practice. There’s a lot of locksmiths I know who’ve written books on how they use visualization to see what in the world the lock looks like inside and how to break the lock.

Michael: Wow.

Bill: Now, you don’t need this type of information as a marketer, but I’m just telling you where to go wild on this whole field because this is something that I’ve used for a variety of different fields for years.

If somebody is an engineer for instance, this is something a lot of people don’t know about, there is a field called TRIZ, you can look it up on the Internet. It’s called the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, and this was invented by a Russian, a Soviet Patent Expert. This guy’s name was Genrich Altshuller, and there’s an institute today, the Altshuller Institute. And, this guy analyzed over 400,000 patents, and today they’ve analyzed over two million patents to find, get this Mike, objective laws to use in engineering and physical engineering products.

Michael: Common denominators within the products.

Bill: Yeah, like, let’s use a change of state. Like at Easter time, they have these chocolate bunnies and you bite into them and they have creamy inside.

Michael: Right.

Bill: Well, how do you do that? Do you make the chocolate and inject it with the cream? What they do is they put the cherry cream in a mold, freeze it, and then put the bunny around it. So, they use a change of state to create that particular product because later the bunny will melt.

So, when you have problems like that, “How in the world do we handle this problem?”, all you do is you look up on this table that they invented what type of problem you have, what are the three or four types of engineering solutions that are used to solve this, and this is something that engineers in companies can learn. If somebody wasn’t a marketing consultant and they wanted to be an engineering consultant, I would say right away, “Go learn this.” This is a structured form of creative thinking for problem solving in engineering that very few people know about, but this is a way to really learn how to actual build or create new products, and a lot of people are actually starting to try to create Altshuller TRIZ type solutions for marketing and public policy and political affairs. They’re trying to do the same type of thing.

Michael: What’s the website called again?

Bill: You can just look up TRIZ, and it’s called the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving. Just look up TRIZ. There’s nothing else like TRIZ. It’s systematic invention creation.

Michael: That’s pretty wild.

Bill: So, another big thing is a lot of people have heard this, and this is what we’ll get into brainstorming. I’m going to teach you how you do a marketing brainstorming technique with a group of people, and one thing if you’re lucky, if you can get a copy of it, Doug Hall who wrote Jumpstart Your Business Brain which we talked about before, a really great marketing book. His firm has a video out, and this video shows him at one of his invention session. It’s probably a $200,000 invention session for Tyson Chicken.

Michael: Is this guy an inventor, Doug Hall?

Bill: Well, Doug Hall used to be a product manager at Proctor and Gamble where you’re a marketing expert if you’re at Proctor and Gamble. What he did was he came out and said, “How can we systemize the idea of product innovation, new product invention?” And, there’s quite a few brainstorming techniques that he uses and you can actually see them at play in the video. It’s pretty amazing.

The whole idea of brainstorming came from this guy Alex Osborne and he worked for an advertising firm, Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborne if I remember correctly, and the idea of brainstorming is to use your brain to storm a problem, and the rules for brainstorming are the following.

I mentioned a way you can do it yourself through mind-mapping, but if you have a group of people, you put them in a room, you close the door, you have lots of variety and stimulus and you say, “Look, there’s no judgments, no negatives made about any idea that anybody’s going to suggest during this session. All ideas even crazy ideas or absurd ideas are welcome.” And, the quantity of ideas is important. You want a big quantity of ideas, and ideas can be combined and so you have a group leader who basically guides and facilitates the group and a secretary there recording the ideas.

And, you don’t want any negativities because you’re always going to have people who are negative. These guys are spoil sports. It doesn’t take any courage to kill a new idea. It takes courage to see how you can take an idea and change it to make it work.

So, brainstorming is one idea, but here’s one that people can start right away. It’s called brain-writing. This is pretty neat if you can get a group of people together who have a common goal and they’re all together and will do it. Then, this is useful besides brainstorming.

But, brain-writing is you get a bunch of participants and they sit in a circle and each writes down their ideas to solve a problem on a piece of paper and then they pass it to their neighbor. Then, the neighbor looks at it and adds ideas to improve it, and then you just go around three times. The first round is just two minutes. The second round is about five minutes. The next round is another five minutes, and you just do that.

Michael: I like that.

Bill: And, it’s very, very quick. So, let’s say you want to do a marketing brainstorming meeting. So, one week you might try brainstorming meeting, then you might have a brain-writing meeting the next day because with brainstorming you want people to say it out loud and a lot of people might be afraid to say anything out loud. So, with brain-writing it forces them to write something down. And, what they’re doing is they write their own idea. That’s passed on to somebody else who improves it, and then that’s passed on to somebody else who improves that as well.

They’re receiving an idea from somebody else. So, you get lots of ideas. Okay, then what somebody does is they pick that up and then they pick up all the papers at the very end, and it’s up to them. The company culture adds to what works best, whether they pick it up or walks away with it, or if he writes it on the board and turns it into a brainstorming group from there. That all depends.

Another type of brainstorming idea is called brain-writing. This is an idea or procedure developed in Germany. This is a little bit different. You get a group of six or eight people and they sit at a table and write the idea. So, Mike, would say, you’d be there and the HMA consultant might say, “All right, let’s figure out some way that we can increase the number of leads for selling more pogo sticks.”

So, then what you have to do then is six or eight people will sit at the table. They’re all quiet, and they write down four ideas and then they pass their idea to the center of the table when they’re done. And, if you run out of ideas, you grab a paper from the center of the table and you improve upon it.

So, rather than going in a circle where I pass it to the guy on my left and then he improves, passes it to the guy on the right. It’s the same idea, but when you’re done writing down four ideas, you pass your paper to the center of the table, and then you start writing another four ideas on a piece of paper and you pass it to the center of the table. When you run out of ideas, you grab a piece of paper from the center of the table, you look at it, and you start improving it.

Michael: That’s a great technique.

Bill: There’s all sorts of methods. There’s a method. It’s very famous called Crawford Slip Method, where people basically state a problem where the target or the focus is, and usually you do this with twenty people or more, a big group of people. When, you have twenty people, you usually get about 400 ideas in forty minutes. So, you don’t want to do this unless you have about an hour.

What people do is they have a stack of note cards, and what you do is you state a problem, whatever the focus is for the group and people write their ideas on an index card – one idea on a card. They write across the long edge of the card, only one sentence per index card, and they use a new sentence for explanations and they avoid words like, it or this, and they use short sentences, and they keep writing until the time is called. Then, the facilitator grabs all the cards after it’s up and performs a data reduction. He sorts all the slips into general categories. He consolidates them using those categories. He develops an outline, comes up with chapters and divisions and what have you, and then he writes a final report where you basically take the slips and they’re all itemized under the relevant heading.

So, that’s one that you do when you have a group of twenty people because they become more unwieldy with twenty people with an individual that’s one thing, and then you go to a group of five to eight people and it’s a different thing when you go to twenty people. It becomes another thing not because it works better. It’s just the unwieldiness in working with large groups.

Michael: I could see getting a client, going into a business with here they have five to ten even fifteen employees, and as part of my consulting, definitely, this would be one of the first things I would do – go in and implement some of these creative thinking brainstorming strategies.

Bill: Absolutely, and what I’ll teach you at the very end is the one that I always use.

Michael: Okay.

Bill: When I’m in China, this is what I would do, but the basis of this is something that this is a whole business itself. Last time, we were talking about sales scripting how that in itself, you can become a business specialist just in sales scripting.

Michael: This could be a whole consulting niche in itself.

Bill: Bingo! Absolutely, and this is big bucks if you get good at this. One of these assignments is anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 to $200,000. So, the last time I was in China, I was talking to one of the universities about doing this, but if I was living there, this is what I probably would do for a couple of years because it’s a lot of fun, but I’m not living there.

Let’s talk about new product innovation, and then we’re going to slowly get to the method that I really recommend people use, and when you look at the numbers, Mike, there are so many raw ideas you’re going to have, and aside from the fact it’s hard to implement them, to get anybody to even move on them, a lot of them have just very poor success rates because a new product failure rate has been increasing in the US since the 1960s. It’s used to be around forty percent in the 1960s. Now, the new product failure rate is really, really high.

So, we need in terms of marketing to create new product ideas, you need some methodologies to create great new product ideas. That gets back to the USP. What you want to do is find out what is a Unique Selling Proposition that is going to appeal to people, and that becomes a new product.

But, here’s what you do. If you get a group of people and you want to stimulate them so that you get a group of ideas is basically you put a group of people in a room and you give them a lot of stimulus – sight, sound or whatever or creativity – so people are relaxed and they’re open. It’s like plying people with drink so they start talking. You want their guard to be down. You don’t want them to be corporate tight-shirts. You want them not to be afraid of anything. So, you want to create an environment where you’re going to get a lot of good ideas out.

That group of people when you’re going to do this – you want a diversified group of people and you want innovators. You don’t want people who are thinking all the same way. Throw the secretary in there. Throw the immigrant who just came in. Throw the guy who’s the driver, because these guys will give you – the different backgrounds will think different things because clones create clones. So, you want diversity in the group. You want different thinking styles – analytical people, rational, emotional people, gut-feel people. What you definitely want is you definitely want left brainers in there, logical people besides the visionary right brainers.

The reason you want the left brainers in there is because when they hear an idea, they know how to turn it into strategy and implementation right away, and if you have enough of those guys in there, then you know it’s not just going to stay in the right brain category – the guys that are just like, “Hey, you’ve got this idea.” It’s going to be in the people who are actually the guys that implement this stuff. So, make sure you’ve got them there.

The big thing is when you’re doing any of these brainstorming groups, these suggestion system groups, you want to basically demolish fear and give people the courage to risk the idea. You don’t want to punish them in any way. You don’t want to say anything negative because the biggest problem is people have a comfort zone, and you’ve got to move them out of the comfort zone to the courage zone just to get them to even offer a new idea.

Michael: How do you do that?

Bill: I’m just saying that’s the big challenge. You have to create the environment for that, and then get them to the implementation zone, the chaos zone, you have to push people because people don’t like change. Everybody has a comfort zone. They don’t want to move. They don’t want to change. You’ve got to get them into the courage zone, and then in one real big action you’ve got to get them into the chaos zone where they’re willing to risk. It’s okay to fail, no problem. Some of my best ideas are because I’m not afraid to fail. I make small, minimal cost tests. If it doesn’t work, big deal. That’s the cost of business.

So, when you’re creating a new product with people – you’re a marketing consultant, an HMA consultant, and you’re called in and you want to help some firm create a new product or service. Definitely, you’ve got to start with brainstorming a unique selling proposition, and we went over that. You’ve got to come up with what are the big promises and benefits to the potential customer. Number two is what’s the real reason they should believe us. You can even design your product with the right color or packaging, besides the copywriting on the packaging, they’ll believe you. You’ve got to have a dramatic difference why your product is different from everything else, why your benefit’s unique.

If you can use brainstorming and USP as a benefit for bringing somebody a new product, then that is really what it’s all about for you. You should just try to do that, but, Mike, if we’re talking about creating ads, you know what you do for brainstorming ads is you don’t have create something from scratch, just look for successful ads that have already run and get ideas from them. You create a swipe file and here’s the key to writing ads, really good ads.

Number one is like you and me, Mike, because you and I both have, oh libraries that are probably over $100,000 in ad collections and things like that. If you want to become good at copywriting or marketing what you do is you make a habit of copying winning ads by hand.

Michael: I’ve heard this. Do you think this really works?

Bill: Absolutely. I just to work, like I said, in Wall Street in a field where I’d have to come up with these, and you would find the very best traders would write down by hand everyday. They would draw the charts of certain stock prices so they could get a feel for it. I don’t know what it is. It just goes to the subliminal mind or second mind. They would start seeing patterns without knowing what the pattern is, and if you just copy something down by hand you can create the style or recapture the style of this guy, and you are basically copying yourself on the style of a master, and you’ll get closer to a better product. Unless you’re already a genius to begin with.

That’s why when you’re teaching painters, what they do is they have you go copy the masters to begin with and then create your own form.

Michael: Okay, very interesting.

Bill: So, you’re touching all sorts of problems here as we’re talking about brainstorming new products. Now, we’re talking about ads, and one of the best ways to write a creative ad that works is you just sit down and describe your product and what it does for people, how it works, the research behind it, what’s different or better about it, it’s description, all the benefits you’re going to get. That’s your ad.

As an HMA consultant, you know what you do? You sit down with a guy. You record it, and boom you have the beginnings of an ad. I mean, that’s what I do when I’m coming up with USPs with people. I ask them those ten questions that I have in my manual or some fraction thereof. I record it, and sometimes what comes out of the mouth is just fantastic. You’re like, “How come you don’t have this on your ads?” “Well, I don’t know.” You just put that in the ads. If you put that in the headlines for their websites or what have you, you can make a big dent in the business because they’re just not tell people.

So, what you do is – a tape recorder is wonderful, and we talked about this in sales scripting. If you want to be innovative to create a sales talk, just record yourself or record a top salesman selling the product to people even if the prospect is imaginary and you get ideas from that. That’s how you come up with sales talks or ads, same thing.

We don’t have to talk about being creative with coming up with content and custom characters and offering collectibles and hiring entertainers. All those things are called marketing creativity and radical marketing, the P.T. Barnum type stuff, marketing genius type stuff. That comes from genius. But, what you do is that also comes from sitting down, like you said, one hour a week and you basically say to people, “What in the world do we do?” And, you do this one hour a week, “What do we do to drive our marketing strategy?” That’s different than a weekly sales meeting where you’re just reviewing sales numbers.

If you ask the top marketers what the key to affective marketing is, they’re going to tell you one hour per week. They’re going to basically sit down with a handful of people in a room for one hour each week, and they’re going to talk about what in the world they do to generate more leads, attract attention, media coverage, etc. Every week, they have to ask the same question, “What do we need to do this week to get more leads, more people in our target market to know about us?” And, they brainstorm answers for that.

Now, here’s what I promised, and here’s the one hour a week workshop format.

Michael: All right, let me have it.

Bill: So, here’s what I want you to know, and when you do this Mike, I’m going to teach you not how to just do this for marketing, but as a consultant, you take this and you teach them how to do it for every division in their company – for accounting, for accounts receivable, for inventory management.

This is the format of a one hour a week workshop. It can take the format of a brainstorming session. It can take brainwriting and all that, but here’s the general format. First principle is focus on twenty percent of the problems when you’re holding these meetings to produce eighty percent of the results.

Don’t focus on trivial things. Focus on the big things. You’re going to force a sharing of ideas through this method, and remember, you as the consultant or the business owner, you want to be working on your business, not in it. So, you want to get the big strategy at the top, let the staff figure out the tiny details, and let the staff be involved in the solution. Don’t focus on the problem. Get them focused on the solution.

So, if you’re going to do what I’m telling you here, it’s going to free up your time because it’s a great way to manage people for every department of the company every week, you come up with a new question or the same question and you say, “Hey, what do we do on this problem?” Here’s an issue, before you get into it, what you do is at the next session, you record it. Not the session that just recorded at that point what the ideas were, and you keep a record of that, one page, that’s it.

Michael: Okay.

Bill: So, let’s say you go to accounting this week, and it’s like, “What do we do to increase the number of people who are paying on time?” Okay, you get all the ideas from the people via the process I’ll tell you. Next week, it’s the same thing. The next week, it’s the same thing. Until, you’ve finally got it. Maybe you make one idea a quarter or a month, if it’s easy.

Michael: Do you focus on the same question each week?

Bill: It depends if you solve it right away.

Michael: If twenty percent of your biggest problems, you’ve got ten situations – you just take them one at a time?

Bill: Right, you take them one at a time, and what you do is let’s say you’re a big firm, you do this for each department. Or if you’re a small firm, just focus at one at a time, because you know what? Common sense will tell you for the situation at hand what the general answer is. You can’t juggle a thousand things if it’s just you and three other people, and even ten. You’ve got to just focus on the main things that are going to matter.

But, basically, what you do is write down on one sheet of paper what you guys came up with, and that’s your record, and you know why? Because any new person who comes into the department, if they look at all these ideas for the problem that you stated, the top of the page is what’s the problem, what were the ideas, what we’re going to try, and they go through that for the year. Man, they get up to speed really quickly, and also that’s your record for the year as a big boss. If you’re going through department after department, and you want to manage people, you know what you do is you just go to that department’s record book to see what they’re working on and you look at it and you say, “Hey, did you try this idea? What was the result? How come you’re not doing this follow-up?” So, it’s a great way for the big boss to be managing people.

Michael: Right, because he knows all the things that need to be done.

Bill: Exactly. So, he gets a new employee up to speed and as a management thing, he can see what’s going on without being everywhere I want, as well as, you can keep people pushing forward on solutions.

Michael: Let’s do this. Let’s take it from the perspective an HMA consultant has a client. Is this something he may be implement at the beginning before he does anything?

Bill: You know what you do at the beginning is you sit down with the boss. This is always situation specific. Don’t take anything I say and go, “That was not the right thing to do.” Of course not, don’t be an idiot. It’s situation specific, but the big things you do is what do we have to do this year to increase to double sales? I mean that’s one question you might ask people, and all of a sudden, everybody will say, “Well, we’ve got to fix A, B, and C.” Three things will come out, and boom, those are the three things that you work on.

Now, you can do that with a chief executives or just the chief executive or the business owner or group of people, that’s what you do at the beginning of the year. Let’s say you were the marketing manager for the firm, but let’s say you’re called in for a specific problem, and it can be marketing. It can be anything. You’ve got a group of people there – five people, ten people, twenty people, it doesn’t matter. You’ve put the topic to be solved up on the board – chalkboard, piece of paper, doesn’t matter. Write it so that everybody can see it.

Then, you ask everybody in the group to write down three solutions to the problem. So, everybody writes it down. Then, you write down everybody’s ideas on a flipchart, and you eliminate the duplicate ideas. Discuss the ideas by asking questions.

You get everybody to look at the board, and they vote then. You might collect twenty ideas. Have everybody write down the top three ideas or solutions. They write down the priority rating – one, two, three. You go around the room, and you ask everybody for their top three choices, and then, bingo, you’ve got from everybody three solutions or possibilities. You’ve collected them all. You put them up there, and have everybody focus on what they think the top three should be. Now, you’ve got that. You can refine this anyway you want. You can say, “Okay, put more slashes next to one, two there.” It doesn’t matter. Use your own ideas for that.

Michael: Okay.

Bill: Then, what you do is now that you’ve got the three ideas, now you have to figure out what’s the new assignment or task to integrate the top three ideas into next week’s schedule – not just get the idea.

Michael: Integrate.

Bill: Right, how do you get everybody to implement to test that? So, you ask for implementation ideas and you write them on the board, and you get the group to take the top three ideas and rank them as before and select the top three assignments, and then what you do is you write a memo of the top three problem solutions, the implementation strategies, and you tell the group to implement them. You file this in a three-ringed binder.

You can record all twenty ideas initially. You can do the whole thing, but don’t make is so big. Just focus on getting to the meat of this. That’s going to move people ahead, and that’s all dependent on the situation, on the culture of the firm, because if I say, “Write down all twenty.” There’s some people in the firm that will spend all this time writing down a hundred ideas, and never do anything because they’re a documentation firm. So, all they ever do is talk rather than implement.

Michael: How do you appoint an implementation team? Do you have any strategies on that?

Bill: No. They know. You can’t go in and know who’s going to do it. What you do is you ask them who’s going to be responsible, and you always create a point man. But, the big thing is take this general process every week with new topics or the same topics until you get some solution. That’s the thing. So, a lot of people just go from one idea to the next, to the next, to the next, and they never implement anything. That’s the wrong way to do it.

So, you want to run these workshops. Here it is again, you basically appoint a person to lead the group. Maybe you’re leading the group, or the CEO, or the manager. You write down the purpose of the workshop on the whiteboard like, “How to get more people to our restaurant” or “How to improve the reputation of our hotel” “How to increase airline safety”.

Everybody writes down on their pad every single idea they can think of – usually at least three. Don’t have them call it out. Have them write it down. Give them a set period of time to think about it. Most people run out of ideas in like two minutes. Even the leader has to do this. So, everybody’s scribing, and if you’re the leader and you see somebody there who’s not scribing, you say, “Hey, write it down, Bill.” “Hey, write it down, Mike.” Prompt them, even if it’s garbage. You’ve got to prompt people to do this.

The leader goes and he asks everybody to tell their ideas. He writes them down, summarizes them. There’s no stupid ideas during brainstorming. You don’t criticize anybody because that will ruin the workshop experience, and you’ve got to create, once again, an atmosphere where people can share. There’s no criticism. There’s no fear. There’s no ridicule, and you get duplications. Don’t write it down. Then, you organize a vote of people’s opinions. They’re going to change as the collective intelligence of the group is shared. You try to get a general consensus, and the people look at the board. They rank their choice number one, two, three.

So, you give people thirty seconds to write down their answers. None of this stuff takes ten minutes. It’s immediate. So, people know, “Hey, that sounds good.” And, then the leader of the group is going to ask each person to give their choices, tally up the totals, and what you do is you cut it off at the three or the top five or six benefits. It’s up to you. You’ll know by the situation.

Then, implementation – write a memo and outline all the findings of the exercise and you’ve got to keep these memos in a single binder and remember. A new guy coming into the department says, “Oh, these are all your problems. Oh, here’s what you’ve tried. Oh, now they’re up to speed.”

As a manager, you just go from each department and see, “How come you guys aren’t working on these problems?” And, he can manage that way as well, or he can say, “Well, geez, I see that three months ago, you guys were talking about cutting the lead time on this. How come they haven’t do anything? Where’s the follow-up?”

Michael: Yeah, there’s always something to do.

Bill: And, this helps you work on the business, not in the business. If you’re an HMA consultant and you go and teach them how to do this as well as you use this for a certain process, this helps these businesses solve so many problems because they’re proactive then rather than reactive. They’re solving problems in an incremental fashion. They don’t have to do these big strategy shifts all the time because all the time as a new problem that arises in the environment, they’re there. They immediately notice it, and they can hold a workshop on it, and they’re learning how to change things immediately.

So, firms that do this are innovating all the time. You basically have to remember to do the following. After you send the memo out, you’ve got to police it. You’ve got to examine and observe the procedure that they come up with an action. The following week or maybe it’s the following month or the following two weeks, whatever is applicable to the situation, you’ve got to go over the procedure or the suggestion that people came up with and refine it. You have to ask each person what they did precisely and how it worked. You get the feedback. You reiterate all of the critical elements, and you just keep pounding this procedure of improvement, this process of improvement, every week for several weeks until your goals of incremental but continuous improvement is there, and eventually you’re going to get into this, and you’re going to get something that works. You’re going to refine it regularly.

An example of this, I think you know this story, is Jay Abraham, a very famous marketer, a carpet company came to him and he said, “Hey, how about you guys create a club or a system where people sign up to get their carpet done twice a year or three times a year.”

Michael: All right.

Bill: Do you know the story?

Michael: I don’t recollect this one.

Bill: Well, there was a carpet cleaner who wanted to increase his business, and Jay said, “Well, why don’t you have this thing where people sign up and for $50, you’ll come twice a year or three times a year, and you just sell the service.” And, they couldn’t get it to work initially, and they just kept working at it and working at it and working at it and working at it, and they finally got the thing to work and increase sales I think about 300 percent.

Michael: Wow.

Bill: But, initially, it didn’t work. So, what they did was they thought it was a really good idea, but the first time it didn’t work. They didn’t drop it. They go, “Let’s try to refine it.” So, that’s one of the things about this. You don’t have to number one, think of all the stuff yourself, and number two is it doesn’t have to work the first time. Just keep trying to refine it.

When I used to be inventing systems that tell you when to buy and sell stock and commodities, a lot of times, I’d get these ideas out of the blue. It didn’t work, but I incrementally tried to improve them, and I’d come up with a winner eventually.

So, what you do is always come up with a general idea, and then tweak it, tweak it, tweak it. Same as copywriting – tweak that ad, tweak it just a little bit – the headline, the offer, the bonus, the price, and see how it changes.

That’s the basis of brainstorming creativity, and we talked about all sorts of things. We talk about dreaming. We talk about this. We talked about that. We talked about brainstorming, brainwriting, brainpooling. The idea that you don’t even need a breakthrough, just copy or have them duplicate, but you need a system that will pull together ideas like you mentioned IPower for incremental improvement. They don’t always have to be all your ideas.

We went over ways that you can self-generate ideas. It’s great if you come up with a group way of collecting the best ideas from people and try them.

Michael: Right, well, questions are the answer, and you’ve given us – I think there’s plenty of systems just in this recording that are going to give the HMA consultants tons of things that they can implement.

Bill: Oh yeah, and if I was an HMA consultant, what I would do is remember all of this is based on coming up with ideas, brainstorming, testing, improving, and then systematizing and automating. You’re going to do that no matter what. That’s the general process.

But, what’s new is if you can get them to trust you, and you can do one of these solution sessions, then after a while, they will call you in as moderator all the time to come up with a session so that you get repeat business when they’re really in trouble. Like I said, becoming a specialist in this is a whole niche in itself.

Michael: Yeah, it sounds like fun.

Bill: Yeah, it is a lot of fun. That’s why I said I really like doing this over in Asia at Fudan University. I just don’t have the time. I’m hopping around too much. This is how I used to make my living is doing this type of thing for all industries and fields.

Michael: These are a series of recordings we’ve done together. They are so packed with content. I mean, I’ve never interviewed or done a recording that has so much content. How do you know all this stuff, Bill?

Bill: This is my specialty. My specialty is seeing the big picture, and then the tiny details and drawing it together, and I’ve worked in – most marketing people or copywriting people have worked in so many different fields and it helps them because you’re exposed to a lot of different ideas and you read a lot. So, I just have that knack that way, but I really like the idea of mental training which is why I have that website MeditationExpert.com. You can get a feel from this, but this is what it’s all about. The whole business of business is really servicing people, but coming up with a way that people come to you rather than somebody else.

So, you have to come up with some ideas that are going to help you with innovation, and by the way, Mike, the reminds me. There’s a couple of books that people, if they’re really interested in this, they can take a look at. One is, it’s a very famous book. It’s called “The Innovator’s Solution”, and that’s by Christianson and Reiner. I believe that won a business award. Peter Drucker that wrote a book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, but that’s not going to tell you how to get ideas – what you really want is you want this book, and I would tell people to get the Doug Hall book Jumpstart Your Business Brain. Christianson also has the book The Innovator’s Dilemma. They have these two books.

If you really want to get into these ideas for how you can play mental games with yourself, visualization games that I was mentioning that the scientists would use, in Napoleon Hill’s book, Napoleon Hill talks about how he would imagine he had a group of people such as Napoleon and Abraham Lincoln and etc, that he would imagine would actually come and talk to him and solve his problems, and he stopped doing it because this came alive.

Michael: Oh, really?

Bill: Yeah.

Michael: Did he talk about that in his book?

Bill: He talked about it in his book. He imagined these guys so vividly that after a while he said all the characters had their own personality. I don’t remember if it was Jefferson, but one of them would always come to the meeting late, and he got so scared that he stopped doing it, because if you do this, stuff like that can happen.

Michael: Right.

Bill: You can read the book, “The Einstein Factor”, which talks about things like this. The Einstein Factor will talk to you about or teach you how to do games like this, visualization games and talk to you how you create a state of flow, mental flow.

The idea of brainwriting, brainpooling and things like that, you can get that fantastic little book called, “101 Creative Problem Solving Techniques”. It’s a fantastic book.

Michael: Okay, who writes that?

Bill: The guy who wrote that is I believe Higgins, and then the last one that a lot of people will – I mean, it’s some science, but it’s a really neat book. It’s very rare. It’s called, “Discovering”, and you can only get it in draft form. They actually published what’s called a draft form of the book, and the guy’s name is Ruth Bernstein. It’s an uncorrected proof that was written or published in 1989 from the Harvard Unversity Press. So, you’d probably have to find that on some used booksite, and that’s Ruth Bernstein.

Or, if you want to learn about advanced mediation techniques for all this stuff, you can always go to my website. Now, I haven’t finished writing a book on this stuff called Sumati, and I haven’t finished writing a book on Sumati in Science for how you do this if you’re a scientist because all the scientists who are really, really good, a lot of them use all sorts of mental tricks like this to come up with breakthrough inventions and stuff, and we really didn’t talk about this. We wanted to talk about the stuff you can use for marketing, but I’m working on a book like that and it’s just not out yet. So, you have to go to these other sources for that.

Michael: All right, wonderful. This has been very interesting, a lot of content. I’ll encourage the HMA consultants to go to the transcripts, to print them out, to reread them, to relisten, to listen and read at the same time. Also, if you haven’t heard Bill’s other recordings that we’ve done. One is called, “How to Create Million Dollar USPs for Your Clients in 57 Minutes or Less”. This is an hour long call we did on developing your USP. It’s supplemental material in addition to what Richard has available for you.

Also, “Seven Tested Words Proven to Increase Sales in Any Retail Business 300%” This was the subject that we talked about for sales scripting and scripting response strategies, and that’s there on the HMA University. Then, we did a recording on how to get more referrals and how to use referral generating strategies within your consulting business that can double and triple your consulting business. And, we’ll probably be doing some more in the future, I hope.

Bill: Yeah, and Mike, you know the one thing I wanted to add is I always tell people, if you’re going to become a marketing consultant, find a niche and specialize, but what I try to do through all these recordings is also teach you niches in the general field of marketing consulting rather than becoming a pizza marketing consultant or restaurant marketing consultant.

Michael: Yeah, you can be a marketing consultant for the pizza industry, but just be a referral specialist within the pizza industry.

Bill: Bingo.

Michael: Or, brainstorming expert within the pizza industry. So, you’re not a marketing consultant for the pizza industry, but you niche it even more.

Bill: Right. That’s what I wanted to say. Sales scripting itself is an extremely lucrative field if you can get the expertise and reputation for that field. If you can do product innovation like I have just mentioned, this is also an extremely lucrative field just like copywriting. If you hear a master copywriter making money for this people, if you can do this, if you can run brainstorming sessions, that in itself is a niche. But, what I’m trying to do is besides the niches out there that you’re in advertising, you’re a marketing consultant for a special industries or professions, I’m trying to give people some ideas of what they can do for these other type of niches that are still in the marketing field and they’re using their creative juices.

Michael: Right, very good.

That’s the end of this recording with Bill Bodri on Creative Thinking and Brainstorming. Please make sure you refer back to the transcripts and reread and relisten to this interview several times. These interviews with Bill are packed with content. There’s so much content in here, there’s no way you’re going to be able to pick it up in one listening. I hope this has been helpful and please make sure you check back to HMA University for more recordings on consulting. Enjoy!

I hope this recording has been some of the best marketing advice you’ve heard in a long time. Richard’s proven system of uncovering hidden marketing assets in a business is based on his 15 years of marketing consulting and it works. Whether you’re a new business looking for a way to systematize your marketing, or if you want to be a marketing consultant helping small to medium sized business while making a very comfortable income working part time from home, Richard’s system can shortcut the learning process for you. For more information on Richard’s marketing system, call (858) 274-7851. That’s (858) 274-7851 and I promise you a valuable free gift. All you have to do is email me.