How Creative Directly Impacts Business Sales

“Creative is no longer a fancy art department, but one that delivers value to the business. The pressure to create data-driven goals has expanded into the creative team.”

---Andy Brenits, Insource Board President

The pressure is on for creative teams. Typically small, composed of 20 or fewer staff, corporate creative teams are now the driving force for sales. According to McKinsey, companies that foster creativity outperform their peers in terms of financial metrics including organic revenue growth. Here’s why and how you should hire creatives.

Creative Teams Form the Core of Your Business

To begin with, the creative team is involved in every aspect of production from designing web pages and products to managing social media and crafting a marketing strategy.

Designers must find cost-effective raw materials, engineers must be able to navigate and adjust complex operating systems, web page designers must find ways to attract, retain, and engage visitors on a company site, and social media marketers must come up with ways to spread the word and create buzz around a brand. For many companies, the advent of digitalization has brought the sales team front and center to the point where they have become the core of business activity.

A Tall Task

If you doubt the importance of creative teams, consider how they are held strictly to account. The 2018 In-House Creative Management Report from the in-house creative organization InSource and creative workflow solutions firm inMotionNow surveyed 400 marketing and creative professionals to get their insights.

The report found that creative teams are judged according to three results: their impact on sales, the feedback from their target audience, and the satisfaction of internal stakeholders such as the CEO and CFO. That’s only three benchmarks, but great results in all three areas requires that a creative team’s presence be felt in just about every area of business.

Why Creative Teams Are So Integral to Sales

The following four points illustrate the complexities of a creative team’s functions, and shows where creativity is crucial to sales.

1. Sales is now more about innovating the customer experience

In a fast-moving, competitive market, companies are looking for “wow” moments—the opportunity to surprise and thrill customers. Researchers have long known that the element of surprise changes behavior; it makes an impression and can lead to return sales, but creating these moments requires salespeople who can find ways to personalize the consumer experience. This might mean monitoring social media to gauge customer sentiment or engaging in feedback with customers and sending them notes that relate to a particular customer’s life. These are ways to emotionally engage customers and keep them loyal.

2. Creativity improves marketing, branding, and output

If a customer is emotionally engaged, that customer will drive a certain amount of sales for you through word-of-mouth. According to McKinsey, emotionally engaged customers are three times more likely to both recommend a product and to renew their purchase.

3. Right-brained thinkers round out a sales team

Why is emotion so important? According to Ted Ings, trainer and customer experience expert, when it comes to marketing and sales, “people may shop with logic, but they buy on emotion.” Ing explains that most advertising relies 20 percent on logic and 80 percent creativity because people make most of their decisions with the right-side of the brain that controls emotion. So, while it is all well and good to have a marketing or sales team full of logical left-brained thinkers, the right-brained thinkers might better understand how to design a brand or a campaign that will appeal to the customer’s emotions.

4. Where analytics meet emotions

Thus, having nimble-minded engineers, savvy social media and web experts, and au courant product designers is no longer enough. An article by Adam Brandenburger of The Harvard Business Review suggests that corporate strategy is no longer powered by analytical tools but is now a creative process where the strategist must look for “connections across traditional boundaries, whether by linking a product and a service, two technologies, the upstream and the downstream, or other ingredients.”

Such connections across traditional boundaries, once found, can lead to new technologies and innovations that can catapult a startup to a unicorn in short order. But for this to happen, the consumer must understand, demand, and builds an emotional connection with the product or technology. Companies are striving to find new and effective channels to educate consumers on

Building the Best Creative Teams

The 2018 In-House Creative report finds that a team of fewer than 10 creatives may often be expected to support the demands of over 50 stakeholders in a business with $500 million or more in revenue. Thus, you need the best creative team you can get.

A professional recruiter, however, can help. Recruiters know how to determine the size of the creative team a firm needs, the candidates that are best-suited to the particular creative roles, and how to reach those candidates. They are skilled in screening candidates and matching their skills and experience with a particular industry and business focus. Professional recruiters understand the need for targeted searches, skills-based screening, attractive benefits, and competitive compensation packages.

Your bottom line is increasingly dependent on the quality of your creative staff, invest in this most important area or risk paling into creative insignificance next to your competitors. Learn more about how to build your creative team with us today.