Seth Godin and Hugh MacLeod have some excellent thoughts on Creativity. While gathering ideas is wonderful, as an entrepreneur ideas I find ideas everywhere! The problem I have is how to filter most of them out, since I cannot work on all of them. And really the hardest part of creativity and ideas — is Execution.

I give my ideas to my clients — most look at them and go right back to the status quo. The client looks up from his desk a year later and nothing has changed, except revenue is down.

Why? He had all those ideas that he heard from me (and others) at ISPCON or on a tele-seminar or read in a blog or email from RAD-INFO. Or worse he paid that marketing idea guy for ideas. It’s planning and execution people. The BIZ 3: Plan, Execute and Focus. Ideas are seeds – they still need to be planted, watered, and harvested. The easy part is getting the seeds.

Maybe you are not a very good farmer. As Gerber expresses in the E-Myth it takes 3 types to run a successful enterprise (entrepreneur, manager and technician). It could be that you need coaching to keep your eye on the prize (or to figure out the prize). Someone who will hold you accountable is helpful in achieving your goal – like making that idea work for your business.

Intelliverse is a VoIP provider who recently scaled back its channel partner staff (see Phone+ story).

He added the company will change the focus of the partner program and the personnel changes reflect that strategy. “Because we were able to get so many good agents and so much activity, we are going to concentrate on the agents that we were able to recruit and start making them drive revenue,” Paterno said. “That was our plan anyway at this point in the year — to switch from partner recruitment to cultivation, if you will.”

It is not about how many agents or sales people you have. It’s how many meet expectations. Far better to utilize your resources to aid your current crop of people to improve their results, than to churn agents, uselessly spending time, money and effort on unqualified agents or unproductive agents.

The best way to improve results is to identify the hot niches and targets and to recognize the best performance. A couple of ways to do this:

1) Weekly Wins – go over one sale per week. What was proposed; why that vendor; what was the key; who pulled the trigger; what did the follow up consist of.

2) Case Studies – present a case study per week or month that defines a niche like retail or healthcare. In addition, demonstrate the ROI or the key selling points for that specific case as well as objections presented and competitors involved.
3) Ideas for prospecting or lead generation especially as it pertains to niche marketing.

These are a just a couple of ways to aid the improvement of your agents (or sales teams). Other ways include providing CRM OnDemand, lead generation (such as InfoUSA or D&B or Harte), and coaching. For 1099 agents, you can simply provide these features by negotiating a discount rate with providers.

My coach, Keith Rosen, will be giving a Webex seminar called Permission-Based Prospecting: Attract More Qualified Prospects, Close More Sales on August 1, 2007 @ 1 PM Eastern. Register here at no charge. Quick hour of some pretty good ideas about Prospecting, the first step in the sales process. (Prospect, Qualify, Propose, and Close).

Keith has written two Idiot’s Guides – Guide to Closing the Sale and Guide to Cold Calling. If you are in sales (or own a business) you need to know how to close more sales. Join in. It’s a worthwhile hour.