• What am I looking for?
• Why do I want it?
• What do I want it to do for the customer?
• What do I want it to do for me?
• What price range am I thinking of?
• Why do customers buy my products? There may be many more reasons why they buy your product or service than you realize. List as many reasons as you can.
• How do customers buy my product? How do they find out about it? Where do they have to go to buy it? How often do they buy it?
• How do customers actually use my product? It may not be what you think. For example, many people use the CD player in their car for listening to music. So do I, but I use it even more to listen to informational, educational, and training recordings; in essence, I convert my car into a rolling university. (I guess that makes me a true auto-didactic.)

• What benefits do my products and services offer? Develop a list; there should be one or more benefits for every feature. Quality is more important than quantity, but larger numbers of benefits can often be very persuasive
• Which benefits do I rank highest? Which do I think motivate customers the most to prefer your product? Are these benefits indispensable?
• Which benefits do my customers rank highest? This you can only learn by observing customers, and actually asking them what their preferences are. This knowledge is vital to choosing the right benefits to enhance.
• Which do they rank lowest? This is an especially important question because the answers may show you which benefits might be eliminated. But before you act on that information, be sure to also ask customers if they would miss those benefits m to the point of switching to other suppliers.
• Why are my benefits similar to, or even if better than, those offered by competitors? Were your product's benefits developed from actual observation of customers, or simply by copying competitors' benefits? It is important to review the origin of each benefit because what may have had value before may no longer have as much, if any.
• Why do these benefits exist? What was the reason for offering each specific benefit in the degree, quality, and quantity that it is offered? How did customers make their needs known?

• Make the place where you meet for brainstorming fun and enjoyable. Four bare walls and no windows wont' do! Add color, comfort, pictures, toys, gadgets, charts, paper, pens, pencils, colors, scissors, tape, flipcharts, and music.
• Project a series of pictures and drawings with things that are any or all of the following: unusual, clever, funny, exciting, beautiful, and inspiring. Invest a few minutes on puzzles, quizzes, brain- teasers and challenges that make you come up with ideas and solution.
• Jump, stretch, sing, dance, laugh, and move about - just enough to fill your lungs with air and get your blood circulating.
• Now, visualize what the end result should look like, and start generating a gazillion great ideas!

The answers to these exercises are at the end of this issue.

Recessions are when you need to be most creative. Innovation Wizard Michael Wynne, and famous author, Rita Emmett, (The Procrastinator's Handbook), will share The Magic of Creative Competition. Learn how to tap The Fountain of Inspiration to generate Million Dollar Ideas that outsell competition, and beat the Recession! This Free Teleseminar will be presented at 8:00 p.m. Central Daylight Time, 9:00 p.m. Eastern, and 6:00 p.m. Pacific, on Thursday, July 24, 2008. Mark the date on your calendar now, and stay tuned for the Teleseminar's specific contact information in our next newsletter. If you can't tune in for the Teleseminar, or you did but still want to hear it again, a CD will be available afterwards.

Someone stealing your customers? Concerned about price competition? You should be because, in a recession, your competitors will almost certainly lower their prices to steal your customers. Learn the strategies and tactics that overcome your customers' price objections, and get you the sale. Discover how the four basic mathematical operations, adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, help you defend your price against low-balling predators. To get this w0book, This and many other techniques for getting the sale without lowering your prices, are available at www.FreeProfitTips.com and download your copy of Never Lose a Sale on Price.

3. You are preparing a beverage for a party. The recipe requires exactly seven pints of juice. The problem is you don't have a seven-pint container. Instead, you have a five-pint container and a three-pint container. How do you measure exactly seven pints with these two containers?

   Solution. Fill the five-pint container with juice; empty it into the three-pint container. Empty the three-pint container, and pour the remaining two pints that still in the five-pint container into the three-pint container. Now, refill the five- pint container, and you have exactly seven pints between the two containers.