PERSUASION AND INFLUENCE
Everyone is in sales of some kind. No matter what you do, you’re concerned with persuading others to see your point of view. Whether you’re getting your spouse to go out to dinner or getting your children to go to bed, you’re making a sale.
No one thinks of themselves this way. I was once addressing a roomful of senior accountants in a large firm. They’d brought me in to speak on the techniques of persuasion. I started with a simple question, “How many people here are in sales?”
The room went silent. One reason an accountant chooses accounting as a profession is they’ll never have to sell anything to anyone, leaving the potential for rejection very low.
I paused for a second and followed up with, “Perhaps I didn’t ask the question clearly enough. How many people here are really in sales?”
After a few more seconds of silence, the senior executive of the organization caught on. He slowly raised his hand and then looked around. As the other accountants saw the top man with his hand up, one by one it dawned on them that they were in sales as well.
Everyone Is In Sales
I then asked, “How many of you are here because you have the ability to bring in new business for the firm? How much of your income and your promotability depends upon your ability to increase the number of clients of the firm and your annual billings?”
Everyone raised their hands. “So,” I said, “everyone here is in sales. The only question is, how good are you at selling?”
It doesn’t matter who you are, your success in life will come from your ability to sell.
Selling Yourself, Selling Your Ideas
Public speaking is a form of selling. The principles that apply to making a sales presentation are the same principles that apply to speaking in public.
The more audience members like and trust you, the lower their fears are of accepting your message. The more they trust you, the more open they are to any recommendations you may make. Just like selling, the purpose of speaking is to persuade people to think and act differently than they would have in your absence.
You have a choice. You can be persuasive and influential, or you can be docile and passive. You can get people to cooperate with you, or you can go along and cooperate with them. The choice is yours.
And here’s the good news — selling is a learnable skill. All top salespeople were once poor salespeople. Many people in the top ten percent of sales today started in the bottom ten percent. With practice and repetition, you can learn the skills of selling.
Reduce Their Fear, Increase Your Effectiveness
Everyone fears being manipulated or taken advantage of. No one wants to be sold something they don’t want, don’t need, or can’t afford. No one wants to be talked into something they’ll regret.
Therefore, new prospects are conditioned from past experience to be cautious, doubtful, and suspicious. When you approach them, you trigger an automatic fear of making a mistake. Your first job in persuasive speaking is to reduce that fear and replace it with confidence.
How can you do that?
Well, before I answer that, do you know what the most important word in selling and in social life is?
Credibility. The most important word for success in public affairs, speaking, selling, and business is credibility. The more people believe you, the more open they are to being persuaded by you.
If you are credible, then a prospect is more likely to trust you and be open to your influence.
The Seven Steps to Effective Selling
The process of selling to one person, a group, or an audience consists of seven steps. When you speak to persuade, you must remember these seven logical steps. If you miss any one of these, your persuasion efforts will fail.
- Prospecting
The first step is in finding people who can and will buy your product or service within a reasonable period of time. First you must determine your ideal customer and their demographics.
2. Establishing Rapport and Trust
Then you must build rapport and trust. You do this by asking good questions about what’s going on in the prospect’s personal and business life and listening attentively to the answers. You then explain how your product or service has helped other people in the same situation as the prospect.
Open and honest questions demonstrate you’re interested in the prospect. Listening builds trust. The more they trust you, the more open they are to being influenced by you.
3. Identifying Needs Accurately
Determining that this is a genuine prospect and establishing rapport and trust will get you further ahead in the sales conversation than most people. But it’s only when you and the customer agree that they have a genuine and immediate need that your product or service can satisfy that the customer becomes interested.
4. Making the Presentation
The fourth stage is to present your product or service in a persuasive way as the ideal choice for this customer. It doesn’t have to be perfect — it simply has to be the best choice at the moment to enable the customer to solve the problem.
In your presentation, repeat the information discovered when identifying needs, and then show the prospect step by step how the problem can be solved with your product or service. Your presentation is an act of showing the customer that your product or service is the ideal remedy to take away the pain.
5. Answering Objections
There are no sales without objections. The prospect will almost always ask you a series of questions about price, terms, conditions, etc.
The best salespeople are those who have thought through every logical objection that a customer might give and have developed a clear and convincing answer to each objection. When the customer brings up the objection, the salesperson acknowledges it, compliments the customer for bringing it up, and then explains how that objection is easily dealt with.
6. Closing the Sale
The sixth part of selling is to close the sale. You do this by asking the customer to make a buying decision now.
Your ultimate success will be largely determined by your ability to help the customer overcome any hesitation or doubt and make a firm buying decision.
7. Resales and Referrals
The seventh step is to get resales and referrals from your satisfied customers. Take good care of your customers after the sale, especially immediately after they have made a buying decision.
It is right after they’ve decided to buy that they’re most likely to experience buyer’s remorse and change their mind. Be prepared for this. Give considerable thought to how you’ll treat the customer after the sale. Make them so satisfied that they’ll buy again and recommend you to their friends.
Summary
- Everyone is in sales of some kind.
- The same principles involved in selling are involved in influential and persuasive public speaking.
- The most important word in success in public affairs is credibility.
- There are seven stages to an effective sales presentation: Prospecting; Establishing Rapport and Trust; Identifying Needs Accurately; Making the Presentation; Answering Objections; Closing the Sales; Resales and Referrals.
