Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2014. The figure of a 19% annual return for more than 30 years for Warren Buffett and the reference to businesses weathering this crisis reflect early 2014.
For business reasons, for your sales career and even for the art of seduction, influencing people is a skill that can be learned if we follow the example of the most influential people. Influence basically means getting another person to do what you want them to do, whether that’s closing a deal, leading a team or guiding a client to sign a contract.
To begin with, and this is the part we can’t fake, people tend to follow results, not the person in question. In other words, we’ll follow the advice of an investor who has earned 19% a year on his portfolio for more than 30 years (Warren Buffett), while we won’t listen to investment tips from someone who keeps losing money. That point aside, how can we learn to influence others?
1. Listen.
To influence a person, we need to know who that person is and how they think. And the only way to achieve that is by listening to them. People also feel much more comfortable when they’re listened to, so even if we know what they’re going to tell us, we’ll listen anyway. The more they talk, the more information they’ll give us to counter later on. Information is power, and people give us that power for free. All you have to do is listen.
2. Ask lots of questions and keep listening.
We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak. Information is gathered by asking, and when the other person feels listened to, they won’t hesitate to give us more and more of it. The art of asking questions is the best way to gather all kinds of information that we can later use to our advantage. They’ll tell us their needs, their fears and their worries. In the end, we’ll have everything we need to influence them however we like.
3. Don’t hold back when it comes to praising the other person.
Very few people take the time to acknowledge what someone else has done well or what they like about them. If you want to influence an employee, make sure you praise them in public for everything they’ve contributed to the company. After that, they’ll jump off a cliff if you ask them to. In the same way, if you want a woman to like you, don’t tell her you preferred the green dress she wore the other day; tell her how much her eyes remind you of a famous actress. Tell a business owner how much you admire them for weathering this crisis in a way very few companies are managing to. That will open the door to a sale.
4. Build a personal connection you can both identify with.
It could be children of the same age or a similar hobby. Since we’re asking questions and listening, we’ll already have found something unusual about them that we also have or do. Bonds of any kind build trust. But never lie, because you’ll get caught and lose all their trust. For example:
I’ve got all of Justin Bieber’s albums too. What a coincidence!! 🙂
5. Talk more about your mistakes than your victories.
Increasingly, people who show off and are “all virtues” tend to arouse suspicion. By contrast, people who talk about their mistakes show enormous sincerity and humility, and they inspire trust because they’re clearly aware of their mistakes and therefore won’t make them again.
See also: How to be a more charismatic and persuasive leader
6. Give people what they want.
Always bearing in mind that this part is negotiable, if you manage to find out what they really want and you can give it to them, don’t hold back. In the world of sales, the steps might be different.
First we need to find out what they want, and then try to bring in what we want by showing them that it’s what they need. They’ll then come to the conclusion that what they need wasn’t what they originally wanted, because they didn’t know they needed it.
7. Gain a competitive advantage.
In an age when everyone communicates by instant messaging, email, social media or phone, the biggest competitive advantage we can gain is meeting face to face. Believe me, a lot of people miss talking to someone who looks them in the eye, seeing a smile that doesn’t look like an emoticon, rather than the canned language of emails. Some readers asked me how I managed to win the battle for the company’s clients. Among other things, it was down to this point: while the competition phoned them and sent emails, I took a little longer, but I visited them in person.
8. Always keep your promises.
Never promise something you know in advance you won’t deliver, or something that doesn’t depend on your own effort. If everyone knows you always keep your promises, they’ll find it very easy to trust you, and so they’ll let themselves be influenced by you.
Further reading
Featured image: régine debatty, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.
