Woo: Survey Your Situation
March 4, 2008 by admin
Filed under Persuasion, Sales
(27101)
To become a skilled persuader, you need self-awareness of your own strengths and weaknesses as a communicator of ideas. You’ll have a preferred channel of communication and preferred persuasion style. By being aware of these factors in advance, you can try to orient everything you do to align with the areas where you are strongest.
Channels of communication
There are six basic channels of communication that typically get used in business:
1. Interest-based persuasion: where you pitch your idea as being in the other party’s best interests first and foremost. You induce others to go along because it will be good for them.
2. Authority: where you give an order to someone who is lower in the hierarchy than you are and expect them to do what you say irrespective of their personal concerns.
3. Politics: where you gain some clout by convincing others to go along with what you’re suggesting, thereby making it harder for a boss to say no.
4. Rationality: where you justify a proposal on the basis of its own merits that are logical and reasonable.
5. Vision or inspiration and emotion: where you try to get people to go along with what you say by appealing to their overriding sense of purpose, values or beliefs.
6. Relationships: where you rely on your network of friends and associates to open the doors that will make it easier for people to say yes.
Selling ideas is very rarely a matter of forcing or coercing people to do what you say. Instead, Woo-persuasion is about aligning interests, values and relationships so people find it easier to say yes rather than no. It’s also a matter of figuring out which channels of communication your counterparts are attuned to and sending the appropriate messages on those channels.
In addition to these various channels of communication, there are also five styles of persuasion that can be determined along two basic dimensions:
| Self-Oriented | Other-Oriented | |
| High Volume | Driver | Promoter |
| Advocate | ||
| Low Volume | Commander | Chess Player |
The five persuasion styles are:
1. The Driver: who tends to come across as:
Do this my way or hit the highway.
Drivers can be overbearing and one dimensional, but if they are dedicated to an organization’s mission, they can also be highly persuasive.
2.The Driver: who speaks from a position of quiet confidence and authority. This style uses expertise combined with finesse to make points in an understated way.
3.The Promoter: generally outgoing and gregarious people who engender enthusiasm in others. This style is necessarily assertive, as not everyone’s interests are aligned.
4. The Chess Player: someone who operates the levers of interests, relationships and politics behind the scenes rather than in the open. This style involves plotting a set of moves that brings about the desired outcome.
5. The Advocate: someone who blends a moderate but persistent level of enthusiasm with a balance between self-and other-oriented perspectives. Advocates use the full range of tools to get things done. This style requires experience and sound judgment.
Since you are the central player in the Art of Woo, you must first become self-aware before you can gain skill in persuasion. You need to know your own strengths and your own strengths and weaknesses, your preferred channel or cannels of communication and your natural persuasion style in order to be involved in the process in an authentic way.
1.Survey your situation
Once you’ve laid this kind of foundation, step 1 in the overall Woo process of selling your ideas requires that you start by doing some very specific things:
1. Defining in detail the problem you’re trying to solve.
2. Researching relentlessly to know what others have tried.
3. Letting your subconscious mull over the idea for a while.
4. Catching the flash of insight that often comes.
5. Shaping your raw idea into a robust, workable solution.
By the end of this polishing process, you need to have a well thought out concept that is ready to sell to the decision makers.
1. How do decisions like this get made in my organization?
2. Who should I woo first to get entry into that process?
3. What follow-up strategy will be required to keep moving?
Most organizations have a formal organizational chart that sets out how things get done. In practice, however, there’s more than likely an unofficial version that embodies how things really get done. You need to map out what pathway your idea will take so you can actively guide the process.
stepping stone
strategy–the sequence of steps you’ll need to follow to get your idea acted upon. In most cases, this usually involves determining who to call on and in what order in order to generate buy-in for your idea. Most stepping stone strategies will be a logical sequence of getting people within your organization:
1. To help your further polish your idea.
2. To suggest your idea to their boss.
3. To get enthusiastic about what is suggested.
4. To approve the allocation of resources to your idea.
5. To act as allies and support your idea.
6. To make decisions about your idea.
7. To implement your idea.
People tend to believe you more when you yourself believe in what you are selling. By engaging in a thorough job of searching for, discovering, and shaping your idea, you will have a much better story to tell about it as you present it to others. It will be a story you can believe in, and that very belief will help make you more persuasive.
–G. Richard Shell & Mario Moussa
The Art of Woo
March 3, 2008 by admin
Filed under Books, Persuasion, Sales
Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas
by G. Richard Shell & Mario Moussa
(27100)
Relationship-based persuasion almost always follows a distinctive and repeatable four-stop process:
The Art of Woo provides tools for a critically important activity in professional life: selling your ideas to people within the context of ongoing, important relationships. If you want to be a player in your organization, a successful partner with your customers or suppliers, a leader in your community, or even a good parent, you need to woo people to your point of view by putting your ideas across in convincing, relationship-friendly ways. Regardless of the context for your idea sale, the four-step Woo process constitutes the best practice for this art.
–G. Richard Shell and Mario Moussa
Sell your ideas or WOO (Win Others Over):
1. Survey your situation:
2. Confront the five barriers:
3. Make your pitch:
4. Secure commitments:
Deal with politics
Integrate Your Customers into an Exclusive Club
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A Customer-only Club Is Your Greatest Source of Support
If you create a community of people who have brought from you in the past, there are a lot of things you can do:
Overall, having availble an excstmer-only club further strengthens the perception that you’re not just a salesperson but an important resource. Over a people will come to trust you more and more. They will have no hesitation in recommeding you to their friends because they will see you as a high-value consultant.
This is all part and parcel of being perceived as a persuader rather than a manipulator. Traditional sales techniques are only needed when someone does not want to buy. When you’re entering into an arrangement that will be mutually beneficial. If you’re viewed as a trusted consultant with considerable expertise in your field, then people will naturally choose to do business with you. Every part of your system is designed to finetune your persuasive eather than your manipulative skill sets.
Honesty and Integrity Is the Best Policy
If you’re honest and have integrty:
No Selling, Just Buying
In essence, sales manipulators are only focused on what benefite them. Persuaders genuinely want to create a win-win situation that benefits everyone. If you have high ethics, prospective customers will pick up on that and want to do business with with you. They will also be happy to act as references for you and to steer their friends doing business with you as well.
Top sales professionals don’t need to sell. Instead, they create the conditions where people want to do business with them and in fack seek them out proactively. No selling takes place–just buying. If you can attract people who are ready to buy and then induce them to go ahead, this is always going to be easier than making presentations, handing objections and aggressively closing the sale. Top sales pros don’t need to memorize their tactics-they just treat everyone ethically.
How to Integrate Your Customers into an Exclusive Club
There’s an unfortunate myth that great salespeople are born, not made. That’s simply not true. Top salespeople are made through knowledge, and by learning to acquire the skill set of a top salesperson.
Master persuaders are top sales pros because people want to buy from master persuaders who they know they can trust. When you operate from a position of integrity, and seeking to create a win-win outcome that benfits the prospect as well as yourself, your nonverbal communication conveys an air of confidence, power, respct, prestihe, and trust. The higher your ethice, the stringer your nonverbal communication becomes. Prospects will want to be around you and will want to do business with you. They won’t know exactly why–they may simply describe you as ‘likeable’–but who cares if they know why or not? The bottom line is that you’re going to get the sale, and future sales, and referrals!
The ability to speak well in front of a group is a skill that no sales pro lacks. It definitely put me on the fast track to becoming a top sales pro and it will do the same for you.
Becoming a recognzed expert is one of–if not the–most powerful things you can do to supercharge your sales career. Prospects forget about why they should or should not buy from you. They consider the fact that you are a tecognized expert who can help them in really big ways if they buy from you.
I’ve been accused by my critics of turning salespeople into order takers. To them I say, what sane salesperson does not want to be an order taker? What I’m really doing is getting salespeople to stop selling, and turning them into top sales pros who know how to create the conditions for a sale to take place without selling–just buying.
–Frank Rumbauskas Jr.
Develop Your Sales Systems
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Focus on Sales
Most sales consist of two distinct parts:
1. Face-to-face meetings with decision makers.
2. Everything else that has to be done to make the sale.
If you become very good at actually making the sales in those face-to-face meetings by virtue of the fact that you’re an expert in your field, then you really should set up systems for all the other stuff and get someone else to do them. With the technology available today, it has become feasible to automate or outsource many of there support fumctions entirely.
If you have assistants handle all of these routine tasks rather than you, this will further solidify your position as an expert in your field. These people will either work for you for a flat rate, or if you really want them to put their whole heart and soul into it, offer them a chunk of your commission generated on each sale. This will make more money.
for you in the run, because it will maximize the amount of time you spend working with buyers rather than lookers.
Steps to Planning Sales System
A reasonable timeline for developing an appropriate kind of automated sales system using these principles will probably look something like this:
1. Work on increasing your know-how so you can credibly become an expert in your field. Build a foundation of internal knowledge and self-confidence that you will perform well.
2. Start finding tangible ways to provide value without expecting any direct sales in return. This will be something simple you can start working on right away.
3. Begin publishing some articles online. Create proof of your expert status and recognition by writing and publishing articles online. Give them away for free.
4. Issue some online press releases. Use a service so they get picked up by Yahoo! News and Google News. You can then include these in your media kit, which you start developing.
5. Start using your media kit to generate more media coverage and free publicity. Send out media kits and make yourself available as a resource for research. Be available.
6. Create your own personal website using the material from your media kit. Add links to published articles and press releases. Make an e-book available for download from your site.
7. Start actively seeking opportunities to speak to speak at local networking events. Develop a presentation idea that is topical and interesting, and make your avaliability known to organizers.
8. Find ways to automate your sales precess through outsourcing or the use of automation. Focus on the area you’re best at and hire others to do everything else that is required.
The whole point is that everything needs to unfold in a logical order. You need to build a foundation first before before you can move away from cold calling to a referral only business model. Similaly, each step in your system needs to build on the previous ones. You can add whatever is needed for the requirements of your particular industry or profession, but the logical sequence is important.
Sit down and analyze single task you do in an average day. Then you need to ask whether each task absolutely requires your hands-on involvement or whether there isn’t some service or piece of software that could perform it just as well. For every task you’re best at and whem to maximize your income.
How to Develop Automated Sales Systems
This process of automation gives a tremendous amount of leverage, and leverage is something that all top sales pros use to their advantage. Leverage simply means the use of another person’s time or talents to get a job done for you. In my business, I’ve hired out just about every task I had previouslu been doing myself. That’s why I have time to sit here and write. My time is now entirely devoted to thinking, creating new books and other products, and to my coaching and learning program.
–Frank Rumbauskas Jr.
Provide Value to Everyone Who Interacts with You
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Value is what you provide without any expectation of payment. Find ways to deliver more value. If you do that consistently well, people will recognize what you’re doing and reward you with their business. Value is the purest form of integrity.
Having No Expectations Brings the Greatest Rewards
If you can get into the habit of providing value to the people you meet irrespective of whether they do business with you or not, you’re positioning yourself to be a long-term success. So how exactly can you do this?
Deal from a Position of Power
In you concentrate on delivering value first and foremost: with no expectation whatsoever of payment: you transform your image from that of a salesperson to one of being a trusted business adviser. You’ll stand out from the crowd, and prospective customers will seek you out rather than having to be forced to see you. This is a great way to do business, because you’ll be dealing from a position of power rather than being subservient.
Top sales professionals always deal from a position of power. Using old-school sales methods of manipulation always puts you in a position of weakness. When you provide value and then people seek you out to do business with you, a new dynamic at work.
Power always accrues to the person who has the least need for the transaction to happen. If you have to make the sale to pay your rent, then you’ll be nervous and the prospective client will pick up on that unease and use their position of power to advantage. If you reverse that situation and hold the high ground yourself, you’ll do better.
To be in a position of power:
The key point is that top sales professionals come from a position of power and then maintain it throughout. They know they are filling a prospective customer’s need rather than meeting one of their own needs to make a sale. If the prospect has called you to come and see then have to adroitly manage the interaction so that power does not slip away.
The Internet Gives You Infinite Reach
In today’s business world, being Internet-savvy is essential if you’re to have any hope of being in a position of power. The Internet is this generation’s premier mechanism for generating leads, creating professionals until you master the use of the Internet in marketing.
At the very least, you need to establish and maintain your own website. This will enable people to find out about you before you arrive in person. And on your website, you should offer free newsletters, reports and e-books. This is a very direct way to offer value regardless of whether people do business with you or not.
Your website and its reports will:
If you make an e-book available for download from your website that contains very helpful information that is also devoid of any direct sales pitches, all kinds of great things can happen. Incorporate a link back to your website and give people permission to forward the e-book with loads of information and you’ll find it goes all over the place generating people who will be more inclined to do business with you in future.
How to Gain Power and Provide Exceptional Value