Woo: Survey Your Situation

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To have any hope of selling your ideas to anyone else, you need to be crystal clear in your own mind what you’re trying to do. You also must figure out who you need to speak with and in what order. If you know all the players well, you’ll already know how to adjust your presentation style to maximize your chances of success. People will only agree if you’re passionate about what you’re suggesting, so show that.

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:

Whether you’re trying to tailor your announcements to your intended audience (other-oriented) or you’re more likely to make blunt announcements of your point of view regardless of who’s listening (self-oriented).

Whether you’re forward in actively engaging others (high volume) or whether you prefer to communicate in quiet conversational settings instead (low volume)

	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

Assess persuasion styles

Polish your idea

Map decision process

Devise stepping-stone strategy

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:

First up, you need to take your raw idea and develop it into a polished concept. Generally, this will involve:

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.

Once you have a polished idea, you then need to map out the influence process you’ll use methodically to sell it. To start this off, ask three questions:

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.

Armed with a good view of the lay of the land, you then come up with a

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