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Management Services Winter 2012
conversationally how to elicit their value system and assess how they prioritise. By doing this, you aid your colleague or client to come to a solution which best fits his values and support his or her beliefs. Body language is also a major element of
communication, and as such is a key element of sales training. The persuader or facilitator becomes practised in how this can be used to create a climate of comfort and progress in meeting ‘win- win’ outcomes.
Stage 3: Identifying needs Here, the traditional approach to influencing is strongly countered by our consultative approach to persuasion and influence. This activity is about the needs and wants of the clients – so keep quiet, and focus all your attention on the client.
Persuading is about listening and refining differences – listening to concerns and objections and then dealing realistically with them. If you have done a good job in building rapport, then this stage of questioning is a natural follow on.
One of the things I do with my clients is asking many questions. If you fail to do this, you will not be able to link need and value to the service that you provide in stage 4. You have to become a great questioner and probe to find your client’s key concerns and wants. You will all the time be assessing these against his or her values and the things that make them tick, and when objections start to surface. To ensure that you deal with the objections, you have to create a strong questioning technique to effectively assess your client’s thoughts on the process.
At this stage, it’s also important to examine key preferences in how the
Persuasion strategies
“Be at one with your client – people like people like themselves.”
client or colleague structures and views the model of their world. This helps build a ‘motivational map’ to see whether people are predisposed ‘towards’ a particular value or are ‘away from’ orientated.
Stage 4: Exploring options
Much of this influence and persuasion process is based on conversational questioning and is not scripted. This means the facilitator, consultant, sales person; persuader etc has to be extremely flexible. As consultant, facilitator, persuader or sales person, you have to establish value for your client before you can progress and reach agreement. You have to establish higher value to assist them to
understand how you establish value. Once you have done this they will be comfortable. You have to establish value to get their problem to disappear.
Stage 5: Enabling agreement – ‘win-win’ – and closure
If you have committed 50% of your energies to preparation, establishing rapport and asking questions in stages 1, 2 and 3 and an additional 45% to establishing value and linking to your services in stage 4, then the final 5% is about finalising the agreement in stage 5. Coming to a ‘win-win’ agreement should be a natural conclusion to consultative influencing, but you still have to close the agreement. It is surprising how few people or persuaders
actually make that close and finalise things.
Review and summary This article is the third in a series focusing on the persuasion paradigm and the persuasion process. You can see that the process can work in variety of contexts and in a range of industries. We personally have used the process for consulting assignments, developing learning strategies in difficult situations, training a variety of staff in change skills, coaching, customer management, negotiating and consulting, selling professional services and products. The major learning about this approach is that it is based on a flexible interpersonal model that creates a climate of consultation leading to deep
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