HOW TO HAVE INFLUENCE IN SALES

Sales is all about influence. It’s about changing someone’s mind and convincing someone to invest their money and time into something.

You could have the best product/ service in the world with a so say incredible pitch which explains all the perks and stats and still be unable to close a deal… you might even find it hard to secure a second conversation.

Why? Because sales is more than just having a good product, it’s about being able to show people why the product is good for them. It’s about making the product unique, whilst making them feel unique by how you communicate with them about it. This requires influence.

But how can you be a more influential salesperson?

YOU NEED TO BE LIKABLE TO BE INFLUENTIAL 

Before you get into any extraordinary communication strategies, just be a nice person.

No one with a mean, arrogant personality makes influential relationships – unless they use fear to get it, but those types of relationships won’t last anyway.

First impressions matter. Everyone will remember the first conversation they had with someone, and if they remember from that conversation someone who’s standoffish, rude, and unrelatable, they’ll be completely closed off to anything you try to sell them and you’ll be very unlikely to have a relationship beyond the initial call. 

People buy from people they like. People trust the judgement of people they like. And people definitely don’t build relationships with people they don’t like.

BUILD RAPPORT AND TRUST TO BUILD INFLUENCE

Any likeable person can build rapport – it just depends if they make that a priority. Rapport is where you have a mutual understanding of other people’s feelings or ideas, something you need to establish if you want to influence. 

If you don’t know someone, you don’t know how to sell to someone. You don’t know their pain points and what would interest them. As a result, you won’t be able to affect them, their ideas, and their willingness to invest in your product/ service.

By building rapport, it doesn’t just give you the opportunity to learn more about your prospect, it gives you the opportunity to build trust. The very fact that you want to learn more about them, as well as telling them more about you, especially outside of the specific conversation of a sale, shows most prospects that you’re a good person.

But where rapport can happen within the first call, trust might take months. This is where many salespeople either feel discouraged and become pushy, or they give up and lose out on a great relationship. 

Influence is also persistence, and the longer you communicate with someone, the easier it is for them to understand your viewpoint about anything, especially a product/ service.

MAKE THE PRODUCT FEEL PERSONAL TO INFLUENCE

Influence is all about influencing people to believe something, feel something, and want something.

In sales, you need to influence people to believe the product is good, feel good when thinking about the product, and eventually want the product. 

Any great salesperson knows never to assume that a product sounds good from the get-go. They know to make the product relevant to the individual person they’re selling to and then influence them to feel like they need it for XYZ reasons. 

Once you’ve built rapport with a person, you know their pain points and their goals, this part is so much easier. Why? Because the prospect will spend more time thinking about why the product is good for them, their business, or their needs over thinking about the product itself and its core benefits. 

People always want to know what’s in it for them and if you can’t show them, it’ll be almost impossible (and tiring) to influence. Because influence is a lot more indirect than outwardly selling, it’s about planting loads of seeds in someone’s mind and leaving them to grow it. 

- Written by Shannon Matthews

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