A Beginner's Guide to Improving Your Business Influencing Skills
The ability to influence others is a highly desirable skill in the world of business. Effective influencing is one of the major keys to success in sales negotiation and for business leaders and managers. The ability to influence how their teams think and behave can be crucial to implementing business change and overcoming obstacles and challenges. Influence, persuasion and assertiveness are closely related business skills and all are valuable to leaders, business managers and sales managers.
Leading business skills training provider Maguire Training offers a highly practical and effective course aimed at anyone wishing to improve and enhance their influencing skills. In Influencing and Assertiveness, delegates will learn techniques and strategies which will help them to influence and gain agreement from others. They will also learn how to distinguish between assertive behaviours and those which are aggressive, gaining the listening and persuasion skills they need to influence their employees or customers without jeopardising business relationships.
Influence is dependent upon power
For a person to influence someone else they must possess power of some description. In this context, an individual's personal power can take many forms; it might stem from their possession of particular knowledge, skills or experience, their ability to issue rewards, their business achievements, or the notable connections and relationships they have established, for example.
Individuals who are considered by others to possess power are those most capable of influencing the thoughts, feelings and behaviours of those who don't.
Improve your business influencing skills in four simple steps
Step 1 - Explore, understand and show respect for the other person's point of view
In order to influence, it is necessary first to build a rapport with them and gain their confidence. Actively seek to understand their position, concerns and goals by asking appropriate questions. Respect their opinions rather than being dismissive.
Step 2 - Explain how your plan addresses the other party's needs and will benefit them
Having gained an understanding of the other person's position, you should be able to adapt and tailor your plan or ideas to accommodate, as far as possible, their needs and concerns. Explain how you will do this in motivational terms, persuading them of the benefits of your proposal.
Step 3 - Anticipate, address and overcome objections
Overcoming objections may or may not require some degree of compromise, but in order to obtain buy-in for your ideas or plans, you should be able to demonstrate that potential objections have been taken into consideration and addressed.
Step 4 - Gain agreement and move forward
By this stage, you should have shown the other party that you understand their position, having demonstrated how your proposal will provide benefit, countered any concerns and objections and fostered enthusiasm for the adoption of your ideas. Having influenced the other party to share your vision, it is time to seek their formal agreement and move ahead with implementation.
How can we help?
Whilst this simplistic framework can help to enhance your ability to influence others within the business sphere, there is a wealth of further knowledge, tactics and strategies that can be learnt and deployed to help become a powerful business influencer. With formal instruction from Maguire Training, business leaders and managers can acquire this valuable skill. Influencing Strategies, a partner course to 'Influencing and Assertiveness' enables delegates to further improve their influencing skills and is conveniently provided as an online training course courtesy of Maguire Training's innovative E-learning platform.
