You influence others all day long during meetings, presentations, and interpersonal conversations. Don’t let these three mistakes keep you from getting the results you need.
Influence Mistake #1: Focusing Only On Content
Content is only part of the equation. I work with a lot of people who have great content that simply isn’t heard because it isn’t delivered effectively.
I recently listened to a man give a five-minute presentation. The content was good, and he thought he nailed it. A question during Q&A surprised him because he addressed it during his talk.
When we asked the rest of the group if anyone heard the point during his presentation, everyone said no. His content was great, but key information was lost because of poor delivery.
Compelling content is a first step. Once you have that, it’s critical to deliver it in a way people will hear and remember it.
Influence Mistake #2: Ignoring the Importance of an Emotional Connection
Relying solely on data won’t persuade people. Data doesn’t make an emotional connection, you do. It is difficult to get people to change if they don’t think you understand them and care about the challenges they face. It’s difficult to convince people to buy if it seems that you care more about the sale than the relationship. It’s difficult to get a team energized around an initiative if you don’t express any passion about it.
Remember, data doesn’t drive people to change, emotion does. Find ways to connect on an emotional level and you’ll increase the likelihood of achieving the impact you need.
Influence Mistake #3: Doing All the Talking
People often focus so much on what to say that they forget to listen. You can’t truly understand someone if you don’t listen. What does the customer think of their current solution? What are your team’s biggest concerns with the change? What part of the project is the most important to your boss?
Understanding your listeners is critical to influence. Once people feel understood, they are more likely to listen to what you have to say.
We’ve been helping people influence for 30 years. We will help you leverage your strengths, identify your blind spots, and remove the obstacles holding you back. If influence is critical to your success, we can help. We guarantee results in our courses, so you’ve got nothing to lose.
We can help you avoid the ways you may be undermining your influence and teach you:
- How to deliver valuable content in a way that people hear and remember it.
- How to apply several strategies to make an emotional connection that will increase your ability to get buy in, drive results, and increase productivity.
- How your natural listening style impacts your ability to influence as well as how to adapt to others’ listening styles to deliver content in a way they want to hear it.
Join us for a comprehensive 8 week hybrid course –
Unleash Your Influence: The Master Class.
You’ll consistently develop influence skills over 8 weeks that will change how people respond to you in meetings, presentations, and one on one. The combination of proven content, expert coaching, and weekly opportunities to practice lead to consistent improvement that you and those around you will notice immediately.
Why develop your influence skills?
- Teams won’t follow leaders who can’t articulate their vision in a way that moves them to take action.
- People will resist change unless you can influence them that the new course of action is in their best interest.
- Prospects won’t buy from sales people who don’t listen and can’t clearly articulate the problem they can solve.
- Your ideas will go nowhere if you can’t get people to listen to them.
