6 Effective Ways to Influence Someone

Rana Kordahi - Director and Founder of Limitlessminds 14th April 2019

 1. They Need to like You 

If people don’t like you then they won’t respect you. If they won’t respect you, then it may be difficult for them to listen to anything you have to say. Rapport is the power to influence. It’s a first and a must. People generally make up their minds about you when they first meet you. Try to find common ground, such as shared interests. Use open-ended questions to discover more about the person. Remember to be genuine when taking an interest in the other person, not just ask questions for the sake of it. Start your day in business thinking, who can I help today, rather than who can I take from today. The more value you bring into people's lives the more trust you will build. 

2. You Need Credibility

Would you like people to trust in what you tell them? Then It’s essential to be an expert on the subject matter. If you want to pitch an idea or convince a person about a political belief, then know your stuff and do the research. What are the pros and cons? Do you know what counterarguments may be used against you? Another component of credibility is integrity and being transparent. Make sure that you have no hidden agendas in your message and clear about your intentions. Also position yourself as the authority in your field by being dedicated to learning, growing and being the best.

3. Know Your Why

When you start with why rather than what, you begin to speak to people’s emotions. As Simon Sinek says in his book START WITH WHY “People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.” Great leaders begin to inspire once they know their WHY. Why do you do what you do? Why does your business exist? Why do you get out of bed in the morning? Why are you an animal rights advocate? Once you start to know your purpose and communicate it to others, they will begin to feel inspired.

4. Ask The Right Questions

When people believe that something was their idea, they typically feel more motivated to follow through. Although you may have the ideal solutions and information, asking the right questions is key in helping people change behaviour. Salespeople, coaches and counsellors, use questioning techniques all the time in order to evoke change in a person. In sales for example, instead of telling the customers what they need, they use reflective questions in order to get the customer to buy. Rather than saying “This product will help you feel more relaxed.” You can turn that statement into a question “How do you think this product will help you?” By answering the question, the customer begins to sell themselves the benefits of buying the product.

5. Autonomy Support

Professor of psychology and founder of self-determination theory (SDT) Edward Deci says that there are two types of motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic. The first comes from within (love, enjoyment, passion, satisfaction) the latter is external: pressure, recognition, family or tangible rewards such as money or grades. Many studies have proved that the carrot and stick no longer work. If you want commitment and lasting results, it is intrinsic motivation that inspires sustainable change. It’s important that those who you want to influence have autonomous support, rather than controlled support. You can always start by listening, encouraging their efforts and try to eliminate words such as, “you should” and “have to” but begin to understand by taking their perspective into account. Once you attack and insult people, they stop listening. So it’s crucial that you resist the urge to argue back and say ‘you’re wrong.’ As Stephen R Covey says in The 7 HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE “Seek first to understand, then be understood.” Rather than shouting at them “If you don't stop smoking you’re going to kill yourself!” Ask them “What would drive you to quit smoking? And if you did quit, how will you go on about it?”

6. Self Confidence

Confidence is simply believing in yourself and abilities. No one wants to follow those who are uncertain. People also find it difficult to be attracted to others who are insecure. Would you buy a product that no one wanted? Or even worse, what if the salesperson advised you that this product is faulty? Never highlight your weaknesses, or put yourself down, unless it’s to make fun of yourself in a humorous situation. However, it's okay to be real and show vulnerability which shows that you are human. Another aspect of confidence is having conviction in your message. It’s what draws people in and makes them want to listen. Conviction is why Martin Luther King’s speech “I have a dream” is one of the most powerful speeches in history and created a whole social justice movement.

Vaibhav’s 5 tips on speaking in front of a crowd:-

Vaibhav Namburi is going places - I had a meeting with him about referron and BBG and was blown away with his knowledge and his willingness to add value. When I asked him how old he was - he has not yet turned 30.

He is a dude to watch - and if you are an investor - to back. I look forward to have him share his story at one of our forums 

Vaibhav says  “Well today marks 3 years since I first jumped in front of a crowd and "spoke" since then I've done nearly a hundred if not more events. These span from 20 people to 600 people (if not more) in a conference room. As one would expect I've had great events and not-so-great events. “

## 1. Do your research 

Research the background of people in the room - interact with them online before the event 

Gauge the skill level and interests of your audience so you know how deep you can go. You should ideally do this before accepting the invite, 

Keep the content relatable, human and palpable. 

Attention is more easily drawn to familiarity as to alien topics, share common pain points (a simple twitter search will help you)- in short, 

Focus on building a relationship with your audience 

## 2. Weave your content into a narrative a tell a story 

The really good talks I've seen always create a story that build up like a theme song and finally do a big reveal towards the end. 

Walk your audience through a journey of intent, cause, action and outcome.

This helps you re-think how you breakdown the approach to the presentation.

## 3. Have a goal, find out what your audience wants to achieve (what’s your BAMFAM- “book a meeting from a meeting”) 

The talk needs to have This is extremely important because an aimless talk leaves everyone unhappy or confused. This bit you need to understand when you're invited for the talk itself.

ask the organiser -  "What is the goal of the talk, what do you want people to walk away with" - this challenges them to really breakdown the outcome they want their audience to get.

## 4. Interact as much as you can, as often as you can

Make sure you interact with the crowd and talk to them - and let them talk to you

This can be as simple as asking them to raise their hands if something matches certain criteria.

Ask the audience to provide their version of a problem you're explaining, this can go two ways. Be able to roll with the answer .

People want to be engaged 

## 5. Keep it relevant, share frustrations

• Relate to the audience 
• Be authentic 
• Share a story, excite an audience and convince them your approach is awesome or worth noting.
• With that said, really hone in on the problem and more importantly the frustrations. People are drawn more to negative emotion than a positive one.
• Keep the content very snippet-y and biteable (digestible content)

And of course - Have fun 

10 Hacks you can do to punch above your weight and get the gig

A powerful fun session by some seriously smart people at our BBG Sutherland Chapter this morning , focussing on adding value to the klt hotseat .

The issue “Do you need to be big to supply large corporates? “

• How do you punch above your weight? 
• When you try and pitch for a tender to a larger company - is it important to make your business bigger than it is!  
• What can you do to become a preferred supplier to a “whale”? 

Here are 10 hacks  that were identified in today’s klt hotseat 

1. Be clear on your Unique Selling Proposition 

Make a list of all the things that 

1. Why a company would not buy from you 
2. What a company is looking for when buying your product or service 
3. What are their pain points 

Ask leading questions ...

• “Tell me about the Time when things didn’t work “
• “How do you find that out .....
• “What keeps you up at night “

Do your research 

• Find out who the decision maker is 
• Do your research on him/ her 
• What keeps them up at night
• What you can do to solve their pain
• What is their personality profile 
• Empathise

Invite them to a bbg forum 

Build a relationship  

Nothing better than face to face 

Once you find out the 3 questions, Find answers to the questions and fears and this will tease out your Unique Selling Proposition

• 2.  Collaborate 

Can you collaborate with other smaller businesses or “giggers” and disrupt the big players? 

Social media and websites - can you get address and tel # in strategic places .punch above your weight! 

• 3. Be socially responsible 

Align with social enterprise (especially if decision maker is millennial or gen y or z! )

Identify who you ideal customer /customers are - create avatars / Personas of them 

• 4. Can you Guarantee delivery 

• 5. Find out what the market wants and deliver it ...

Daniel’s Example 

Beauty industry - perfumes - high prices, fancy bottles, scientific -men testing in white jackets - pretty

Customers wanted all natural and 

body shop and similar companies took market share 

• 6. Use your BBG members and Advocates 

They will sell for you. Your best advocates are your happy clients and stakeholders. A recommendation from someone that your prospect knows is often enough! 

Meet with BBG members - they are connected - they will refer you to decision makers - ASK 

• 7. Understand your funnel 

• 8. The 3rd Quotient IQ EQ and LQ  - Likeability Quotient 

• 9. TESTiMONIALS 

Provide case studies and TESTIMONIALS - to build trust and credibility 

• 10. Provide a WoW service 

Provide a brilliant service , on time and wow your ciustomers 

What are some of your gems ? 

The Do’s and Don’ts of LinkedIn

We have built an amazing #bbglinkedIn+forum as a result of a LinkedIn masterclass of 160 humans that I had the privilige of being a part of last month.

The forum evolved by getting an enthusiastic group from the evening to be part of a whatsapp forum where we shared experiences and ideas that has evolved into a #bbgforum at Noirin’s raceparty - where we meet once a month (consistently) to connect, collaborate, contribute to create a connected, collaborative community that is built on know like and trust (klt).

Andrew Naar has just share with us a great post by Zoe Bermant - where she shares with us the 7 do’s and don’ts of linked in and the 3 actionable items you can do for 25 minutes a day. 

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/linkedin-dos-donts-zoecialmedia-guide-zoe-bermant

Below is a reprint 

1.      YOUR TITLE:

 This is your title. It is not a selling point for you to list your “skills.” If you are the founder or VP of something then list it. It is how The Linkedin Algorithm (TLA) knows how to categorize you with other similar positioned people. Recently a founder asked me to analyze her profile and her title was listed as “go to market strategy; leading brands to greatness” or some other such nonsense. A quick look at other profiles like that showed that people on Linkedin who list their “skills” as part of their title are working for a particular company and many of them not for very long. They tend to move positions every 1-2 years if not less. This is not of the status this founder wants to portray for herself.

2.      YOUR SUMMARY: 

The key to a top “about summary” lies in your keyword usage. It is one of the ways to become more “discoverable” via TLA. A summary should be more about who you are RIGHT NOW and not a history of WHO YOU WERE. It should list your skills, knowledge expertise, current role and most importantly career successes. No more than 1,000 words if possible.

3.      YOUR WORK HISTORY: 

You should have a complete history of your work experience. Like a resume, so people can easily follow your history and expertise. As one of the most important things throughout your profile is the use of keywords, the history is a good place for you to list in bullet point format the most important attributes of your time in that role. Here is an example taken from my Linkedin:

4.      HASHTAG FOLLOWING: 

This is a fairly new feature on Linkedin. By following hashtags, and using hashtags when you post, you are allowing TLA to optimize your experience for you and start to show you more of the people, companies and content related to the hashtags relevant to you. It really works and is probably one of the most important developments in organic social media optimization in the last 12 months. If you are in a services related industry, consider following key hashtags for the industries your clients appear in as well, such as #cybersecurity or #proptech. As we have clients in those fields, it exposes me in my regular daily activity on Linkedin to people, companies and content relevant to her clients as well as things relevant to her own needs. It also exposes her to other new potential clients. Remember TLA is very clever and will show you other interesting people for you to connect with and engage with based on the hashtags, people and companies you search for or connect with – it makes it easier for you to expand your network with the right people.

5.      STALKING AS AN ART:  (I’m great at this :))

Otherwise known as best practices for expanding your network. You do NOT want to just randomly start connecting to people on Linkedin. It’s akin to proposing to a person on the 1st date. But you DO want to court them. IN Linkedin terms that means checking out their profile, liking something they shared, commenting on something they wrote or shared, sharing something from their profile, or joining mutual groups. Yes! This takes more time, but… you become more visible to this person and it also triggers TLA to show you more of this person’s activity and visa versa. Often just from doing this you will get a connect request from the person you are stalking, which is a great result, because it means you didn’t instigate it. I would even go as far as recommending that you build a list of ideal companies you want to engage with you should map them out, map out the key employees at those companies and then start the steps mentioned above. Try and come up with a list of 50-100 ideal connections as a great “stalking” point. Remember if you can successfully connect to these people, or get them to “follow” you or your company, they will start seeing some of the content you put out in their feeds for the 1 month period following the follow/connect – that uniquely positions you to be able to soft-sell your value-offering to these “ideal” connections.

6.      THOUGHT LEADERSHIP: 

Thought leadership is about much more than just liking and sharing relevant content on social media. It is about original comment and opinion around an area of expertise. At the bare minimum you should be sharing at least one industry relevant piece (preferably from an influencer) and explaining what is interesting about it. To do thought leadership properly, however, I believe you should also be sharing original blogs or articles around pain points related to your expertise. Case studies, top tips such as listicals (5 things you should never do as part of your product launch marketing planning), also do very well. Life experiences are also a great way to share expertise and people tend to like to read them.

7.      EVERYTHING ELSE: 

Linkedin has some great built in features, that you should definitely take advantage of, such as:

a.      Birthday reminders: YES that is a very good thing. I managed to get invited to a major baby product event to meet the a company I had been trying to pitch my invention to, by “stalking” a key staff member via Linkedin. It was a 2nd year in a row birthday reminder, with a simple birthday message, that triggered the person in this company to reach out and invite me.

(Ik - spend time to make the message personal and not a fit and paste job)

b.      Like suggestions: When looking at someone’s profile on Linkedin, look to the right of the screen, Linkedin will suggest other similar people for you to follow and engage with, this is very useful and can save you hours of searching. Use Linkedin filters to narrow down your search to the right skills, country, level of connection. It is all there.

c.      Network updates: When you make a change to your profile, Linkedin will ask if you want to inform your network. This is definitely a good idea as it will trigger people to know you have made a career change and if they engage with your post, then likely you will be visible to them for a month or more after the trigger. The best way to do this is to change your job title and select the “inform network” option that Linkedin will prompt you for. But also write a personal post like, “delighted to join this company and help advance their…. With my …” list your key attributes and relate it to the company and what they do, try and establish early on your role and the expertise you will bring to this role. USE HASHTAGS, and tag the company. If you work for a good company with good social media team, they can take your post if you have tagged them and share it to their network of followers too. Being a good advocate for the company and them being one for you, can only bring mutually beneficial success.

Overwhelmed yet? Don’t be. Here it is broken down into 10-15 min of actionable activity for you to do every day:

1. Stalk or connect to one new person every day.
2. Share or like or comment on something written by either someone you want to connect to, or someone you want to be visible to, such as an influencer.
3. Share original thought leadership opinion each day. You can do this by using curated content or writing your own original content. Try and showcase your success, tell your story. Believe it or not, people engage and are interested in it.

Stay active, just doing the above 10-15 min every day, will open you up to a whole new network of visibility. In the first 1-2 months you may not feel a difference, but by month 3-4 you will notice more people connecting with you, more people approaching you with asks or requests and in best-case scenarios, more opportunities for you professionally.

HOW DO YOU MEASURE SUCCESS:

Go take a screenshot of your Linked SSI (Sales Selling Index). Each month, take a new screenshot to measure the success of your work on Linkedin.

To get your SSI benchmark, log into your profile and type /sales/ssi after the URL like this: https://www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi

Your SSI is a ranking that Linkedin gives you to show how well you are connected to your industry, how well you are connected in your network and how influential you are on Linkedin. The top highlighted % numbers need to be as low as possible.

The number in the circle in the middle should be as high as possible (that is your influence ranking). See below a screenshot of my SSI, it is a great example of what happens when you connect with, engage with the right people and post the right content:

How important is first impressions or gut feel?

We had a great session at our Eastern Suburbs forum this morning with Jennifer Austin who was talking about the importance of “looking the part” and first impressions. With robust think tanks chrystalkisingbthe gems from the talk and the app coerienced from the members.

I look forward to sharing them with you .In due course.

Some people say 

         “trust your gut” 

Others say -

 “never judge a book by its cover” 

            What do you think? 

Malcolm Gladwell “Blink” talks about how you can make accurate decisions in a “blink of the eye” - with an unconscious process called “thin slicing” so you should trust your gut. 

Gladwell writes about how an unconscious decision is made by seeing something or someone - you take your cumulative unconscious experiences - and analysing them within a blink - to make an initial first impression! 

The studies of Paul Ekman, a psychologist who created the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), indicates that  "thin slicing" enables you to unconsciously  analyze a person's fleeting look in seconds - called a microexpression 

Your face and the way you dress is a rich source of what is going on inside your mind and although many facial expressions can be made voluntarily, our appearance and behaviour are also dictated by an involuntary system that automatically expresses our emotions. 

An interesting study in predicting whether a couple will stay married or get divorced 

John Gottman is a researcher on marital relationships whose work is explored in Blink. After analyzing a normal conversation between a husband and wife for an hour, Gottman can predict whether that couple will be married in 15 years with 95% accuracy. If he analyzes them for 15 minutes, his accuracy is around 90%. But if he analyses them for only three minutes, he can still predict with high accuracy who will get divorced and who will make it. This is one example of when "thin slicing" works.

Join us on Tuesday at our BBG Eastern Suburbs forum at the Sheaf

BBG Eastern Suburbs Forum   Join me for breakfast on Tuesday with our Eastern Suburbs members and guests, featuring a presentation by "fashion psychologist" Jennifer Austin. Jennifer focusses on why people wear what they wear and the affect that clothing has on other people and their emotions. It is a scientific fact that what we wear affects perceptions of competence. Jennifer will illustrate to us how clothing impacts your moods , behaviours and your non verbal messages and with some simple ideas, how you can impact a better future for yourself. Click here to register There are only 3 places remaining,  Join me as my guest and enter into the promocode BBGGUEST to come as my guest for free.  Where & When Date: Tuesday 9 July Time: 8:00am - 11:00am Location: The Golden Sheaf Hotel 429 New South Head Road Double Bay, NSW 2026 NOTE: Please note the change of venue for this meeting. About Jennifer Austin Jennifer's degree in Sociology  blended with a journey in the fashion industry from being an international model to being the Director of Orange County Fashion Week and radio  Fashion Reporter has led her to be a personal branding strategist, trainer and image consultant. Jennifer blends ideas from her training of Time Management, DISC, NLP and Emotional Intelligence, with her fashion experience into both her individual styling and her unique workshops.  She is an accredited Colour Consultant, lecturer, trainer and teacher at a variety of Sydney institutions, including the renowned finishing school, June Dally Watkins, and Style Academy.  Jennifer's "why" is to transform people's lives and their level of influence.   About Our Monthly Forum Jennifer's presentation will be followed by a Think Tank session on her presentation and a series of interactive break-out group discussions. As a guest at our monthly Business Forum you will have the opportunity to network, learn and collaborate with other guests and BBG members in a way that will help you overcome common business obstacles whilst getting to know the members of our dynamic Sydney Eastern Suburbs Chapter. I'm sure you will find this forum useful, informative and stimulating. We look forward to seeing you there.                                                                                  Have a great weekend and hope to see you on Tuesday. PS have a look at our spark weekly and subscribe! Click here to register