Whatever your stumbling blocks may be, face them before the next networking event and devise a personal plan for getting past them.
Once you do, you will find yourself connecting with confidence and courtesy on every occasion and the results will be reflected in your bottom line.Influence and Persuasion Are Not the Same Thing
There is a big difference between influence and persuasion. Salespeople who understand this difference consistently outperform those who do not.
There’s a reason Dale Carnegie didn’t title his classic book How to Win Friends and Persuade People.
To persuade means to prevail on someone to do albania telegram data something by argument, entreaty, or expostulation. To prevail is to gain ascendancy by strength. In other words, to coerce a buyer to do something, which just reinforces their negative image of sellers as sellouts.
If your primary job in sales is to listen to understand what the most important thing is for your buyer, and then help them get that, then what value does persuasion offer? Are you going to persuade the buyer to change their mind about what is most important to them?
Similarly, if your buyer’s job is to quickly gather and make sense of the information they need to make a decision to get what is most important to them, then how does persuasion help them achieve that?
Your buyers want you to be a source of value that helps them make informed trade-offs and decisions about how to achieve their most important thing. Which means that your persuasive coercion is of no value to your buyer.
Persuasion is not a sales skill. It’s a blunt instrument of last resort that sellers use when they don’t understand how to influence the choices their buyers make. In that sense, influence is the antithesis of persuasion in sales.