Selling = Influencing & Influencing = Selling
Being good at influencing means you are good at selling. The pinnacle of selling is the ability to sell the intangible, and more often than not, influencing internal stakeholders involves selling the intangible.
Which means, to be successful influencing internally in large organisations you’ve got to be extremely good at sales.
When was the last time you went on a sales course?
Here’s one extremely powerful idea drawn from the field of sales, especially B2B selling, that will transform your ability to influence.
FAB = Features, Advantages and Benefits
A feature is a technical, tangible aspect of a proposal, such as a process, delivery date, or new product.
Advantages are all the possible way in which people may gain from the feature, such as after the delivery date: resources can be released, focus can turn to other projects, revenue will start to roll in.
A benefit is an advantage of particular importance to the person you are selling to. If you need your proposal signed-off by several stakeholders, one may be keen to have their resources back, another looking forward to the revenue.
And the point is, for maximum influence, you are best to tailor your pitch to highlight the benefits the individual you are seeking to influence will gain.
In coaching, I like to ask clients how their stakeholder will benefit from their proposal. In virtually all cases, the initial pitch (to me) is a massive dump of all the features of the proposal. Salespeople have been fired for less.
This is why I go to great lengths to encourage people to get to know the personal and professional agendas of their stakeholders. Then they can tailor their pitch to highlight the benefits they are really interested in.
This approach can be applied to virtually anything that you are attempting to influence a stakeholder on. Here’s a way you can being to apply, or at least pressure test, your pitch.
- List all the features of the idea/decision/proposal you are pitching.
- For each feature, list as many advantages as you can imagine.
- Think of a powerful stakeholder you are targeting with the pitch, and run through your list of advantages looking for the ones they will be most interested in.
- Repeat for each stakeholder you need to influence.
- Select one or two advantages that are real benefits for each individual stakeholder.
- Incorporate this thinking into your approach.
What I see a lot of is people focusing most of the air-time on the advantages that they themselves are most interesting in, or excited by, rather than those that will grab the stakeholder’s attention.
If you are presenting to a group of your stakeholders, it might also be worth considering the advantages that are of interest to the majority, or to the most powerful, as you are craft your slides. When you take an individual through those slides, adapt your words to focus on the benefits they will be most interested in.
Sounds simple doesn’t it?
It is, but only when you know your stakeholders well and get into the habit of focusing on their interests ahead of your own.
If you want to learn more about this, just hit the net and search for features advantages benefits and you’ll find loads of useful information.
The Gautrey Influence Blog
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