Here’s another idea drawn from the sales field that can transform the way you approach your stakeholders.
The term buy-in is commonly bandied about but few people in my experience actually think about the psychological buying process and where their stakeholders are in it.
Reflecting on the buying process aligns well with my oft repeated notion that influencers at their best are helping stakeholders to make decisions – buying decisions.
To see what this can do for you, here’s a quick summary of the standard psychological buying process:
- Problem recognition
- Information Search
- Alternatives Evaluation
- Purchase Decision
- Purchase
- Post Purchase Evaluation
Take a look at this article I found which goes into a lot more detail: Six Stages of the Customer Buying Process.
This process is easy to apply to the world of large organisation internal influence. The second half simply becomes Decision to Buy-in, Action Taken and Review.
Quite often, your stakeholder may not even have started the process, being oblivious to the problem that you can see. This makes it hard, especially if you simply drop by with a solution for them to consider – a solution to what?! They probably won’t even be listening to you even if they are being polite.
The purpose of highlighting the buying process is so that you can adapt your action to suit the stage they are at (and of course, different stakeholders may well be in different places).
For example, if you think your stakeholder isn’t on the process at all, focus open questions on what they are noticing a happening in the area where you believe a problem need to be solved. Help your stakeholder to discover the problem.
At the Purchase Decision stage, you don’t need to harp on about the problems (they’ve already bought that). Instead, lay out the decision that needs to be made, the factors that need to be weighed in, and help them to mitigate any inherent risks.
It is also worth bearing in mind that although it may appear that the stakeholder is ready to make a decision, it might be prudent to test that they have attended to diligently to the preceding steps. Otherwise, you may get a yes that later unravels when they realise an option they hadn’t seen before the decided to agree to your request.
Ultimately, the goal for an ethical influencer is to ensure that stage six (review) concludes with the stakeholder being very happy with the decision they made. And that is most likely when they have made a well-informed, conscious decision. Using the buying process helps them to feel informed, and in control of their purchase – sorry, agreement.
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