Advanced Influencing

Over the last five years, Marcus Corah has trained in global and local markets, helping companies communicate more effectively and persuasively with their customers. His latest project, Emotional Persuasion in Business, allows companies to be more persuasive in their communications by engaging their clients emotionally. Here he shares with us his thoughts on advanced influencing.

Today I’m going to talk about how we can work with our clients’ values and really understand them, and how to look at some ways of constructing or shaping your language to really help you increase your ability to influence.

So, let’s start at the beginning. There are two types of influencing that most people are familiar with, or certainly one type, which is top down influencing – the mindset of being the authority and commanding people listen to you because of this. Now, when you use this “my badge says I’m more senior than you” influencing it can work quite a lot of the time but it’s not 100% effective, and one of the challenges I think this type of influencing has is that it tends to create resistance because you’re using an authoritative approach to create or change people’s behaviours or attitudes.

I wanted to talk about another type of influencing, which is influencing through understanding because when you use this technique there is much less resistance to your ideas and the message you’re trying to convey. So how does influencing through understanding work? It’s actually very straight forward.

If you want to influence people powerfully then you need to understand how those people see the world and what their map of the world actually looks like. When you are able to understand what their map looks like then it gives you an opportunity to influence from within their world view, from within the way that they see the world. When you influence from the way they see the world it enables you to create much less resistance because how can they resist their own way of seeing the world? That’s one of the really important things that we need to take away.

There are two things we really need to understand, the first thing is the business side of someone’s map and the second one is the personal side of someone’s map, when you understand them from a personal perspective it gives you much greater influencing ability because you can then use the business and the personal together in combination.

So what we are looking at really is..

• What are the business drivers?
• What are the business opportunities?
• What are the objectives?

But also from the personal side…

• What are their values?
• What are their beliefs?
• What are their past experiences?

Focus on using values and language to influence people powerfully, and understand the power of language patterns when communicating.

For more information on Marcus Corah click here, or contact our dedicated team on enquiries@raisethebar.co.uk.