If you really want to excel in business or your career you will have to unleash that sales giant from within. The ‘sales giant’ that is inside every sales professional I have ever met and interacted with.

When you move away from old school hard selling and instead focus on using positive influence and persuasion, to build meaningful, mutually beneficial relationships with the right people, who need what they have to offer, you will achieve far better results than what you currently produce.

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So I guess that it is logical to assume that if you are in sales, you must have great selling skills. I would like to help you unlock your sales giant and help you to achieve all your sales targets this year and the many years that follow.

Remember if you want to be successful in sales, you need to always have your clients and prospects best interest at heart. That means you can never succeed in sales in the long-term if you try to manipulate or coerce people. You would achieve better results using the art of positive influence.

Understanding the Concept of Positive Influence and Persuasion

As a starting point it is necessary to understand that in order to positively influence anyone, you need to understand that there are three parts to the art of persuasion.

Logic

The first one requires the use of logic i.e. this is a process where you completely understand your product or services value proposition, you have identified the perfect customer, who needs exactly what you have to offer.

Then using this information to inform them, you allow them to use their own logic to come to a positive conclusion, in which they fully understand your value proposition and they see that it meets or exceeds their needs and expectations.

Emotion

As you know people buy with their emotions, so it is vital that you understand this crucial element in the persuasion process. This is the part of the sales process where you explain your product or service and your client has understood all the logical reasons why your product or service is the best option available to them.

 At this stage, your client should fully understand your value proposition, from a logical perspective. Your role as a sales professional is to appeal to your customer’s positive emotions so that they can completely understand, “What is in it for them”.

The positive emotions I am referring to here are joy, fulfilment, meaningful contribution, recognition, love, compassion, honour and pride.

To make this part of the sales process work for you, you must completely understand your value proposition and all the benefits it offers your customer. Using this as the starting point, uncover how your customer will benefit from using your product or service and describe this to them from an emotive perspective.

Action Idea: Explore the positive emotions described above; now examine your product or services benefits. Link your customers need to one or more of the benefits your product offers and describe this to your client, in terms of one of the positive emotions they will experience, as a result of using your product or service.

Ethics

The final cog in the wheel of positive persuasion is integrity, consistency and good character. In essence, as a sales professional, you must always be authentic, honest and believe completely in whatever you are selling.

The truly great sales professional does not only believe in what they sell and what they do, but they are a living example of it. Their actions, words and deeds exemplify everything they stand for. If you want to be a great sales professional, you must walk your talk. Be the example you want the world to reflect back to you.

Believe in what you sell and the world will see it

You can never attempt to positively persuade anyone if you are not positively persuaded yourself. Just as you would never ask someone to do something you have never or would never do.

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You can never build a mutually beneficial long-term sales relationship with anyone if you are attempting to sell something you would not gladly buy yourself.

Be 100% Authentic

The key principal to being effective in positively influencing people, you have to be a 100% authentic and be yourself. People will see right through you if you try to be someone you are not. Being authentic and ethical, when persuading people is the exact opposite of manipulation.

When you are a living example of your sales pitch and people can see that you have their best interests at heart, they will quickly warm to you and eagerly form a long-term mutually beneficial relationship with you.

What are you waiting for? Be authentic and ethical and you will open the floodgates to your sales success this year.