Recently, a colleague asked for some help to sell a bureaucracy on making a change for him. Complicating matters was the fact that several other people had made similar requests before and all had been refused, in part because change would have meant promoting customer needs over the needs of his staff. We developed our presentation/negotiating approach, executed it and succeeded. He then suggested we share the process we took with everyone, so others can do the same. Great idea… so here goes.
- ADAP: Adopt the Audience-Driven, Authentic Presentation philosophy. The audience is a senior executive who has three main concerns: Promoting the excellence of his brand, protecting his staff and pleasing customers. Therefore, the presentation must address these concerns, in that order! Second, to help him resolve the conflict between customer and staff needs, we need to bring both the logical and emotional issues to bear.
- Create a Bond: People buy from people they like, people with whom they identify. You do that by demonstrating that you share similar values, background or history. In this case, I began the conversation by demonstrating my personal interest in his area of specialization and commonalities about our backgrounds.
- Create Trust: Knowing that he has to make a tough decision, I shared with the buyer my understanding of the conflicting values he must weigh, and made sure to focus on the super ordinate goal – that in order to promote the excellence of his brand, pleasing the customer was more important than ruffling the feathers of some staff members. Building a bond and trust, enables you to create irresistible influence – the emotional element in decision-making.
- Compelling Case: Since we like to make decisions based on logic, the key is to present a persuasive fact-pattern. As a leader, his #1 responsibility is to promote it, authentically. Choosing to protect his staff rather than the brand’s values would undermine the brand. In this case, excellence in education means creating an atmosphere in which we encourage people to invest time, creativity and energy learning the subject; ultimately, the goal is to inspire people to want to learn more. Anything less diminishes brand value. The leader needed to remember these were his authentic values and that only one course of action would promote them.
- Feel like a Hero: We all want to feel we make good decisions, which is why we should end with a positive conclusion that eliminates the possibility of “buyer’s remorse”. Knowing that the client might experience some negative feedback from staff, we concluded by addressing his emotional need that he made a good decision. With this decision, he would promote his brand value to customers and reinforce his self-image as an authentic leader who does the right thing.
In sum, we combined the power of Irresistible Influence and Compelling Case to succeed:
- Feel like a Hero: We all want to feel we make good decisions, which is why we should end with a positive conclusion that eliminates the possibility of “buyer’s remorse”. Knowing that the client might experience some negative feedback from staff, we concluded by addressing his emotional need that he made a good decision. With this decision, he would promote his brand value to customers and reinforce his self-image as an authentic leader who does the right thing.
- Irresistible Influence: Creation of a bond and trust for the emotional framework for the buying decision we wanted, and
- Compelling Case – A logical argument to take one course of action really promotes brand value in this case.
In your future presentations and negotiations, use the both of them to succeed!