Good morning everyone,
We are in the home stretch for the holidays! We can see the end of the year just over the horizon!
Now that my book has launched and is out for sale, I wanted to focus on the next step from sales to gaining influence.
In the picture attached to this blog post you will see the five buying decisions that someone will need to make before they are willing to buy your product. What if your product is actually a vision for your organization that you are leading? What does that look like?
Well let’s change the names of the steps to help from bottom up.
1. You
2. Your Leadership Team
3. Your Vision
4. Employee Cost
5. Buy-in
The same decisions need to be made by your employees before they will be willing to go the way with you on your vision.
Let’s look at you and how you are selling yourself to your employees. Do your employees trust you? Do they believe in you? How do you know for sure? You can ask them, but they may not tell you the truth because they like being paid and are fearful of that imploding with an honest comment. How can you be sure? How candid and open are you with your employees? Do you share them your humility, or do you sit up in a throne that they are only allowed in to be sentenced to punishment?
Dave Ramsey often walks around the office to talk with his staff and to know what is going on in their life. He makes sure his managers that have reports know them as well. This creates a great level of trust in an organization and I highly recommend it. After working in multiple industries most organizations have the throne approach or some level of being superficial.
Second buy-in decision that has to be made is do the employees trust your leadership team. This could you be your managers under your supervision, or if you are the CEO, your top level executives. Do the employees trust them? Same as you if the employees don’t trust you or your leadership team, you vision is going to stay in dry dock and not going anywhere.
Your vision is the third buy-in decision that the organization is going to have to decide on. Much like the sales process when the customer is going to have to buy in to your product that you are selling so is true for your vision. How sound is it? Does it align with the core values that the organization has? Does this vision violate any out of bounds areas with those core values? What needs does this vision address for your employees and the organization? Using these questions and the pages in the book uncovering needs will help you come up with the needs and questions to ask the organization to see if your vision is going to help or hurt the organization. Bounce this vision off of your team and any people that are not directly paid by you that have an investment in you as a leader and will provide honest and sometimes tough feedback.
Now we get into the cost step of influence. What does it cost the organization to move in the direction you want it to go in? Will there be extra work for the employees? Will there be payoffs for the organization that will offset these things? How much pain is the organization going to go through before they come out the other side to a better way? These decisions have to be validated before the organization is going to buy in to you. Sure most employees will say yes to your face, but their actions with engagement will show you the truth later on. Better make sure that they cost is not more than the reward to the organization.
The fifth and final step in the influence in the buy-in step which should be very quick if the organization trusts you and you have the influence built up to a high enough value. The organization will want to “charge the pits of hell with a water pistol” as Dave Ramsey states from his Millennials. If you have focused on building the influence to cast your vision your organization will follow you anywhere.
Isn’t that what we all want in business? The same could be said for your family though. If you do not have the influence with your family, they will not follow you either.
There was a great deal here in this blog post and we are only scratching the surface on influence. I look forward to diving more in depth in 2019.
For the next two weeks the blogs will follow year end review and goal planning for the next year. See you next time!
Sincerely,
Kevin Sidebottom
Sales and Leadership Enterprises