Learn the Influencing Skills to Put Your Career in the Fast Lane
We live in a world where we are brought up to believe that academic or professional learning and qualifications are the tickets to success. Once we are in the workplace, however, we all too often see people with fewer qualifications climbing the corporate ladder faster, making more commission on sales, or having more success in negotiations. What those people have is not something that we are taught in school. They have influencing skills that persuade others to agree with them and do what they want.
Some people are born with these skills, and the rest of us are rarely taught them. Yet there are specific skills, strategies and techniques that can make us more persuasive and this, in turn, helps us to make that all important sale, negotiate a better deal for our company, or persuade senior management of our ability and potential.
The way to nurture these skills is through leadership training, and most of us will not remember having a lesson on leadership after double maths on the school timetable. Some business schools focus on leadership as part of their broader programmes, but to truly instil the ability to lead effectively you should probably go to a consultancy that is dedicated to training people to perfect their influencing skills.
Leadership is all about persuasion. In today’s word most customers are more informed about their purchasing choices than ever before, thanks to the vast amount of information available on the internet and through social media networks. As a result they are more choosy about who they buy from, and this makes almost every company more vulnerable than ever before to their competitors. The ability to interact with customers effectively, confidently and persuasively is the key to winning business from the competition.
If customers are increasingly making their choices on the basis of added value, brand image and the quality of their relationship with a company, then having a workforce that understands how to use influencing skills to retain customers and make new sales is vital for any business. After all, if your company can improve its customer retention by even 2% then there will be a noticeable impact on the bottom line.
Even if your job is not customer-facing, the ability to use your influencing skills in negotiations can help get a better deal with a supplier, or improve your own position at work by working out a better deal for yourself with your employer. In today’s world we don’t always get what we deserve. More often we get what we negotiate, which depends a great deal on our capacity to influence others.
There are plenty of consultancies out there that offer the kind of leadership training most us would have liked to receive when we were younger. Among them are some stellar performers, like So in Flow, which prides itself on the fact that the leadership training it offers has made it the most current sales training and coaching consultancy and helped it build a client base of both national and global brands.
Through a Brain Friendly Learning approach So In Flow offers simple but effective techniques that make people more persuasive and influential. The outcome is better results for them as individuals and for their employers.
Author Bio:
Influencing skills and leadership training are vital, vibrant new ways of instilling successful behaviours in management and sales teams.