The Vision Council



THE VISION COUNCIL

Moderator: Amber Robinson

September 30, 2015

6:47 am CT

My name is Mike Karlsrud. I'm the CEO of the Karlsrud Company, and you can find me on The Vision Council Web site; as well as today we have almost a resident coach, I would say, because Tim's been with us now the entire last year, and two-thirds of this year -- guest coach Tim Roberts, founder and principal of Trustpointe.

Trustpointe is an Indiana-based company that really does an outstanding job of training and influencing leaders and salespeople worldwide.

Tim, we are going to dive into a topic that I think is incredible, and it's all about influence. And many of us are trying to garner influence -- and after all, that is our job. Our job as salespeople is to influence the buyer, and influence other people to buy our products and services.

And I really want to set us up in this topic, if you will, and really understand, what kind of influencer am I? And have I ever taken any time to figure out what you do on purpose to influence a buying decision? And then basically I want us to kind of talk about, on a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate yourself on your ability to influence others.

As we go through this program, we are going to have about three or four different takeaways. One of them is the six critical strategies of influence; second, we will have a clear understanding of how conformity works and what your buyers are subconsciously willing to conform to good ideas, depending on how good they're presented; and finally, the difference between negotiating and influencing, because they are so different.

And so with that, Tim, I'm going to open this up and get out of your way. And let's talk a little bit about understanding influence.

Tim Roberts: Well you really are going to set me up and let me fly, aren't you?

Mike Karlsrud: I am.

Tim Roberts: All right. Good for you. Good morning everybody. I hope you're having an exciting day already. I'm going to try to render you in a jiggy mood this morning, as you go out there and start thinking about, my gosh, what do I really know about influence? Am I a real, live salesperson? Am I just a vendor? Do I have trusted advisor status? How do I use influence to my advantage? And what do I know about it?

Michael asked a really important question at the beginning, and I'm going to rephrase it. What score would you give yourself as an influencer? And be brutally honest with yourself. If we had a 1 to 10 rating, where would you put yourself?

Here's another one. What do you really know about influence? I mean if we sat down and we had a philosophical discussion about influence, would you have some really rough-around-the-edges insight? Would you be winging it? Or would you say, here's how it works? And what do you really know about negotiation? Which I'll come to at the very end.

Now still another question. What have you actually read, studied, analyzed, that gives you insight into influence? I mean do you really know the topic? Now I understand that's why we're all on the call today, and I'm going to give you some of that insight. And I'm going to share with you some resources you can go to, that are going to make you different forever.

Last question. What do you deliberately do, on a sales call, to influence the outcome? Mike said the words. What do you do on purpose to influence the outcome of a sales call? And did you know that there are stages of a sales call, and influence works within each one of them? And if you knew that, now how deliberate are you?

Michael, is it okay if I go into a little definition here and just play with it for a while, and set it up a little more?

Mike Karlsrud: I think you should, because there are such huge differences between negotiating, influencing, and other things that you just talked about. So I welcome it.

Tim Roberts: Here we go. Influence. Here's the definition. The power to change or affect someone or something without directly forcing it to happen, and without apparent effort. You know people hate to be persuaded. You know when you sit down and just do a feature and benefit dump, and you're trying to be really persuasive, actually what you're doing is triggering a psychological condition called reactance, that actually subconsciously turns people off.

So how do you change somebody's behavior? Now think of a buyer. How do you get a buyer to go, hmm, I didn't see it that way; or, interesting; or, I wasn't aware of those statistics; or, oh, I didn't know you were an expert or an authority. And I'll come back to those concepts.

You know, I study this concept all the time. My secular bible on the topic - I've got two of them. One was called The Social Animal. Folks, don't go out and buy The Social Animal. It's psychology that can be way over a lot of heads. It's a great resource book with a lot of great social psychology experiments, but don't get it.

I'll tell you another one, in a minute, to get, that's an easy, great sales read that you should own and master.

But in The Social Animal, they start off by talking about conformity. Do you know we, as humans, conform a lot easier than people know or understand. We will change our behavior very quickly, subtly influenced by somebody else.

There was an experiment a fellow by the name of Solomon Ashe did in the early '50s. And it's been a landmark study where he just drew one line on the left side of a piece of paper. On the right side, he drew four other lines. Of those four other lines, one of them looked exactly like the one on the left. And then the other three were completely different.

And in this experiment, they just took eight students, and seven were actors. One was not in on the deal. And the seven actors all picked this really short line. It no more matched the line on the left for any reason.

But each one of them said, well, yeah, it's Number 2, very clearly, obviously. And Number 2 was the furthest one away from the line on the left. Each one of those seven people said, "Yeah, Number 2. Why are we doing this experiment, doc? It's stupid."

By the time they got to the eighth person, the non-actor who looked at the first two people like they were idiots - by the time it got to that person, you know what that person responded, and 74% of the time, this was the same response? Yeah, it's Number 2.

Why did people choose something that was obviously very wrong? They were influenced by what everyone else was saying or doing. Now we're going to call that concept social proof, and it's going to be really important in a sales call.

There are six real clear concepts that I'm going to mention to you folks. And I'm going to have you only pick out two today, and these are game-changers. First of all, those of you who are sitting down at a desk with a pen and piece of paper, this is a good time. If you're driving a car, I'll make sure I impact on your mind these two concepts.

First of all, the book that I want everybody to consider getting - I invite you to consider, is called Yes! by Robert Cialdini, C-I-A-L-D-I-N-I. You go get that book, and you read it. Easy read. And you're going to sell differently than you ever have before. Dr. Cialdini is the authority on influence here in the US. Very highly regarded. On the cover of Harvard Business Review magazine last July. The book, Yes!

Mike Karlsrud: Okay.

Tim Roberts:...came up with six - is it okay if I give these six things real quick, Mike?

Mike Karlsrud: Yes, absolutely. And I got to make sure that - there was a book written years ago called Getting to Yes, Tim. But this is different.

Tim Roberts: It's very different. Very, very different.

Mike Karlsrud: So when you look for it, just look for Yes!

Tim Roberts: Yeah, just Yes! with an exclamation point. Dr. Robert Cialdini. Big difference. Thanks, Michael.

Mike Karlsrud: You're welcome.

Tim Roberts: I'll do these pretty quickly. The first principle of influence - and you can just Google six principles of influence, and this is going to show up. The first one is reciprocation, the law of reciprocity. If you do something - say, for example, you give a friend a gift, unconditionally. You know what psychologically has to happen? They want to return that. The law of reciprocity is key in sales.

How do you go first, give somebody something - and I'm not talking about a free demonstration. I'm not talking about a discounted price. What do you do that they're going to be triggered to reciprocate?

The second one. Social proof. And I'm going to come back to that. Do you know, social proof, when people hear a statistic, when they know that everybody else is doing something, they'll do it, too.

If you look in a hotel room and see a sign that says, 8 out of 10 of the last people that stayed in this room recycled their towels and linens, would you be kind enough to do the same thing? That sign in a hotel room was a game-changer, but it took them a lot of variations of that to arrive on those specific words.

Have you ever said to a prospect, I don't know, if you knew 8 out of 10 of the last people that chose us did so because of original thinking? Or 8 of the last 10 people who chose us did so because they were frustrated that, fill in the blank, and we made it go away? When people know that other people are doing it, they have an inclination to do it, too.

Now some of you on the line right now are contrarian, and say, no, I hate that stuff. If I know everybody else is doing it, I'm not going to do it myself. Well you're in a minority of people. Love you. Love to have you in a board room. You'd play a good role of devil's advocate. But most people are influenced by social proof.

The next one. Commitment and consistency. If you can get people to say something out loud -- I agree with you, Michael. Yes, that makes sense with me. I will meet you from eight to ten next Thursday. When they say things out loud, if you can get them to do it out loud, they will be consistent with what they say.

How many of you on the line hate filling out expense reports? Do you know how they make that go away? Instead of signing at the bottom, companies started making you sign your name on the top. Once you put your name on the top of your expense report, boy, you were more inclined to do it much more accurately and on time. Commitment and consistency.

The next one, a simple one, liking. You all know that people buy from people they like, and they like people who are like them.

The next one is key -- authority or expert in your field. And the last one, scarcity. If people can't get something, they'll do anything they can to get it.

Now I want to highlight two, and all I'm going to say simply -- and then I'm going to let Michael get in and play -- I want you to focus on two of these. In your sales call, how do you use social proof to subtly influence somebody? And second one, how do you use authority or expert in your field?

Do you know by using the word expert several times in your sales call impacts, imprints, plants on the prospect's mind, she is an expert. I want to deal with experts. Do you know what most people still defer to all the time is a white coat? That doctor. The authority.

How do you subtly say, I don't know, if you knew one of the experts on our team? Or, one of the areas I became an expert in was? Does your company provide any white papers for your prospects and customers? Have you written a white paper? Are you an expert in your field?

Social proof and being an expert in your field are the two keys to influencing outcome in a sales call. Now later on I'll tell you some stages. But, Michael, get in and help me play for a while.

Mike Karlsrud: Well I want to get in and help you play for two things that are striking me. One of them is your last point -- scarcity. And the reason why I want to bring up scarcity is because I'm a firm believer that in the industry that we play in, the optical world, that we have just the opposite. We have too much choice.

We are providing our eyecare professionals with somewhere around 250 new frame styles per quarter. There's over 1400 lens options available on the market that they can recommend to patients.

And so I'm listening to your conversation here, Tim, about influence, and I'm thinking in a world of surplus, not of scarcity -- so we can't utilize that necessarily -- how would we utilize social proof and authority in a world of surplus, to make a difference or to influence people to buy our product or service?

Tim Roberts: Well let me use some of my tools with you brother, and ask you. So let me reverse that. What's your insight, Mike? I'm going to lay in. What do you think?

Mike Karlsrud: What do I think about this? Well social proof allows you to do a couple things. One of them, I think, and I tie this back into branding. Social proof for me is about branding, meaning my own personal brand as a sales representative or sales professional, or an executive, however I define myself.

So for me, social proof is not only my personal brand, but it's also the brand that's my product, service, company, relationship, all of that brings to the table. And if I do that well enough over enough period of time, and over a great number of customers, if you will, the social proof almost takes a - in my opinion, it would take kind of a road of its own, where people would begin to recommend you.

They would talk about you. You would be able to influence in areas, ways, that you never thought you were able to influence, or would ever think that you could influence, because you've created this social proof.

And then maybe we tie this back into being an expert, because you are an expert in what you do; that the two kind of go together, and you create something that's almost bigger than yourself, because the social proof is there. The proof is in the pudding.

You're consistent. You are influencing. You are delivering results. You are viewed in the industry, viewed in your area, viewed in your territory, as being the most influential, the most liked, the expert. How about you? I'm throwing that out, Tim, as a dialogue. But for me, that's what I'm picking up out of this. Is that how I would go after surplus with influence?

Tim Roberts: Yeah, let me jump in and play, and thanks for the dialogue. And first of all, ladies and gentlemen, I just used a form of influence right there. When I reversed to Michael, I let him start influencing himself. One form of influence is to get out of the way. Instead of just answering his question, and trying to be an expert and make it all about me, I got out of the way and said, Michael, what do you think about it?

Michael started to influence the conversation. Michael likes the idea of being authority himself. And that's what your prospects want to be. They are authorities. Let them be an authority, and they'll actually like you more. So that was the first thing I did.

The second thing. Let me make a clear distinction between being an expert and branding. Do you know when you're out trying to brand something, people will look at it about 50% of the time and recognize the brand. When you're an expert, 80% of the time they want to engage with you. That's a huge gap. People want to talk to an expert, are more influenced by an expert, than they are the brand itself.

And now directly to Michael's conversation, we're in an environment, an industry, where there's way too many options. So how does scarcity work? It's back to authority. You know what people really want. Often, they want to be told what to do.

And so the way that you take care of way too much of an abundance is use these words -- sort of like a doctor, ma'am, I would prescribe to you. Don't make a recommendation. Prescribe to them, instead of a lot of options, two or three things that you would do as an expert. They're looking for your insight.

Don't use the word - use the word of their industry -- kind of like a doctor, Mrs. Prospect, I would prescribe that you choose A or B, and here's why, based on the fact that 8 out of 10 -- and then you use social proof. So the way to get rid of abundance and too many options is to create a tighter option, create scarcity, by being an expert and using social proof.

Mike Karlsrud: How does that translate into social proof?

Tim Roberts: Social proof is when you - and this is a phrase that's really key for me. When you know or have a statistic, when you're able to say, well 74% of the last folks that chose us - and I'm a big believer in using the word chose. 74% of the time...

Mike Karlsrud: Love it.

Tim Roberts:...when I prescribed these two options - that's the form of social proof, Michael.

Mike Karlsrud: Got it. Got it. Got it. Okay, this has been really eye-opening. I like that a lot. Let us - because we've only got seven minutes left, let's take a look at some really different - let's get some clarity around the difference between negotiating and influencing, because they are different. And to be honest with you, I think we could easily spend three to five minutes talking about the two. So let's talk a little bit about those two things.

Tim Roberts: Yeah. I really wanted to figure out how negotiating worked a number of years ago. And ultimately I stumbled upon a gentlemen that happens to be - his name is Keith Fitzgerald, and he is a negotiator, a hostage negotiator, and he has represented about 62 countries.

Okay, first of all everybody, did you just hear me drop an experts name, and I used 62 countries as social proof that this guy's good and an expert? Okay, the thing is, Keith Fitzgerald. And Keith, he's actually spent time in a cave, negotiating with the Taliban. He's actually been fired upon before. He knows a little something about negotiation. And you know what he says the key difference between the two? He said, negotiation is sort of like when you deal with. It's formal. You debate. You settle. You work out. You haggle.

He said, the big difference with influence is influence is when you make an impact. When you impress. When you have an effect on. When there is importance to them that is discussed. When you exercise leverage, and instead of haggling, you sway. By the way, there's a great book out there called Sway, and it has to do with this very topic.

So one is very, very formal and rigid -- negotiation. And the other is very subtle. One real quick Sandler technique that we use is called -- you guys know it -- reverse psychology. We call it stripline -- doing the exact opposite of all your competition.

Do you know how to do that? Do you know how to say things exactly opposite of what they expect? Have you ever been deliberate using - doing something exactly opposite? Or do you sound just like everyone else?

One small example. I don't know. Might not work for you, doc. Might not work in your practice. Their tendency then is to go, no, no, I think it will work. Okay? Instead of begging, you did the exact opposite and said, I don't know. Might not work for you. And that triggers them, it influences them, to take a different approach and say, yes, maybe it will.

Mike Karlsrud: That also ties into what you just talked about with creating scarcity out of surplus. You know, you and I talked about this a little while ago, I think on one of our last calls together; and that is the statement that you brought up, I believe, at our last On the Road Sales Coach session, which said not everyone gets to be my customer. I remember you distinctly saying that. Not everyone gets to be my customer. And I'm thinking about the world of surplus, creating scarcity, and expert authority and social proof, and weaving it all together. And I just had this thought that basically said not everybody gets to be my customer as wrapping a bow around this entire topic.

Tim Roberts: You know, Michael, right to that line, I often start off my meetings, after I set the ground rules for the meetings, which is called an upfront contract and is a form of influence in itself. I often say, you know what's the neat thing about where my practice is at right now? I get to hand-pick all my clients. I don't have to take everybody. Ain't that cool? And I say it just like that. Ain't that cool? And they look at me like, of course. You all know you have customers that you don't want to work with. When you learn to be discerning, that is a form of scarcity. It's a huge form of influence.

Mike Karlsrud: Wow. So, Tim, I'm going to review some of this for our listening audience today. We talked a lot about influence, and what is influence by definition, versus negotiation. We also talked about certain laws or rules that have to deal with influence.

One of them is reciprocity. The other one is social proof, utilizing social proof. Commitment. Consistency. Liking people. Having people like us. Being an expert or authority into the marketplace in a bunch of parts and services. And then also creating or giving a sense of this scarcity, and wanting people to make sure that they are buying from the best, and also making sure that not everyone gets to buy the best, if you will, and kind of influencing that.

You mentioned something that I thought was really fascinating, which is the role of the salesperson and the influence that the salesperson has. The brand will carry you 50% of the time, but if you become an expert in the field and in your area, that will carry 80% of the time. People want to buy from an expert. I really took huge note on that, because not only is that a big gap in terms of percentage, but it's also, I think, the difference between the winners and the also-rans. The also-rans will depend on their brand that they represent to carry the day.

And what you're suggesting is, the star players in the market rely and create themselves - or give themselves, if you will, the perception of being the expert into the marketplace. And that carries the day more times than not. Would you agree with those summaries?

Tim Roberts: Yeah, it's a perfect summary. The stars I know out there, they influence on purpose, and no one ever knows it. That's a skill. Michael, I'll end my comments with simply saying, you know, this topic of influence can be scary for some people. Because for some people, it's over their head and they don't want to take the time to really work hard on their craft. Sometimes people want short fixes. Like what's technique, Tim? Just give me one technique I can use on my call today. You don't advance yourself until you understand how humans work. Humans conform much more than we know. Get in the influence business, and you'll become best-in-class trusted advisor.

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