Simply put, persuasion skills refer to the skill of changing or influencing the behaviours, beliefs or attitudes of someone or a group towards another idea, person or event. The art of persuasion usually involves reasoning, sharing feelings, and cleverly conveying information to gain an advantage and win a deal with your customers or acquire funding for your business or managing your staff to perform how you would like the business to be run.
If you want to acquire in your business more customers you need to mastered influentials skills, persuasive skills are so important to gain that it is taught at university part of certain courses and it's demanded from staff and leaders to manage a business to acquire customers to increase revenues and profitability.
In this article, we are sharing 19 influential skills including a few tips on how to influence others to perform as you would like or gain an advantage in dealing with others.
The Importance of being influential in your business
Being influential can help you in your small business and your personal success by helping you be an outstanding leader and accomplish business goals. Building influencing skills can help you encourage and persuade colleagues to support your goals and ideas. In this article, we explain what influencing skills are, how you can use these skills and tips for developing your influencing skills.
What are influencing skills?
Influencing skills are your abilities to encourage and persuade others to adopt your ideas. The skill to influence others can be beneficial for business leaders and owners to motivate people and make their teams more productive or win sales from prospective customers, returning or new customers. Here are 19 common skills that contribute to being influential:
1. Active listening
Active listening is an ability that means you hear what people say and understand what they said, implied and intended with their words. If you have actively listened to someone, then you can repeat what they said and convey the meaning to another person. This skill is useful to influencing others because understanding people and your surroundings can determine how you should behave to persuade them. If you want to more about active listening read this post The Art of Active Listening.
2. Assertiveness
Being assertive is a skill very useful to leaders and people in a position of authority. Assertiveness means being able to communicate your own thoughts and desires in a confident and effective manner. Often, an assertive person can command respect and communicate on the behalf of others. Earning respect from peers can encourage them to accept your ideas and motivate them to listen to you.
3. Awareness
Awareness is noticing your surroundings and your own consciousness. This includes the environment and the people you are with, including their behaviours and your own thoughts, feelings, and actions. Being aware of yourself helps judge your actions and ensure that your behaviour and reactions are productive and set an example for those around you and you take responsibility and accountability for your failure and fix your mistake as well as apologising.
4. Communication
Communication skills involve verbal, nonverbal and writing skills to interact with others and share your thoughts with them. Being able to communicate effectively with others is essential to influencing them. It's important that you can speak clearly about your goals and ideas to convince others about your viewpoint and help you achieve desired business goals and results.
Good communication encourages teamwork and helps people understand one another, hence this can be the first step to persuade others.
Read more about effective communication: Communication is key in business dealing
5. Critical thinking
Critical-thinking skills are the ability to analyse and interpret information and use it to guide your beliefs and behaviour. Critical-thinking skills can help influencers interpret others' behaviour and analyse it to set a course of action to influence business dealing or support customers with a solution-oriented for their needs.
6. Empathy
Empathy is the ability to understand and relate to another person's feelings and your own feeling. Understanding others and yourself can help you learn about ways of influencing them. Empathy skills also help build relationships with others and become a reliable figure for the people you support.
7. Endurance
Endurance is the skill of remaining persistent during hardship or a stressful situation and finding solutions to survive the crisis and remain afloat. Persistence can help you achieve your desired results as an influencer. Having endurance can motivate you to continue efforts of persuading team members or customers, associate or in negotiation the interested party to take your side or adopt your viewpoint.
8. Intuition
Intuition is a skill that relies on instincts to understand a situation. Using intuition can allow you to predict the behaviour of others, which can guide your methods of influencing them. Having good intuition skills can also save time reasoning and planning because your instincts can determine decisions and help you make decisions quickly.
9. Interpretation
Interpretation is the ability to make educated and accurate assumptions based on information. You can use interpretation skills to understand data, people, and situations. You can make interpretations based on a person's nonverbal behaviour, such as facial expression and body language, and use this information to guide your reactions toward that person. Knowing how to interact with people individually can help you acquire interpersonal skills and influence decision-making in your direction.
10. Interpersonal
Interpersonal skills are the ability to relate and communicate with others and form relationships. Building relationships with people on your team or with your customers, associates or in your workplace is an important step to being able to influence people. You can use interpersonal skills to understand others and learn how to work with them. This encourages teamwork and makes you more successful at work, in meeting with others and helping you acquire leads and sales.
11. Innovation
Innovation is using creative and unique techniques to accomplish a task. Being innovative helps you to earn attention from peers and can often lead to others respecting you and relying on you to guide them in work processes or acquire customers. Creativity can also inspire others, and your creativity can influence others to purchase your goods and retain customers
12. Leadership
Leadership skills are the ability to hold and maintain a position of power and guide others toward accomplishing goals and support other during a crisis or facilitate help and support amongst a team when the management failed to support the team and the environment become toxic. Leadership skills can help earn you an authoritative role that can increase your opportunities to influence others. Overseeing others is not a requirement to influencing them, but being a good leader helps put your ideas into action and your team respects you hence they will be more willing to execute what you convey.
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13. Motivational
Motivational skills are the abilities that help you encourage others to perform certain tasks. Motivating others can be an effect of influence. A positive attitude and being a good teammate or supporter can help you be motivational to support others, sometimes to achieve sales you need to motivate your customer.
14. Negotiation
Negotiation skills are the ability to compromise with others and achieve a conclusion that is pleasant for all involved parties. Negotiation skills are important for influencing others to accept your ways of thinking because you may compromise some ideas to gain the support of team members or associates, lenders and customers alike.
15. Observation
Observation skills involve using your senses to gather information. In a workplace or acquiring customers, leads, you most commonly use your hear and sight to observe others, your work environment, potential customers, leads or returning customers and your colleagues. Great observation skills mean you pay attention to details and notice others' behaviours. Observations can help make judgments on how you should react and can help plan strategies to influence others.
16. Persuasion
Persuasion is the ability to convince others to agree with you. You can use persuasion to reduce conflict and encourage others to listen to you and purchase your product.
17. Problem-solving
Problem-solving skills help you identify problems and create solutions. When you have a solution, you'd like to share at work or with your team or customers or potential customers, associates can be good for sales, negotiation in your favour..., it is useful to be good at problem-solving to influence others to consider and accept your idea and solution.
18. Self-confidence
Self-confidence is believing in yourself and accepting who you are. Displaying self-confidence encourages others to want to be like you and listen to you. Self-confidence also helps to exude a certain sense of expertise that allows people to trust and follow you.
If you want to know more about self-confidence read this post it will help you gain confidence if you are lacking in it.
19. Time management
Time management is being organized and accomplishing tasks at the right time. Time-management skills can increase your abilities to plan and strategize. These skills help you develop ways to influence your colleagues or customers, leads and associates.
Tips for developing your influencing skills
Here are a few tips to develop your influencing skills:
Gain trust
Gaining the trust of your colleagues and customers or business associate puts you in a better position to influence them. Here are ways to earn trust:
Be honest
Be dependable
Trust others
Do what you say you will do always
be reliable, trustworthy
be consistent in what you say and do
Network
Networking means meeting people in the industry and building relationships. A solid professional network can increase your credibility, which can encourage others to listen to you. You can likely find and attend networking events related to your field or based on your level of experience. For example, you may be able to attend a young professionals networking conference or a real estate networking event or the Great British Business Show or Girlfriday Local Event for SMEs and startups.
Give constructive feedback
Giving constructive feedback can show others that you have good ideas and are committed to being helpful. Accepting criticism is also key to giving and getting constructive feedback. Feedback is beneficial in business because it leads to both personal and company growth.
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