Improve Your Results the Easy Way: 10 Simple Tips to Make it Easy for Others to Embrace Your Ideas

By Chakisse Newton, President, Cardinal Consulting, LLC

No matter what your job title is, you must influence others every day in your personal and professional interactions. There are many techniques to improve your powers of persuasion, but one of the most effective is also most overlooked: make it easy for your listeners to adopt your point of view, buy your services or take a favorable action.

Here are ten simple tips to make it easy for your listeners, clients and employees to accept your influence:

1. Prepare. Before you make the next call, write the next piece of marketing material or send that email, take a moment to prepare. Remind yourself of your objective and ask yourself, “What is the easiest way to achieve my desired outcome?” and “How can I make this process easier for my listener?”

2. Address their self-interest first. If you don’t communicate how your idea, product or service benefits your listener, they won’t do the work for you. Mention how your idea saves time, prevents pain or provides value before you make secondary points.

3. Paint a picture of the benefits you offer. Don’t stop at addressing self-interest. Use colorful sensory language to help the listener see and feel what it would be like to adopt your point of view. Practice beginning a sentence with the word “imagine” to generate ideas on creating powerful images.

4. Adapt your style to theirs. You have a preferred way of communicating and so does your listener. Be sure to adapt. If you prefer email, but your listener prefers face to face meetings, or vice versa, give their needs priority.

5. Make recommendations early. Don’t bore your listener with details of all the possible options and permutations they could consider if you already know what you think is best. Start with your recommendation and explain why it’s superior to other options. If asked, you can always provide more details later.

6. Simplify next steps. If you want the listener to take action, make the process easier by decreasing the number of steps. Can you do some of the preliminary work first or combine a multi-step process so that it appears simpler? Perception is reality here. If it seems too time consuming, your listener will delay or ignore your recommendations.

7. Offer an incentive for prompt action. Is there an extra benefit you can offer for adopting your proposal? A trade organization recently offered a free conference call with an author I admire in exchange for renewing my membership early. That incentive made me act immediately instead of delaying several months before I got around to it.

8. Test your message or product first. Whether it’s asking a friend to listen to you practice a message and evaluate it for clarity or asking an accommodating client to test a new solution before you reveal it to the world, seek quick feedback from others you trust. Make it easy for them to help you. Ask them to only evaluate how easy you are to understand and follow.

9. Remove barriers to action. If you know that a process doesn’t work as well as it should or that language that you use is confusing, fix it or stop using it. After 10 minutes of unsuccessfully placing an online order, I called the company to complete my transaction. The agent informed me that the website was often “quirky.” They would probably increase sales by temporarily removing the online option instead of testing the patience of potential customers with their “quirks.”

10. Be brief. Enough said.

 © 2009 Chakisse Newton. All Rights Reserved.