
Selling Ideas To The Boardroom And Beyond
My conversations with clients this month have focused extensively around influencing others within our business to get on board with some really great ideas. Whether it’s to improve processes, increase employee engagement, drive growth or something else, the challenge is to build consensus that will lead to change.
The influencing skills and strategies needed to do this effectively require more than one social media friendly newsletter, however; here are my first three tips for success:
1. Define the problem you want to solve. This is so much easier said than done. All too often what I hear are superficial, ‘obvious’, vague problems which aren’t compelling. Extensive scrutiny, garnering opinion, scaling down, getting to the ‘root cause’ takes time, effort, and iteration.
2. Build consensus individually. Jumping on calls or walking into meeting rooms with an audience of many, who have not heard your ideas before is a recipe for disaster. You will be shot down. Effective influence means building consensus one person at a time so that you are not on your own when pitching your idea.
3. Understand and use the concept of ‘loss aversion bias’. We have many biases as humans; this one is the reality that we are twice as likely to act to avoid a loss, than we are to secure a gain. Think of it this way: what are the (negative) consequences of doing nothing? That’s the ‘why’ behind increasing urgency and relevance for the audience to agree with our idea.
Do we need to do more than this? Of course, but that’s for another month. Mastering these first three strategies would be a great place to start.
Until next time…

Sarah Brummitt
FFIPI AICI CIP
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