THE ART OF PERSUASION

Persuading people for any purpose is very complicated issue in every area of the life. People can be uninterested in your point or simply they can be uninformed. Or, the message you are transmitting can be mispercevied due to various reasons. In business life convincing people is the major concern otherwise there will be no value of what you are creating, producing or selling. In International trade even it gets more complicated due to cultural differences and different type of business minds. When I was thinking about this issue, a speech of Simon Sinek, which I had watched several months ago, has come to my mind, “How great leaders inspire action”.

In this video, Mr. Sinek explains how to affect people in the scope of leadership. But, leadership can be at anywhere. So this approach, which I really like, can be applied in international trade. He draws a simple schema, which looks like below, to explain where to start and to understand intrinsic forces of persuading people.

According to this schema, before we tell people what we want from them,  we should start with why we want. This point represents sharing passion you feel. If you are not excited about what you are doing, you cannot get what you want. This is obvious.The second step includes learning process. This can be about product itself, type of business doing, transactions and so on. We should clarify the path in front of people, whom we want to convince. At that point, I strongly recommend to stay close with them and forming warm relationships. Being in business doesn’t mean that we have to be always business focused. Ask people how they are doing in daily life. People likes to be taken care of. But, do it sincerly not for business purposes.  In this perspective, our business will get easier in the last step, where we will ask people about what we want.

I really like this approach to persuade people. I certainly believe that personal relationships are the most important part of business life, especiallay in international trade. That is why we have developed Salesupp.NET, which allows companies to create their networks and to set up continuous relations. We are not automatic working machines. Enjoy personal links, get into more conversations and at the same time persuade people for what you want. The key is to be more human.