Power Connections - Connecting

Hey, it's Jermaine Edwards, your customer growth guide. If you're new, welcome. If you're old, welcome back to the fold. We're starting a brand new set of videos called Power Connections and looking at how you can get inside the circle of influence of your most important contacts. Now, if you've watched my video Stakeholder Mastery, you'll see that this precedes that and can actually go beyond it as well, because we'll be going deeper into not just Who's important and understanding how to manage contacts at scale, we'll be looking at how do we actually get intimately connected to those people that we want to have more influence and persuasive power with. And that's what we're going to discuss in today's video. This is one of three different videos. Now, power connections is really an interesting topic because it's often misunderstood. And what I mean by power connections are not stakeholders, because we've done that already. It's about understanding that within every single person in contact that we meet, there are going to be people that have certain levels of influence and persuasive power with those people that are more than others. And it's not just the boss of that particular contact, it's not in sometimes their teams, it could be a range of different people sometimes that aren't necessarily visible to you, but are still important for us to consider. And so the first piece that we need to understand to really get into power connections and getting to the circle of influence is to understand this I. This I stands for the actual influence itself. So what influences the actual people that you're speaking with. So the first thing that governs influence, particularly when it comes to our contacts, are specifically motive. So motive is really important, meaning what is it that specifically motivates their activity? Because once we understand what motivates their activity, we understand who holds the power to to support in that activity. I'll give you an example. I had a contact once that was actually working with their marketing department. As part of the marketing department, the, the head of marketing had all the budget for customer and sales activity. So every time this person came up with a brand new idea, they had to sign it off with this marketing person, this head of marketing, otherwise it wouldn't go through and they weren't able to execute it very well. And particularly with this head of marketing, if that person wasn't involved or engaged in that process, a person was very likely to sign it off or even engage very well. So this person, from a motive perspective, was motivated to create particular areas or particular kinds of propositions that the head of marketing would be interested in. And so that head of marketing became a part of that circle of influence, somebody who had influence and persuasive power over what they actually did. So from a motivation point of view, there, it was very, very clear that that head of marketing would be somebody that we needed to befriend to support this person in achieving some of our goals. So motive is a big area there in terms of understanding the circle of influence. The second part here in the area of influence, which is really important, are the things that drive their fears. So motivation is their desires, The second part are their fears. So what are the things that they want to avoid at all costs? So let's just say for a moment we're speaking with our organi— or other contact in the organizations that we speak with on an ongoing basis. And when we speak with them, we say, oh, listen, if this wasn't done correctly or done right, who else would be impacted in business? Or who else would need to be involved in this particular project that would have an influence on how we did our work together? Questions like that, that help you to understand where those triggers are. What would be the consequence of them not doing wrong? Who would they need to speak with or answer to? Questions like that help us to understand where some of those particular concerns or fears might be. So motives, desires, fears, concerns. If we can begin to ask really powerful supportive questions, we can begin to take a map, a snapshot of those people in that business that have influence and persuasive power over what this person or those contacts do. That's really important. So that's the first part that we want to do— spend some time asking some great questions. And I've got a series of questions you can ask in the download below as well. The next part of this is once you've understood who those people are based on motives and fears of the person, we now want to think about helping. So how do we help? Well, there are a number of different ways we can help. I want to give you two. And the first piece here is we want to help personally. And we want to identify things around projects. Now, why do we kind of identify those two things to begin with? Well, the first thing is that personally is really easy for us to get going with, because we're speaking with that customer on a day-to-day basis. And now that we know their motive, and we know who and what they need to avoid or what they would like to avoid based on their own fears or concerns, we can shape our engagement around things that support them personally. So let's just say for example here, this person wants to communicate something directly to their head of marketing to get something signed off, or at least to get that person engaged so you can actually fulfill your goals with the customer in a particular way. So here on this personal area, what you can do is come alongside the customer and say, "Hey, I recognize you're trying to produce this particular proposal. We understand that when working with marketing directors like this," and you'll understand, there are some things that they really need to see in this document. We'd love to prepare that for you so you have much more confidence in going to your head of marketing, head of director of marketing, and you don't have to put in the time to actually do it. It's, we'll take away the time of creating the proposal. We'll do that for you because we want you to win. Now that's really helpful. Now that person sees you as an advocate in supporting them getting into that circle of influence, and you become now somebody who's getting more involved with those relationships. So that's around the personal help. Now the project help is actually more interesting because this is probably what you're doing already. You're already speaking with the customer about projects that are taking place within the business. Now here is the difference when it comes to power connections. What we want to do now is invite those people that we know where appropriate into the conversations of these projects. Why? Because we want to raise our own visibility with them. We want to get into a place where our weight of interest and our conversations with those people become something that they listen to themselves. And when they are able to listen to us, and when we get credibility with them, they are more likely to hear our suggestions and promote them to the right people. So within these projects, we want to begin to think, who in our contact circle of influence can we bring into this project to enable us to get closer to those contacts and to help them do something specific. So we get much more advantage, much more access to increase our influence and persuasive power within the organization and with these contacts. Really important key. So we're looking at motive and fears, moving here and seeing how can we help, genuinely help our personal contacts, and then how can we move people into projects so we get better access and we can raise our and increase our influence and persuasive ability. So those are the first 2 steps for Power Connecting. There are 2 more steps that we need to do as we move through this particular sequence. So look out for video number 2, download the workbook because it will be our guide as we move through this particular videos. And when you do, do the exercises because it will be super helpful to you in the next video.