Episode 377: Mastering Influence: Skills for Success

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

00:00:56:63 – (Brynne Tillman): Welcome back to Making Sales Social. I am very excited to have Elaina Zuker here. She’s a seasoned businesswoman, author, consultant, speaker and trainer. Her acclaimed training program Secrets of Influence is both a corporate program and e-learning program. And it’s based on her best-selling book Seven Secrets of Influence. She has taught thousands of people and organizations all over the world. And is now also bringing this to individuals through her e-learning version.

00:01:31:04 – (Brynne Tillman): Elaina, welcome to the show. 

00:01:33:67 – (Elaina Zuker): Thank you so much Brynne. I’m delighted to be here. Thank you for having me as your guest. 

00:01:40:32 – (Brynne Tillman): Well, thrilled to have you. And I know that you’re going to bring such value to our audience. Before we jump into your brilliance around Secrets of Influence, we ask all of our guests one question, which is what does Making Sales Social mean to you?

00:01:57:00 – (Elaina Zuker): You know, it’s such a great question Brynne, because I became an expert on influence because of my sales background. And so that was the so important foundation on which I built my unique theory. So I was in direct sales at age 18 here in my native Montreal, selling encyclopedias, door to door in the freezing cold. And later I moved to New York and became an organizational consultant.

00:02:31:02 – (Elaina Zuker): But there was always this very strong base of selling, which is really if somebody doesn’t sell something, nothing happens. And so I learned to refine these skills and codify them. And when you say social selling, this is what comes to my mind. I don’t. I’ll just share it. So back in the day when we did conferences live, you know, before COVID and you’d go to the opening event and there’d be like hundreds of people, everybody wearing a name badge with their, you know, their drink in their hand and not knowing who to talk to.

00:03:15:15 – (Elaina Zuker): There you go wearing your badge, which said your company and your position and I had 2020 vision and I was very, very focused because sometimes I was the speaker at these conferences and sometimes I wasn’t. And often I’d pay my own money to get there. And I would spend that opening event not looking in people’s eyes, unfortunately. But the first thing I looked at was their badge, and I was screening who I wanted to talk to later.

00:03:54:08 – (Elaina Zuker): You know, were they a corporate decision maker? Right. And so I did that kind of screening and sifting, which we now do on LinkedIn. Right. So when you ask that question, I thought, yes, this is the brilliant advantage that we get from social media now, because we can just touch a button and do that kind of filtering without, you know, breaking our eyesight and by making proper human contact with people instead of just looking at their badges.

00:04:35:26 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that. That’s a new perspective I haven’t heard yet, so that’s fabulous. 

00:04:41:89 – (Elaina Zuker): Good. So I just thought of that. Yeah.

00:04:45:11 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, I love it. So I want to jump into influence and I’m going to start with, like, the most simple question. What’s influence? 

00:04:56:91 – (Elaina Zuker): Okay, well, influence, according to the dictionary, this is kind of fun.

00:05:01:25 – (Elaina Zuker): Influence is a set of skills, and it is the action of having another person change their attitude, beliefs or behavior. Now, you will not observe the change in attitude, right? The only thing you can observe is the behavior.

00:05:26:01 – (Elaina Zuker): But that’s basically the definition. And an archaic definition of influence, which is very interesting in the dictionary, says that influence is the ethereal flowing of a fluid said to change the hearts and minds of people.

00:05:46:26 – (Elaina Zuker): It’s a magical fluid. Right. And I thought that was so interesting because, I mean, this is an old Webster definition, but like magic influence, what it’s done with subtlety seems like magic, and yet it’s just a set of skills that anybody can learn and master and use for their success. So I don’t know whether one of your questions is influence manipulation?

00:06:22:06 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. Keep going. I love that. 

00:06:23:87 – (Elaina Zuker): Let me just address that because some people, when they hear the word influence, you know, it has a bad rap because it seems like we are being hit by so many messages these days. Political. You know, what’s wrong with your health, your car, your roof, etc.. And we need to be aware of those messages and how they are affecting us.

00:06:52:09 – (Elaina Zuker): And so people think that influence is manipulation. And, you know, if you think something is bad and unethical, you will not do it because you’ll have a psychological barrier about it. And so what I say is that influence is a power like electricity or nuclear, and you can use it for good or bad. Right. And it’s power if better.

00:07:21:22 – (Elaina Zuker): You are at it. The more powerful you are. And the way that I like to think about manipulation is that positive influence is. I like to look at it from two perspectives the intent and the effect. So the intent is, are my intentions honorable? Do I intend to give you benefit, teach you something, make you better in some way?

00:07:53:11 – (Elaina Zuker): So that’s my honorable intention. And it effect is how do you feel over there as a result of our interaction? Do you feel that you’ve been enriched or enlightened or learned something? And if we can answer those positively, then we would say that’s positive influence. So I just wanted to add that because often it’s something people ask. All right.

00:08:22:05 – (Brynne Tillman): So I’m going to go one deeper in this, because this is a conversation I’ve had for many years. Is manipulation always bad? 

00:08:33:34 – (Elaina Zuker): Hm. It’s a great question. I mean, if you’re, you know, a parent trying to get a kid to do something and you’re, you know, using all your adult tricks because, you know, it’s for their own good, then it’s not bad.

00:08:52:00 – (Elaina Zuker): Okay. So, you know, that’s an example in the business arena. I would have to look at a case by case, you know? 

00:09:00:23 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, that’s fair. Yeah. So in manipulation, we think always as people, but we manipulate data, we manipulate even programs. Right. So it’s always been a question, because really, that even more than influence manipulation has this really bad connotation.

00:09:20:20 – (Brynne Tillman): But I don’t believe it’s always bad, but I thank you for it’s a case by case for sure and I love that. I will say, as a grandmother, I am in. yeah. I have two beautiful babies, but I am manipulated by them all the time. Not complaining. 

00:09:41:11 – (Elaina Zuker): I mean, absolutely. Just putty in their hands. Absolutely. 

00:09:45:64 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So that’s kind of fun. Yeah. So I’m a Bobby, and I love it. So let’s just talk a little bit about influencers. Is this a skill that they’re born with? Can you learn to be an influencer? What does that look like in your work? 

00:10:04:78 – (Elaina Zuker): Well, you know, it’s a great question Brynne, because like, I have this trademark and this book, you know, 25 years ago before we had YouTube and Instagram and all of that.

00:10:18:22 – (Elaina Zuker): And so the word influencer, as it’s used in common Internet lingo, means, you know, you have half a million followers on X, right? And this is not that. So, you know what I am selling is a set of skills. I like to say that influences these days. It’s not what you know or who you know, it’s what I call portable power.

00:10:55:01 – (Elaina Zuker): So, you know, if if you get laid off or your network disappears for some reason or another, you carry these skills within you. So to differentiate this from the influencers, you know, who have, you know, selling a cosmetics brand or something, this is not that. Now you can have very strong influence skills and be an influencer as you are.

00:11:27:26 – (Brynne Tillman): Thank you. I try to influence for good. 

00:11:31:44 – (Elaina Zuker): For good, right? And so what I came up with on this using the foundation of my selling skills and then my later getting a graduate degree in organizational psychology, I wove together my real world experience and some academic rigor to create my own unique theory of influence. Because I, you know, I find a lot of people I’m not saying who, but have never really had to sell for a living and are, you know, peddling influence.

00:12:13:22 – (Elaina Zuker): And really the only way you really get to know is from failing a lot, which I did and learned a lot from it. And so, you know what I’m teaching basically, I am teaching people a way to have more confidence and more options when they set out to influence someone. And so I just want is, as we said earlier, we’re being bombarded by so many influence messages coming at us.

00:12:52:18 – (Elaina Zuker): So one of the important things that we teach, I teach in my program is first self-analysis. There’s a questionnaire which is an assessment, and it’s unlike other assessments because it measures your thinking and behavior when you’re in the posture of influencing someone. It’s not just a general theory of personality, but although we love to learn.

00:13:23:10 – (Elaina Zuker): Me, me, me.

00:13:24:24 – (Elaina Zuker): Right. We all love to take these assessments. That isn’t really the most important lesson. And you know this from selling 101 that the most important lesson is using. There are six styles, which I won’t go into now, but people find out what their profile is across a spectrum of six different styles, strengths, and not so strong. And then we use that as a prism through which to assess the influence styles of the other.

00:14:06:04 – (Elaina Zuker): So, you know, I say it’s like having better radar. I mean, you knew those cues were there all along. You just didn’t have the equipment to find them. So that’s the easiest way to describe that. 

00:14:22:19 – (Brynne Tillman): So you can learn influence is what I’m hearing. You can learn. And so, yeah, so if you could, before we start to kind of wrap this up, can you quickly go through the seven Secrets of Influence, just kind of high-level chapter names almost right. 

00:14:42:76 – (Elaina Zuker): Well, you know, I what I will do is describe, let’s say two of them by that are vastly different from each other.

00:14:51:01 – (Elaina Zuker): So you’ll get the idea. So, for example, one style is called telling, and then I gave it a little corporate twist, and I called it analyst. And so a person I don’t label a person as a teller, but rather this has been your default. Like this is what you do because you don’t know that there are other ways and that’s why people have more confidence once they learn this.

00:15:23:01 – (Elaina Zuker): So this style is one that uses, as you said earlier, data, logic, facts and figures, evidence. So lawyers might use this. Okay. So that’s an example, like another style which is very different. And the polar opposite is what I call idealist, and it’s called gelling. It means that your ideas gel with another and a good example of this would be, a big, you know, someone who is offering a vision of the future.

00:16:05:21 – (Elaina Zuker): Martin Luther King I have a dream. So it’s a very emotional and future-oriented kind of style. Now, if I am predominantly the first style that I mentioned and I’m trying to influence someone who is the second one that I described, how far would I get using facts, figures as you know, statistics?

00:16:38:28 – (Elaina Zuker): Not very far, because if I’m the other kind, emotional, future oriented I love big ideas, possibilities, I’m going to glaze over. Right. So the bottom line, because we’re wrapping up is that, you know, it’s the same old thing from selling is just know your customer. This is just a different language. I’ll just say that, you know, love language has gotten very popular.

00:17:12:06 – (Elaina Zuker): So this is that similar idea. Understand the language and how do you understand it? That’s what we’re going to teach you. 

00:17:23:35 – (Brynne Tillman): Okay. I love that. You know, and I think my last so we talked the comparison of influence and manipulation. But can we throw the word persuasion in for a moment? How important. Yeah. Talk a little bit about how important it is to be persuasive when you’re influencing the decision.

00:17:43:18 – (Elaina Zuker): You know, I think I would use the terms interchangeably, Brynne. I mean, I think if you looked up persuasion, I haven’t lately, but I do think it’s probably interchangeable. You know, a gentle persuasion.

00:17:58:15 – (Elaina Zuker): This is not necessarily underhanded. You know, it can be very transparent. And when this is used with teams, for example, everybody takes the assessment and then shares with the team.

00:18:12:15 – (Elaina Zuker): I just thought I’d mentioned this so that, that team member that you thought, I don’t know why I can’t get through to her. Now you see. So it gives us more rapport and more empathy. And I also just want to say, at the end, if we’re at the end, is more confidence. When you think you only have one way to do something and it’s pass or fail, it’s kind of a trap, right?

00:18:44:19 – (Elaina Zuker): It’s scary. But if you know that you’re experimenting, if you think about it that way and you have five other routes to try, then you feel more confident. Well, if this doesn’t work, I’ll go in another door. 

00:19:07:59 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, that’s fantastic. I love that. So, you know, as we kind of put a bow on today’s conversation, is there a question I should have asked you that I didn’t?

00:19:23:05 – (Elaina Zuker): I don’t think so. I think I told you the origin story. I mean, a lot of people ask, how did you come up with this? And the thing about manipulation, I think, yeah, you covered it. You covered the basis. My dear, you’re such a smart interviewer. I love it. 

00:19:44:22 – (Brynne Tillman): Well, thank you so much. You’re so fun to interview.

00:19:47:12 – (Elaina Zuker): Well you caused me to do some good, deep thinking. So I always appreciate it. 

00:19:54:76 – (Brynne Tillman): Well, I appreciate it, too. Thank you so much. So if our listeners are like, my gosh, you’re amazing, how would they get in touch with you? 

00:20:00:09 – (Elaina Zuker): Okay, well, the easiest thing is my website, which is easyinfluence dot com. And my

00:20:10:19 – (Elaina Zuker): It’s easy. And my email is easyforyou. That’s the letter E Z number four letter U at easyinfluence dot com. 

00:20:28:00 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s awesome. And I believe that and your phone number are in your LinkedIn profile. 

00:20:33:02 – (Elaina Zuker): Everything’s in my LinkedIn profile and I love to hear from people. If there are questions that this smart lady didn’t think of or if there’s anything you want to ask me, please, please don’t hesitate.

00:20:47:09 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that. Thank you for all of your insights today. And to our, gosh Definitely. My pleasure. For sure. So and to all of our listeners, when you are out and about, don’t forget to make your sales social.

Outro:

Thanks for watching and join us again for more special guest instructors, bringing you marketing, sales training, and social selling strategies that will set you apart. Hit the subscribe button below to get the latest episodes from the Making Sales Social podcast, give this video a thumbs up and comment down below on what you want to hear from us next. You can also listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music. Visit our website, socialsaleslink.com for more information.