Mastering the Art of Influence

Hello and welcome to the show. I'm your host, Tavi Shima Ayede. This is definitely going to be a noisy episode because I'm at the car wash, so expect to hear interruptions in the background and today is a very windy day. If you'd love an opportunity to connect and to see what opportunities that you and I can explore, then call me on 08064662140 or you can WhatsApp me on the same number. The country code is +234 for those of you who are not Nigerian and for social media,

you can connect with me on LinkedIn. So today we're going to continue with how to build strong relationships with decision makers. The reason why I'm going back to that topic, even though that's what we did yesterday, was because yesterday it looks like I went over and over why it is important that you should build relationships with decision makers. But I didn't actually tell you guys how we should go about doing that.

So today I'm going to tackle that part of the equation. So today we're going to look at relationship building tools. Essentially, when you're dealing with people who are decision makers, if this is your first time of listening to the podcast, you don't know who a decision maker is and you don't know why that is relevant to what it is that you do. Then after you're done listening to this episode, listen to yesterday's episode and you're going to get caught up to speed.

Now, since people are in the business of providing secrets to success, let me go on and provide secrets of my own. I'm just being tongue in cheek here because really, I don't believe that anything is a secret when it comes to sales or business development success. The answers already out there. So First off, if you want to build relationships with decision makers, you have to identify their concerns. Now, I know this might sound strange to you guys because if you're thinking about relationship building tools, I'm sure you are thinking about how to talk better, how to laugh better, how to smile better, you know, and stuff like that.

But remember that this is business, you know, we're not about making friends. We're about building our bank accounts and making some money. And we are about providing value to the people that we're sitting across on the other end of the table. And so even they are not here to make friends. They are here to solve a problem. So it doesn't matter what business you're involved in, whether you're a wedding photographer or whether you own a car wash, like where I am right now recording this episode, whether you're an accountant, the person that you're having a conversation with is not looking for a new friend.

The person is trying to solve a problem. If you're an architect, the person is trying to build a house and build a house on the budget. If you're the car wash, the person wants his car to be clean and let me see what else. If you're with a wedding photographer, of course the person wants their wedding covered in a very nice, sophisticated, stylized way or whatever it is that their taste happens to be. So when we're talking about building relationships with decision makers, we're not talking about coming here and making friends.

Nobody needs new friends. Everybody already has enough friends, so they're trying to solve the problem. You're trying to make some money. So let's keep the focus on that. So First off, identify these people's concerns. I'm trying to figure out what it is that they're trying to solve. So if you're the architect trying to build a relationship with the people on the other end of the table is first of all, trying to figure out exactly what it is that they're trying to do.

Do you understand their artistic vision? Do you understand their timeline for when the house is going to be built? Let's see what else? Oh, forgive me, I'm not an architect and I'm not in the building space, so I'm not sure exactly what it is that the architect does different from the draftsman and what the draftsman does different from the site engineer. So I'm just freestyling that, but you get my point. You want to figure out who this person is, what they're about,

what it is they're trying to build, what's the timeline, what are they trying to achieve? That is the beginning of building relationships with decision makers and people on the other end of the table. Because if you're able to understand what it is that they're trying to do and you're able to align your needs with theirs and show them how you can bring their vision to fruition and help them get the results, then that's the beginning of everybody being all nice and happy.

If you don't believe me, think back to the time when you had a Carpenter to come and do some work at your house and the Carpenter did rubbish. It was because the Carpenter didn't understand what it is that you are trying to achieve and they ended up producing rubbish. And believe me, if you remember correctly, that did not help the relationship between both of you. And that's the reason why you don't call that Carpenter again to do work for you.

So the secret to building a strong relationship with decision makers or with clients on the other end of the table is to not obsess over building a relationship in the 1st place. Just come in there, identify their concerns, make sure that your needs are aligned, and then the relationship will take care of itself. Of course, if you listen to the episode that I did three days ago, now I was on relationship building. I can't remember, but I know it was about 3 days ago.

So if you don't listen to this episode, skip back to episodes and then listen to that. I spoke about commonality or how you build rapport. That is also going to help when it comes to building relationships. So no need to be labeled that since we're already done that on another episode. I want to make sure that today's episode is not one of those 30 minute episodes. Then there are also some frameworks to help when it comes to building relationships or trying to identify people's concerns and things like that.

And one of them is from Victor Antonio. He is a sales trainer, mostly technical sales based out of America. Now, I cannot remember his framework entirely because he has lots of nice acronyms that he uses to explain some stuff. But going based off memory, let me just talk about a couple of things that he talks about. South Victor Antonio talks about identifying the management user. For those of you who are in technical sales, you know you're trying to sell IT or software,

let's say. OK, I'm outside the Accountant General's office right now in Abuja. So if you want to go and sell, let me see, OK, let's say you graduated from Babcock and you studied computer science and then you have connects with guys in China and you don't have to supply Apple laptops at a good price. And then maybe your uncle works in Accountant General's office or Ministry of Finance and he has the hookup. He thinks he can arrange a meeting for you to say you can supply laptops to the whole to the whole building or maybe to a certain department.

So this is the framework that Victor Antonio says that you should adopt. So first of all, if you think about the management user, management user basically just means Orga. You have to liaise with all the Orgas in the department because they have to be on board because orga has to know what's up in the department before any decision is made. So definitely you guys to align with the management user or the Orga, then you also have to think about the technical user.

The technical user is the desk officer, the person, the very person who's going to be handling that laptop on a day-to-day. Because if you're trying to sell into Accountant General's Office and you think that Apple computers are the best in the world and everybody should adopt Apple computers, but the people who are in Accountant General's office or who are in Ministry of Finance or whatever are used to working with Microsoft Windows,

then this is going to be a hard sell. Because if the Olga likes the vision, but the technical users, the desk officers say, Olga, we don't like this thing, we cannot use it. It doesn't work with our process. You know, this and this and that, and that is going to make your deal unnecessarily hard. So it's not just a matter of going in there and aligning with Olga. You also have to be cool with the technical users and aligned with them.

Oh, sorry. You know, I told you guys it was a windy day and I'm out of the car wash. So that's what I breeze in the background. Then Victor Antonio says we also have to pay attention to the economic buyer. The economic buyer is the person who is going to drop the money at the end of the day because the management user or the is not the person who is going to drop the money. The technical user or the desk officer definitely won't drop the money.

The person that will drop the money is the person who is in the accounting department or the human resources department or the procurement department or the purchasing department or whatever department it is that they have there. So for Victor Antonio, he says that when we look, when we're in complex sales, especially in technical and IT kind of sales, that is how we should think about breaking into this deal. Who are the management people?

Who are the auger begin to align with them? Who are the technical users? Who are the desk officers? You need to be talking to those people. Who are the economic buyers? Who is the person that is going to sign on the cheque or authorize the transfer? At the end of the day, you also need to make sure you're talking to those people and bring them in on the deal. So once you know who the management user is, the technical user is, the economic buyer is, then remember what I

said about identifying their concerns, what's important with them? Align your needs to theirs and then build some commonality along the way. Make sure you're a decent human being to chat with and you should be doing OK. Remember, if some of these terms sound strange, if this is the first time listening to the show, especially when I say commonality and rapport, rapport. After you're done listening to this episode, skip back 2

episodes. The episode has trust. It has trust in the title. I can't remember what it was called. Anybody has trust in the title. If you listen to that, you only hear about the three CS and that's another framework from Tom Hopkins and that's commonality, credibility, and competence. Yes, commonality, credibility, and competence. So you guys will learn some more there. It's also going to be useful when it comes to building relationships with decision makers.

Then also when we are trying to build relationships with our customers and decision makers, we also have need to offer insights. Insights just means important stuff that they have not paid attention to before. That is insight. For instance, I'm a member of a group, the African podcasters and voice actors. Something, something, something. So we have a water group and a couple of us, you know, it's our tan season and we work with our voice, you know, whether we're consultants or we do radio work or TV work.

And so it's that time of the year. Some of us have started coughing and sneezing and, you know, things like that. And so I was just chatting on the group, like in like, hey, guys, you know, I'm supposed to collaborate with somebody. The guy is down with a cold. Even me, my, my throat is dreaming one kind. So like what are tips for voice care and things like that? Now, of course there are some usual voice exercises and voices and voice routine that people already know of.

Well, then there are some things that are helpful but people did not consider like OK, that I told you guys before about how my father-in-law and my mother-in-law, every time this thing starts, they tell me I should just take warm water and I should mix it with lime and I should mix it with ginger and I should mix it with honey. And so they spoke about the honey thing. Some members of the group talk about the honey thing.

He's looking as if this thing is an African remedy because even people in Zambia are talking about this, this remedy. So maybe I should try it out. When somebody said something about cold water and coffee, about how that restricts vocal cords. Now, you see, in my own situation, now that is something that is really, really, really insightful because it's important information, but it's not something I've considered before and I probably never would have considered.

So you need to find ways to give insights to your customers. So like if you're selling into Accountant General's office, you want to sell computers to the whole department. If once in a while you call up the technical user and then you drop some knowledge on them, like hey my guy, I don't know, blah blah blah. I was just thinking, you know, since people use Windows system with this AI tool, you can integrate this and this and that and that.

You should be able to help you to process this payment and process that payment. You know, I'll be how you see him and the guy will be like, ah, yes, it's true. Let me try it. And then he tries it and then it works and the guy will heavily be grateful. And you know, when they're considering in the departments, you know which vendor to go with, it's one of the things that will be in your favour because everybody will think this guy is a correct guy or this babe is a correct babe.

So yes, maybe she's young, she just graduated Babcock University two years ago, so maybe she's young, but she sounds like she knows what she's doing. She's been giving us correct insights that is improving the way that we work and things like that, you know, so we might as well consider her. So you see that these are ways that you can be building relationships with decision makers and it will help you move your house, help you move your business.

Then let's see what else. Let me look through my notes. OK, I already mentioned that there's an episode that I did 2 episodes ago on building trust. So what you do is just skip back 2 episodes. You listen to that or if you're listening to this on YouTube, what you do is just type in Tavishima in the search bar, type in Tavishima and then type in trust and then hit send. And then any episode that I have done with the over 970 episodes that we have for the show right now available on YouTube, any episode that I've done around,

trust all the episodes will just be there and you can listen to them. Remember, like I said, when you are listening to any of the resources that I have on YouTube or you're listening to anybody's resources on YouTube for that matter, listen with a pen and a paper. The goal is you should be writing something down today that you can use tomorrow, 9:00 AM immediately to start moving your business forward. Don't just listen and say, oh,

that was nice, that was nice. Keep a pen and paper handy. Don't annotate the whole thing. Just write down the thing that you know you can do tomorrow morning. 8:00 nine o'clock to move the business forward. Then of course, try and be personable and likable when you're talking to people, talking to business maker, decision makers and something that I cannot over stress, you know, be patient, but be persistent because when you're doing complex sales, these things take time.

If you listen to yesterday's episode and you consider the examples that we spoke about, you see that these things take time. If you're going to sell computers to a department or to every single department in the accountant General's office, these things take time. You're not going to enter into that place today, meet with somebody tomorrow and then collect a cheque for hundreds of millions next tomorrow. It doesn't work like that.

The patient complex deals take time, so there's a lot that can be said on the matter, but let me just bring it to a close today because I don't want to keep doing these 30 minutes episodes. I don't want to test you guys patience. So thank you very much for your time and attention. I'll catch you guys in the next episode and remember, if you would like an opportunity to connect and see opportunities that we can explore together,

you and me, call me on O 806-466-2140 or WhatsApp me on the same number. The country code is +234. For those of you who are not Nigerian because I noticed that 2% of you are Chinese. So please reach out to me. Are you guys really, really Chinese or you just happen to be Nigerian diaspora, you know, Nigerians who are living in China, you know, reach out, let's have a chat. Let me see what problems that you guys are facing.

Let me see how I can help. And most importantly, let me see what you, you know, my Chinese brothers would like to know to help move your business forward. I was about to say something racist. So let me, let me just keep. Well, anyway, let me just say it's not exactly racist. DSTV is doing this thing where they're showing a couple of movies about Bruce Lee and Jet Li and who again. So please, my Chinese listeners, you know, Novak's, I'm not sure whether those guys are Chinese or Japanese or whatever, but it's, you know, we Nigerians,

especially those of us who are like, you know, 70s to 80s kids, you know, we grew up watching all that Bruce Lee stuff and Jackie Chan and all that. So forgive me if it sounds racist. Well, you know, we got love for you guys. We like your cinema. So yeah, that's it. I'll catch you guys in the next episode. Yeah, that's it till tomorrow.