Consulting Tips from the Million Dollar Consultant:
Alan's Ten Step Program to More Powerful Persuasion
- Build your vocabulary daily
- Write down and look up words you don't know
- Strive for "mid-high" level speech
- Create and practice metaphors, analogies, and examples
- Use repeatedly until natural
- Keep examples contemporary through reading
- Understand the other person's behavioral comfort zone
- Flexibly change your own behavioral set
- Use emotion, not logic, to spur to action
- Listen 80% of the time
- Employ effective listening techniques
- Allow silences and don't seek to fill them
- Visualize and anticipate
- Consider the conversational options in advance
- Create an articulate response to every likely objection
- Focus on output, not input
- Transfer your mental set to result and outcome
- Distinguish between them with the other party
- Avoid defensiveness
- Use judo and momentum to reverse direction
- Ask "why"
- Provide options, not a fait accompli
- Move the discussion from "if" to "how"
- Engage the other in the diagnosis
- Move through a series of small "yeses"
- Know your business model
- Gain conceptual agreement methodically
- Always concentrate on value, never price, cost, or fee
- Never voluntarily discuss fees
- Defray questions about fee in the other's best interests