Influencing – Clearly Defined Goals

We continue with our series on ‘Influencing’ with Clearly Defined Goals.

In every area of our lives you only really achieve if you know what it is that you want. In business if you know what you want you can direct the right questions to a particular client and get the results and response that you want.

Doing a customer needs analysis will help direct this line of questioning and ensure you get the result you want, by knowing what they need and how that fits with what you can provide.

When going into any meeting you need to know; What is it that you want?

Let me break this down a little, there are 3 types or levels of goal that I will take in with me:-

Primary goal – The thing you would most like to achieve. If you can come away with your Primary Goal achieved – it’s job done!

Secondary goal – If you are faced with an obvious obstruction to the primary goal, what do you do? Fall back to the secondary goal which might be to establish a need from the client to come back with a proposal that would fit their interpretation of their requirements. This would allow you to go back and get the sale at that point.

Tertiary Goal – You have not achieved a sale and there really had not been an understanding of requirements or further need. What do you do next? What are the next actions to take? How do we take the business relationship forward?

Do understand that communication lines are still open at this point.

Having a Clearly Defined Goal helps us to guide and direct what it is that we do on our interactions with anyone in any meeting, sales, training sessions and almost any human interaction.

Why are you there? What is it that you want to achieve? That, will direct exactly what it is that you do and how you interact on a moment by moment basis.