Teppo Holmqvist - Practical Influence: How to Increase Your Sales Without Lying, Begging, or Bullying

Practical Influence:

How to Increase Your Sales

Without Lying, Begging Or Bullying

Copyright 2017 Teppo Holmqvist

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author, except for brief quotations in critical articles, books and reviews.

First Edition 2017

Editing: Jukka Srkijrvi, Noel Boaz, Anthony Escarega, James Scott

Legal disclaimer

This book is designed to provide information and motivation for our readers. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged to render any type of psychological, legal, or any other kind of professional advice. This book is not meant to be used, nor should it be used, to diagnose or treat any medical condition. For diagnosis or treatment of any medical problem, consult your own physician. The content of each article is the sole expression and opinion of its author, and not necessarily that of the publisher. No warranties or guarantees are expressed or implied by the publishers choice to include any of the content in this volume. Neither the publisher nor the individual author(s) shall be liable for any physical, psychological, emotional, financial, or commercial damages, including, but not limited to, special, incidental, consequential or other damages. Our views and rights are the same: You are responsible for your own choices, actions, and results.

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Table of Contents

No matter what you are doing, you are selling yourself, your ideas or your products to other people. Because of this, influence is the highest-valued skill in free society, as it is the only way to get what you want without resorting to violence. No matter what you are doingbe it sales, teaching or just datingyour success is closely tied to how many people you can get to say yes. Getting those yeses allows you to have the kind of life you want to live.

But everyone knows that getting those yeses isnt always easy. Sometimes it feels like you are arguing with a brick wall. Sometimes you feel like you are doing everything correctly, but at the last minute the person just backs out for no apparent reason. Sometimes no matter how hard you try, it seems like your customer doesnt even understand your well-meaning proposal. It is so frustrating and it has happened to everyone.

My name is Teppo Holmqvist and I am a sales consultant. I personally prefer to call myself just a guy who knows a lot of stuff, because that is what I do. I take a specific topic, immerse myself in it fully, and a few years later come out as an expert in it. I don't focus only on theory, but learn how to use that knowledge in practice. Im not particularly slick, inspirational, or flashy, but my colleagues tell me I have a serious knack for making information accessible and easy to understand. This is why they thought that all that knowledge and experience would be wasted just lying in my head, so they convinced me to write this book.

This book is meant to help you get those yeses more often so that you are able to live more of the kind of life that you really want to live. I want to challenge your own personal beliefs about influencing others and show you that you dont need to lie, beg, or bully to be highly influential. As a matter of fact, I want to show you that a lot of things you might have learnt previously about influencing others are counterproductive. They are based on a different era where you could become highly successful simply by pounding your potential prospects into submission. Your potential prospects are far smarter than they are typically given credit for and if they start to smell fertilizer, they will shut you off. It is really your ability to provide people what they want that is going to make you a winner.

This book is meant to make your life easier. It is meant to help you to get more sales, get more for less work, forge better relationships, and improve the quality of your life. While the context used in this book is traditional sales, thinking this book is only meant for sales would be underselling it, because the actual techniques are content free. No matter what you are doing, you are selling yourself and these techniques work equally well when doing negotiations, therapy, dating, networking and even parenting. There is no context where these skills cant be used, but learning them requires effort. But with the right kind of attitude, with willingness to put forth effort to learn these skills, you will be surprised how much your ability to influence others will improve in the span of just a few months.

If you are an absolute beginner, this book will give you a roadmap that allows you to get an idea of how different pieces fit together. If you are just getting interested in sales, you will learn things that will hopefully save you from years of frustration. For more experienced people, this book will help you spot where you might have made mistakes in the past and help you to fix them. If you are an expert at influencing others, you will get an excellent overview on the most important skills and you are also likely to discover new strategies and techniques. With all this being said, lets get started.

The intended goal of this book would be to provide the pure essence of influence. So long as a person has an IQ that is above 70, and hasnt lived their whole life isolated from human civilization, you can count on these operators to be available for your use. When you understand these time-proven psychological operators, you dont need to rely on tricks and routines to influence people. Instead, you are just leveraging what is already deep inside every person. For the sake of clarity, this book divides the operators into seven groups, which will be discussed in much greater detail in their own chapters:

1. State control: Ability to control your own state and pay attention to others
2. Rapport: Creating a feeling of sameness between two people
3. Acquiescence: Getting the other person to follow your lead
4. Emotional connection : Connecting emotions to your product or service
5. Framing: Contextualizing the interaction and putting an idea or belief into a different perspective
6. Hallucination: Skill of creating vivid and compelling imagery
7. Self-Affirmation : Making a person commit to a given behaviour

Each operator is followed by an application chapter that puts things you have learnt into practice. Theory chapters can be read in any order you want, but with application I assume you have familiarized yourself with all of the operators introduced before the chapter. This is simply to keep the structure and make sure that I dont need to go over things again and again. For your reading leisure, each chapter also ends with a recap that summarizes the most important key points into a nice, tight package.

As you start to read this book, Ill be your personal coach on influence. Like great boxing coach Angelo Dundee, I cant last in the ring with a top-ranked heavyweight more than fifteen seconds. However, he knew how to bring best out from Muhammad Ali and make him the greatest boxer the world has ever seen. My intention is also to bring the best out from you and this is why I want you to promise me something. Im not asking you to believe anything that Im saying. Im not even asking you to agree with me. Im merely asking you to go through this book at a leisurely pace, and if you see something that fits and works for you, just take it and use it. What doesnt work for you, just let go of it and let it be.