Everyone is in Sales

Sales is persuasion. It is convincing another person to take an action.

Relatively few of us spend our day persuading others to buy something, but all of us find the need to persuade others to take actions.

Maybe you need to convince your boss to give you a raise. Or perhaps you find yourself in a position where you need to persuade a law enforcement officer that a verbal warning is all that's required to keep your speed below the posted limit the next time you drive.

Or maybe you need to get your children to eat more broccoli and less cheese pizza.

All of us need to persuade others to do something we desire at some point during our day.

All of us are in sales.

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Bottled Success

What makes someone good at sales? If you can bottle the full answer to that question and sell it for $4.99 an ounce, you'll be replacing Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk at the top of the Forbes list.

We don't have the full answer to what makes someone good at persuasion, but we do know one of their secret ingredients: they know what makes the other person tick.

If you can present your argument in a manner that aligns with the other person's priorities and perspective, you're halfway there — you might even be all the way there.

Before anyone says yes to a request, they consciously or unconsciously must find an answer to the question, "What's in it for me?" Even if it's the avoidance of a negative, everyone looks at the request from their own perspective.

Persuasion is the art of letting the other person have it your way.

To paraphrase Dale Carnegie of "How To Win Friends and Influence People" fame, get the other person to think it's their idea and they'll go to the end of the earth to defend it.

That sounds easy enough, doesn't it? You're still faced with one challenge, though:

How do you find out what the other person's priorities and perspective are?

Priorities and Perspective

You can ask someone what's important to them, but they may not know the answer.

You can guess, but throwing darts at the wall only seems to work at picking stocks.

Perhaps one of the most effective ways to glean someone's likely priorities and perspectives is to take a personality test.

[Hint: Don't just take any personality test, take the world's most accurate and reliable psychometric assessment, the Core Values Index — with a rated 97.7% repeat reliability in longitudinal studies.]

First, know yourself and understand how you see the world. By identifying the lens through which you see the world, you will learn your own priorities and perspectives. You will learn how you communicate, and more importantly, how you subconsciously want others to communicate with you.

To persuade others, the first step is to get a handle on how you come across and why. (Your full Core Values Index psychometric assessment report will give you all this information and more.)

It's Not About You, It's About Them

The next step is to learn how to identify the personality type of the person you're trying to persuade.

Study the various Core Values personality types that exist and learn how to identify the likely traits they exhibit.

Read about the four Core Value Energies (personality types):

• Builders — Power and Faith
• Merchants — Love and Truth
• Innovators — Wisdom and Compassion
• Bankers — Knowledge and Justice

By spotting someone's personality profile, you can quickly determine their preferred communication style and get a pretty good handle on what their priorities and perspective might be.

See also:

• How to Guess Someone's Core Values Index Profile

You can then fine tune your message so that it resonates with the other person and quickly answers their internal question, "What's in it for me?"

This may not make you Salesperson of the Year down at the local car dealership (it might if that's your job), but it may result in your kids finally eating their vegetables.