Persuasion

I was told of an interesting system for measuring how much influence you have when trying to persuade someone to do what you want. My first thought was that persuasion is not the way to be working today, however almost everything we do in business involves it. For example, getting a meeting with a prospect means persuading them that you are worth seeing.

The technique revolves around two criteria - relationship and expertise. How is your relationship with the person to be persuaded and how much of an expert do they regard you as, for the subject being discussed. For example, I met a person earlier this week who is HR Director of a mid sized company. I had not met them before but the company use our HR software. At the start we had little relationship but she regarded me as enough of an expert in the system to have a meeting. My aim during the meeting was to strengthen the relationship.

New use for an old way of working

I have been at a user conference run by a company we are looking to partner with. Amongst other presentations was one from BigHand (http://www.bighand.com/) who sell digital dictation systems. When I heard they were presenting, my first thought was that the age of the typing pool was long gone. However, they gave it a new twist - their sales team use the system to dictate messages, letters, proposals etc when out on the road. These are picked up by an admin person back at the office who processes them either into their CRM system or as letters etc.

The result of this is a more efficient sales team with happy clients and prospects who receive documents much quicker. An added bonus is that their admin person gets to know the business much faster being more involved.

Another speaker was a futurologist who was encouraging us all to watch 'An Inconvenient Truth'. Must get a copy soon!

My first blog post

This is it - I have finally got a blog up and running!

I have had a number of people telling me that I should have a blog and post my thoughts about business and more particularly about implementing business systems. The final straw was a really interesting meeting with John Mell from Trovus. I finally realised that it was time to find out more.

My company, Centurion, has been implementing sales, marketing and HR systems for over 10 years. During this time we have worked for companies of all sizes throughout the UK. We have contact with many great people and the scope for learning is enormous. Hopefully I can share som eof that through thsi blog.

When I am not working I spend time with my family sailing, hiking or renovating our house. I took up running a couple of years ago and have run several 10k races and a 1/2 marathon last month.