The Influencer: Secrets To Success And Happiness With Brian Ahearn

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TSP Brian Ahearn | Influencing People

 

Developing your ability to influence people is crucial to success and happiness. Your business needs to have a solid foundation, and you also have to know how to widen your network. Join John Livesay as he talks with Brian Ahearn on the science behind the influence process. Brian is a dynamic international keynote speaker, author, coach, and consultant. He specializes in applying the science of influence in everyday situations. Tune in to discover how to recognize powerful opportunities and influence people!

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The Influencer: Secrets To Success And Happiness With Brian Ahearn

Our guest is Brian Ahearn, a return guest from October of 2020. When he reached out to me and said that he has a new book called The Influencer: Secrets to Success and Happiness, that is a business parable and follows the life of John Andrews, who’s an ordinary person who becomes an extraordinary influencer as he learns from coaches, mentors, and clients. I thought to myself, “I need to have Brian back on.” I, myself, have written a fable. What he is doing is using the storytelling format to reach a new set of readers. It is about applying what is in The Influencer book on the impact that influence can have both professionally and personally.

Brian, welcome back to the show.

John, I appreciate you having me on. It’s good to talk to you again.

I know that one of the things that excited you about this book is that nearly every character is based on a real person that you have learned something from. What a great combination of your life’s work? I know what that feels like. You think I couldn’t have written this book several years ago, and I couldn’t have done it.

Absolutely. I didn’t start out writing the book with that in mind, but I started to quickly realize, “This character is based on Loring, Ben or Dwayne.” I started utilizing those first names so I could clearly visualize them, but it was an honor to share with the world the things that these people taught me that were so helpful on a professional and a personal level.

For those who haven’t read your episode from October 2020, give us a little snippet of your own story of origin. You can parallel that with the book as well. You do an amazing analysis and research to give some exposition on who this lead character is. I wonder if any of those things mirror your own story of origin.

TSP Brian Ahearn | Influencing People

The Influencer: Secrets to Success and Happiness

They do mirror my story. I had people ask me, “Is this your story?” Its bits and pieces are. For example, when John goes off to college, he takes a Psychology class as a freshman, which has a big impact on him. That happened to me. I didn’t come across influence, but I do clearly remember that class. It obviously had a big impact, but John is a lot smarter than I was. The things that he learns, he lays hold of and puts into practice so that he starts reaping the benefits.

It took me a lot longer to figure that part of the game. Certain things do parallel. Many of the things that he learns throughout the book are things that I learned from significant people, coaches, clients and mentors throughout the course of my life. To go back to that episode in 2020 and let people know my area of expertise is the science of influence. I look at the decades of research from Social Psychology and Behavioral Economics. I look at ways to put that into practice to help clients get to yes more often. That usually means, on a personal level, a lot more success when you are in the office and usually a lot more happiness at home when people are more willingly saying yes to you.

As a storytelling keynote speaker, what I have found is that when people learn how to tell better stories, it not only helps them in their sales career, it helps them in their personal life. You do such a great job in this book of showing how the two things work in this character’s life. Can you give us a little snippet of when you fix, learn, or improve one area of your life? It is not in a siloed, “This only helps me in my career.”

I think it takes creativity to figure out how to take some of the silos and combine them. As a personal example, I’m a disciplined individual. It came from sports at a young age, football, weightlifting, running marathons, and things like that. It took me a while to figure out how do I take that silo and put it into my career to have more success. Once I figured it out, all of a sudden, especially as I stepped out on my own a few years ago, it has never been hard for me to get up early, put my head down, and put in 8 or 10 hours a day towards the business where a lot of people might say, “I would not have that self-motivation.”

That is a personal thing for me. In the book, I tried to help the character as he learns these bits and pieces. He has got this vision of what he is trying to put together in this puzzle. He doesn’t know what the picture is going to be ultimately, but he knows that these snippets of ideas that are helping him somehow have to come together to form a philosophy of life. At the end of the book, he completes the puzzle and knows what that picture is.

One of the intersections of what your work and my work is people inevitably get this objection, which is, “I don’t feel like I’m ready to make a decision right now. I need to think it over.” You have helped people come up with some things to either avoid that from happening or what to say when it does happen. Can you give us some insight on that?

I think a great way of avoiding that is very early in the sales process. John, the lead character, is a medical supply sales rep. When you understand the principle of consistency, it tells us that we feel an internal psychological pressure and external social pressure to be consistent in what we say and what we do. The bottom line, we feel better about ourselves when our words and deeds line up.

[bctt tweet=”Don’t say ‘no problem’ after someone thanks you. Give people everything they need upfront to make saying yes easier.” username=”John_Livesay”]

If a salesperson learns to ask the right questions early on, when you get to the point where you are trying to close the sale, it becomes much easier because you can reference back to. For example, “John, when we initially talked, you told me that you needed this particular price, timing, and these terms in the contract. It looks like we have done all of that and a little bit more. Go ahead and start working on the paperwork and consummate this deal.”

It becomes much harder for you to say, “Let me think about it.” It is not that you want to remove yourself from the situation. There is always a little bit of fear when you are making a change and a purchase. Learning how to ask those questions to trigger this principle of consistency allows somebody to feel good about themselves by saying yes because they are only responding that you have done everything you said you would.

The other thing that almost all of us have happened to us at one time or another, especially if there is some emotion involved in it, like if someone is breaking up with you, for example. They said, “It was never my intention to hurt you.” I know this happened to me exactly. At that time, I found that so unsatisfying of an answer and I thought, “Why is that not landing as a sincere apology or making me feel any better?”

Someone said later, “Wouldn’t it have been great if you could have said back? I’m sure it wasn’t your intention to make me feel loved by that behavior either.” I didn’t have that in my repertoire to say when it happened to me. You talk about almost all of us having that situation where we go, “I should have said this instead of that or not saying anything.” What do you show in the book that helps us with these situations?

This guy, John, is a smart and good person, down to the poor, which most people are. We want to do the right thing. He does run into situations where he ends up hurting his wife because he is making some decisions without consulting her. She was looking at this like, “This is a partnership, and you may not think this is important, but I’m not even in on the decision-making.”

He does feel bad about it, but he continues to make this mistake at times. It is never to hurt. He sometimes feels boxed into a decision, and all of a sudden, he is responding. I will say that he begins to learn his lesson, and that makes things better, having to sit down with somebody in a situation like that and not try to defend why you did what you did because we all have reasons to be able to say, “I am so sorry. It was never my intention. Here is what went on with me. I hope you can forgive me.”

That is an integral part of having relationships being able to say you are sorry and asking for forgiveness. I think asking for forgiveness is important. We could think that everything is okay because we apologize and have not gotten confirmation from the other person that they are okay. I think it is important to admit the mistake and then say, “Can you forgive me?” If that person says yes, you are in harmony. If they say, “This is going to take some time,” then you have got to be patient.

TSP Brian Ahearn | Influencing People

Influencing People: It takes creativity to figure out how to take some of the silos and combine them as a personal example.

 

I think what the frustration was, at least, for me, and I see it in other situations where it is not that big of a dramatic moment, but it is when someone doesn’t want to own responsibility for what they did or the outcome. The fact that it wasn’t my intention to hurt you means I’m off the hook. There is nothing to even ask for forgiveness for because it wasn’t my intention. I think in a business situation, it is the same thing because I have worked with clients that have lost clients and tried to win them back. We have to do the same thing as we do in our personal relationships and own that we made a mistake, explain what we are going to do, that it doesn’t happen again and have some empathy for what that other person is feeling.

The other part of what you do so well is when someone is looking for a sales keynote speaker. They typically do a Google search. Oftentimes, I have come up against a couple of other speakers. They had a meeting and interviewed the final three candidates and looked at our videos and our books. Sometimes, as many as 8 or 10 people have to agree on who is going to be the speaker. You hoped you had created somebody in there that is going to be your internal champion to rally for you. No matter what the decision is, getting a consensus can be challenging with a team. What kinds of tips are we going to learn from your Influencer book?

When you are going into a situation like that, try to discern, first of all, is this person the decision-maker, or there going to be other individuals who are part of it? Can you get some of those other individuals on the call? For example, I had the second call with a client. The first there was the lead-in, but we had a call with that lead-in’s boss and a peer of the boss. There are still other people that are going to make the decision. I know that now having a positive influence on three different decision-makers and being able to speak their language in the middle of that sales conversation gives them confidence that this guy knows what he is talking about and he can relate to us.

Three people will be a lot better for ultimately making that decision than if I had that single individual. Discerning who the decision-maker is and doing what you can to bring in other people also asking, if you and I were having the conversation and I might say, “John, it is a great conversation. I’m excited about the potential opportunity to work. Who else will you be talking with? What can I give you beyond the conversation to support your recommendation for me as a speaker?”

If it is that bio, the customer list, the videos, and all of that stuff are usually out there for any speaker. My goal is to make your life a little easier and directly give you that information so that you are ready at that moment to say, “I talked to the person, look at the list. Let’s watch this five-minute video and get that traction.”

I think that is so valuable. Sometimes you get hired because you are easy to work with, given everything else is the same. The simplest things of, “You are connecting the dots for me. I don’t have to go searching for something, or you have some empathy and are trying to put yourself in my shoes going, “You might need this. I’m happy to send it to you. You don’t have to spend five minutes looking for it,” or whatever it might be. Those little things do add up.

I had a client in 2021. I’m very diligent about staying on top of the email. When I would email that person, they are like, “Thank you so much for getting back to me quickly.” I said, “Part of my job is to make your job easy.” She was like, “You would not believe how many people don’t do that or hard to get ahold of. They don’t get me information.”

[bctt tweet=”An integral part of having relationships is being able to say you’re sorry and ask for forgiveness.” username=”John_Livesay”]

I also know this when I get something. If she had said, “Give me the bio, the customer lists, and a link to a video,” I almost always would put in the beginning, “Name as promised to make what you need.” It is only highlighting that, “Brian is a guy who does what he says he will do.” Those little bits continually work on somebody. That is when they look for a speaker again, and they say, “This person was great on stage. They were so easy to work with.” They want you back.

It is that whole thing of pre-suasion that you are such an expert at. You are reinforcing, as promised, is a subtle subconscious thing of almost edifying yourself that you keep your promises.

If you go into a store, you may have a wonderful experience, but it can be reinforced when that person says something about, “We hope you had a great experience shopping here now,” or the server who comes up. The server, like in a restaurant, should never, ever, come up and say, “Is the food okay?” Nobody goes to a restaurant for okayed food.

That is all we are aiming for.

Is the food delicious? If you come back and say, “Delicious,” you have convinced yourself that this is pretty good. I should probably come back. If it is not, they have an opportunity to say, “I am so sorry. What can I do to change this? Can you bring it back and have it warmed up or something like that?” That act becomes viewed as reciprocity, “That server was nice.” He or she went out of their way to make sure this was warmed up. I’m going to tip them a little more and come back here. Those little interactions back to that customer mean a lot.

I had an experience of this personally. I was in New York to go see some Broadway shows. You now have to stand in line to show your ID and vaccination and then another line to show your tickets. You are standing outside. It is cold and winter. They have those people saying, “Welcome back to Broadway.” Suddenly, everyone is happy in the line. You don’t mind the cold. You are excited to see a show that you have seen for many months. That one phrase said by the people who are running the line made a whole energy shift for everyone to remember why they are there. You have a great story in here about a major insurance company that was able to recover from a $700,000 mistake with post-it notes. Please share what that is.

The first book that I wrote, Influence PEOPLE: The Powerful Everyday Opportunities to Persuade that are Lasting and Ethical, looks at a lot of business case studies. There was a piece of research that intrigued me. It was around a company trying to increase the response rate for a survey they sent out. When they sent the survey out with a cover letter, I think 36% of the people responded. When they put a little handwritten note on the cover letter, it bumped it up to 48%. Taking a little extra time to sign that personally and put a little note on there increased the response rate, but in a third variation, they put a yellow sticky note. They had the same handwritten note that had been on the cover letter before.

TSP Brian Ahearn | Influencing People

Influencing People: There’s always a little bit of fear when you’re making a change and you’re making a purchase.

 

The response rate was 75%. They more than doubled it. When people hear that, they are fascinated, but they don’t always know how to put it into practice. At the company that I used to work for several years, I would come back from an extended Christmas break, and almost immediately, I was called into a room with half a dozen people. “Here is the situation we face, John. We had overpaid insurance agents in one of our operating states, $700,000 in total, 150 agents had their commission for the month of December doubled. We needed to get the money back because, at the end of January, we were going to be paying year-end bonuses to those agents. It would be nice to have an extra $700,000.”

As we strategized about it, we didn’t have the ability to go in electronically and take the money out. We were going to have to inform them that there had been a mistake and ask them to write a check. That is no easy task. If you get a letter that says, “John, I’m so sorry, but we overpaid you $5,000 last month, would you sit down and write us a check right away?”

That is where cold calling becomes more appealing than writing the $5,000. The head of accounting had been through some of my training, and I turned to him and said, “Steve, remember what I taught you guys about the sticky notes?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “When you send out that letter that talks about the mistake and asks for the money back, make sure you put a sticky note on every one of those, personally sign it or put a little note.” He said, “I will do it.”

It was a couple of weeks later, I called them up, and I asked, “How was the collection going?” His exact words were, “John, I’m floored.” I said, “Why?” He goes, “We have already gotten money back from 130 of the 150.” The optimist in me said, “You mean we didn’t get it all back?” He laughed at me and went, “We are talking about money because I get them to say, ‘Take it out of next month’s commission, put me on a payment plan’ or anything, but ‘Sit down and write the check.’”

When we had lunch a few months later, we had collected in full from 147 of the 150. This is a hardcore accounting, black and white numbers guy, and your sales staff is BS. I don’t believe in that. He believed in the use of yellow sticky notes. He was a believer after that because he knew that was a radical change in behavior from these people to pay us that money back.

When you go, the extra effort to other people is a great way to end the episode. The book itself again is Influence PEOPLE: The Powerful Everyday Opportunities to Persuade that are Lasting and Ethical. It is on Amazon, but this concept of the unrecognized power of saying thanks and responding properly to thanks, there are two questions in that. One is, saying thanks, how is that unrecognized as a good thing to do? The second part of it is, when someone thanks you, there is a proper way to respond as opposed to maybe, “You’re welcome,” not saying anything or a smile. Let’s take the first part of that question. Are most people not aware that there is power in saying thanks, and that is why they don’t do it?

[bctt tweet=”Having positive influence on different decision makers and being able to speak their language in the middle of that sales conversation is important.” username=”John_Livesay”]

I think what you or I might have called good manners as we were growing up had gone by the wayside. I have always found that, for example, if somebody asks me something and I say, “Yes, please or no, thank you,” I have a lot of people go, “It is so nice to interact with somebody who has manners.” I will say, “My mom raised me right.” The story that I put in the book was about a man named Lieutenant Murphy who was a Navy SEAL and was killed in action.

He had to make a call back to base and expose himself on a rock. He knew he was going to die and be shot. In the middle of that, he called for airstrikes and said, “Thank you,” at the end of the call. The individual who relayed the story, a commanding officer, said, “That is the man that he was,” in the middle of a firefight and he did lose his life. My point with sharing the story is if he can find the time, life and death situation, to say, “Thank you,” then we all should.

It acknowledges that other person like, “I appreciate what you have done.” On the flip side, the other story and that you asked about how we respond to that, we never wanted to dismiss somebody’s thanks to you. When somebody says, “No problem. No big deal. No worries,” you are de-valuing what somebody felt like was valuable. The proper way when somebody says “thank you” is to say something like, “John, that is what partners do for each other. You helped me. I will help you. I’m happy to do this.”

If you want to be funny, sometimes I have said this, “It would have killed an ordinary man, but you were worth it.” Something that acknowledges you heard them. You had put forth an effort and I appreciate what they did. It is the grease of the wheels that make our relationships better. Little things like that make customers want to come back because they feel good about the transaction.

I want to thank you publicly, but most people won’t be able to see what I see, which is you did something very personalized and customized as you have a monitor with my show’s image logo. It says, “Hello, John,” on it. I have done over 350 episodes. It also shows pictures of your wonderful books. I have never had a guest do that ever.

I appreciate you saying that. I joke with people, I say, “Everybody should have their name in lights once a day,” but I’m a fast learner like John was in the book, The Influencer. Once I see that something means something to people, I make it a point to go out and make sure that I recognize and prepare for the time that we are going to spend together. It is a wonderful selling tool, too, because then people ask questions. I can stand up and talk about the virtual studio that I put in because of the pandemic. It creates a win for everybody.

Any last thought? Obviously, if people want to reach out to you, they can go where?

TSP Brian Ahearn | Influencing People

Influencing People: Learning how to ask questions to trigger the principle of consistency allows somebody to feel good about themselves by saying yes.

 

The best place to go to start is LinkedIn because I post a lot of content. If you reach out to me and don’t tell me how you found me, guaranteed, I will come back and say, “How did you find me?” I like to know why people reach out. It allows us to have a little bit of interaction. It makes social media social. If you let me know how you found me, I will still say “thank you,” and we will have a little interaction. You are going to get some one-on-one.

The other place would be my website, which is InfluencePeople.biz. There you find links to the books. You can see previews of my LinkedIn learning courses and all kinds of other information. I have been blogging weekly for several years. There are a ton of free resources available if you are a reader, and I have been on well over 100 podcasts. If you want to listen to podcasts, there are lots that are listed there.

Thanks for sharing your wonderful wisdom and fable. It is a fun way to improve our skills in becoming better influencers and having better connections with people.

Thank you, John. I appreciate you having me on the show. It was great to chat with you, and hopefully, as we get out of the pandemic, we might find each other at the same venues speaking to some audiences.

That would be terrific. I look forward to that day. Thanks again, Brian.

 

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Tags: Asking The Right Questions, consistency, happiness, Opportunities, positive influence, Success