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    The Laws of Influence: Mastering the Art of Sales, Leadership, and Change
    The Laws of Influence: Mastering the Art of Sales, Leadership, and Change
    The Laws of Influence: Mastering the Art of Sales, Leadership, and Change
    Ebook184 pages2 hours

    The Laws of Influence: Mastering the Art of Sales, Leadership, and Change

    By Brad Harker

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    About this ebook

    Leveraging your purpose towards your greatest potential is the pinnacle of influence. In fact, regardless of role or responsibility, your success is directly proportionate to your capacity to influence. Entrepreneurs, teachers, executives, and sales professionals all rely on the compelling power of influence to accomplish their goals.

    In The Laws of Influence, Brad Harker reveals an ideology that begins with a discovery of your own deep-rooted capacities in the context of four attributes of influence. Empowered with perspective and direction, you will be introduced to proven sales, leadership, and communication strategies that facilitate powerful habits of success.

    Whether your purpose is to lead, to create, to inspire, to protect, or promote, The Laws of Influence is the ultimate guidebook to:
    Develop the confidence to challenge your greatest fears and limitations
    Harness the ability to read people and establish lasting rapport
    Masterfully communicate your vision and inspire audiences
    Cultivate a magnetic style of leadership that people will choose to follow
    Become a master of change in your professional and personal life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateDec 5, 2014
    ISBN9781483551470
    The Laws of Influence: Mastering the Art of Sales, Leadership, and Change

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      Book preview

      The Laws of Influence - Brad Harker

      Event

      PREFACE: DISCOVERING INFLUENCE

      The real voyage of discovery consists not

      in seeking new landscapes, but in

      having new eyes.

      — Marcel Proust

      I remember my first official sales job as though it were yesterday. I was in my third year of college and had been hired to sell security systems, door-to-door in Denver, Colorado. This particular company had built its sales team from a pool of college students seeking summer employment.

      The sales season began in May and finished around the first of September. In the months leading up to May, I scoured through sales books and added a few marketing classes to my already full schedule. I wrote down my sales pitch and rehearsed it at least a hundred times. That first evening, I recall driving around looking for what might be considered an ideal neighborhood. Truthfully, I had no idea what I was even looking for. I found an average-looking street in an average-looking neighborhood and figured it was as good as any other. As I approached a dark cedar house, I felt my heart pumping fast. I knew that this would be the first of a lifetime of pitches.

      Despite months of preparation, those first few calls were disastrous! The more I tried to follow the sales strategies I had committed to memory, the more I struggled. I soon realized that rehearsed selling wasn’t working for me. Instead, I resorted to a more natural approach: a casual communication style that friends use with one another. That little switch changed everything, and I soon found my first sale. I felt victorious at finally closing a sale. As I drove home, the endorphins subsided, and I thought about how different this particular experience had been from my previous attempts. It felt like everything I had studied vanished into the recesses of my brain. Not once during the sale did I think about specific closing techniques, or whether I had completed all five steps of an effective product demonstration. Instead, I instinctively followed a loose outline that was geared towards closing the sale. Although I had rehearsed the entire presentation, I kept shifting into auto-pilot.

      Over the years, I examined what set my first sale apart from the rest of my failed pitches. As I hired and trained sales executives in the capacity of business owner, I noticed a pattern. Despite their keen interest and an arsenal of sales books, a consistent percentage of recruits struggled to find success. I spent a lot of time interviewing reps and evaluating their differences, assuming a technique or training element was missing. Instead, I discovered that the differences were not based on technique or training but rather from something else that most sales books and techniques did not address.

      As my career progressed towards entrepreneurship, real estate, and private equity, the sales or deals became more complex. With this complexity, I found that routine sales strategies became more and more irrelevant. I noticed that discussions and negotiations occurred on a much more instinctual level, not bound by the various headings of the sales books. This deepened my desire to discover the differences between sales success and mediocrity. I soon realized that I had been asking the wrong questions. Success was not a function of how much a person studied, if they were married, or if money was a motivating factor. Instead, success came from instincts, beliefs, communication styles, and a number of deep-rooted habits developed in the early years of life. Selling was more than following the right steps or remembering items on a list. It was an art. Like painting, art has always been rooted in the artist, not the paint. I concluded that traditional sales books, although helpful in teaching principles of sales, often struggle to help us develop the habits and instincts that facilitate consistent sales success.

      Today, I see selling as a form of influence, and the two words can be used interchangeably. Rooted in a distinct mindset, selling is in the way we think, act, and communicate. It is habitual. It’s not so much what we do or say, it’s how we do or say it. Selling is something we do on a daily basis, often unaware that we are even selling. We all sell something every single day of our lives. No matter what our job title is, we are all active in the art of influence.

      My career has always involved sales. From lemonade stands to real estate, I have sold over a quarter-billion dollars in various products and services over the years. I have read dozens of sales books, attended seminars, and viewed countless videos. In addition, I have personally recruited and trained more than a thousand sales professionals. Armed with this experience and education, I have come to four conclusions:

      1.   Selling, or influencing others is an integral part of our daily experience, no matter what role we play in life.

      2.   Our success in any endeavor depends on our ability to influence.

      3.   We each have natural abilities that we can cultivate into habits of influence.

      4.   By practicing these habits on a consistent basis, we can leverage the power of influence to reach our greatest potential.

      I created this book to challenge the common perceptions of sales and demonstrate that success in any profession or endeavor can be found in direct proportion to one’s ability to influence. Moreover, I believe that everyone has within them natural abilities that can be cultivated to build true influence. In the following pages, we will explore a number of sales, leadership, and communication strategies that have proven to be the foundation for success. Drawing upon proven strategies of sales, leadership, and change, we will uncover truths that are universal and can be applied to all aspects of life. The Laws of Influence will explore four attributes of influence and then uncover the methods used to develop these into instinctual habits of success.

      INTRODUCTION: PRIMING THE PUMP

      The two greatest days in your life are

      the day you were born and the day

      you find out why.

      — Mark Twain

      You live in a world defined by odds. You are told that 95% percent of new businesses fail within the first five years. That 8 out of every 10 sales executives will generate only 20% of a given company’s production. Women are told that they can expect to make 23% less than men who hold the same position. Despite the fact that your kids have a 1 in 22,000 chance of playing professional sports, you can rest assured that if they don’t make it to the draft, they have a staggering 27% chance of pursuing a job that is related to their college degree.

      As shocking as those statistics may sound, a surprising percentage of people use them to justify major life decisions. Accepting to be defined by these odds deprives you of the freedom you have worked so hard to gain. Quite often, people forget that they have the right to reject popular opinion and create odds of their own. The great irony is that you know people who run successful businesses. You know athletes who have made it to the pros and women who make substantially more money than the men in their profession. Not surprisingly, these people also put their pants on one leg at a time. You are made of the same stuff they are and have the same right to demand the best that life has to offer.

      Have you ever considered the phrase, Money doesn’t grow on trees or The rich get richer while the poor get poorer? Have you ever cringed when you heard someone tell you, It’s a man’s world, or a Good ol’ boys network? Did you realize that 6 out of 10 Americans are not happy with their jobs? Should you be troubled by the scores of people who continually give up greatness for the false perception of security? You should be able to wake up every day of your life, look in the mirror, and embrace the reality that you love your life and you are pursuing your ambitions to the fullest.

      Despite my resentment of conformity and limiting beliefs, I get it! I’ve been there and walked in those shoes. I know exactly what it feels like to lay in bed with no desire to get up and face the day. I understand how hard it is to juggle the responsibilities of providing for a family while saving enough for kids, college tuition, travel, and retirement. I have personally experienced the debilitating effects of a failed business as well as the discouragement that comes from being broke and up to my eyeballs in debt. I have taken that safe-job in an effort to escape the toil and pain of entrepreneurship. I have sat across the table from defeated multi-millionaires who wagered their fortunes on a booming real estate market only to watch their wealth evaporate overnight. I have also sat across from the con artist who decided not to pay me after the work had been completed. I can relate to the tendency we all share to follow the commonly travelled road. The good news is, there is hope in the midst of conformity. There is a reality beyond the doubt, fear, and mediocrity that most people embrace. Most importantly, I have spent my career proving that such a reality exists.

      When I started my journey in sales and entrepreneurship, I faced a mountain of negative expectations. The odds of my inevitable failure were staggering. Yet I remained relentless in the face of adversity, and I demanded the extent of what life had to offer. I viewed my career as a laboratory and pursued initiatives that provided insight into the realities of achieving success. As my entrepreneurial endeavors progressed towards real estate development and private equity, I discovered certain patterns that preceded success. Certain attributes were common among successful people. These same attributes cultivated habits that transcended the mediocrity of the masses. For over a decade, I have studied these attributes in the context of sales and entrepreneurship. Through the experience of building several companies, and over a quarter-billion dollars in personal sales, I realized that these attributes were, in fact, laws that could be replicated and relied upon for a lifetime of success.

      As we consider some of the greatest leaders and innovators of our time, it becomes obvious that in spite of varying roles and objectives, each had a unique capacity to influence those whom they served. Within any profession, the demand for influence is as important as the product or service being offered. This book will introduce an ideology centered on maximizing your capacity to influence. It will compel you to discover your purpose and to embrace the inevitability of achieving your greatest ambitions. As you are empowered through direction, you will be introduced to powerful habits of leadership and persuasion that will provide you with the tools to take control of your life, change anything, and determine, once and for all, that you are capable of anything you desire.

      I understand that this probably isn’t the first time you have considered change. This likely won’t be the last time either. Timing is a big factor in change. This time, however, it will be different. Sometimes the pump just needs a little more priming before we see results.

      It will always seem easier

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