Achieving your desired outcomes is all about achieving buy-in from your strategic business partners and clients. You need to learn how to maximise and leverage your strategic relationships to build your business and achieve your desired objectives.
Strategic entrepreneurs understand the deeper psychological workings of business, the importance of excellent business relationships, and how to communicate skilfully enough to achieve the necessary buy-in to fulfil their professional dreams.
The following ten vital tips can help you to become a more strategic communicator who can succeed:
1. Plan to Succeed – Any strategy is only as successful as the planning behind it. The more focused, intelligent and creative your planning is, the more likely you are to succeed. Think BIG and don’t forget the small details.
2. Confidence sells – People need to believe in you before they will buy in to any of your suggestions. Research shows that we tend to trust confident people far more than people who display fear or hesitancy. Learn how to control your nerves and sell yourself confidently.
3. Provide solutions – Find out your clients’ needs and provide better solutions than any of your competitors. People buy in to strategies that make their lives easier and where the benefits are easy to understand.
4. Inspire Trust – Demonstrate that you have your clients’ best interests at heart, and be genuine, sincere and honest. Your attitude, coupled with your self-confidence will win over even the toughest clients.
5. Listen – Strategic communicators listen actively and empathetically which allows them to understand their clients’ holistic needs and respond strategically. Often the most important information can go un-said and the strategist needs to be perceptive enough to read between the lines.
6. Communicate effectively – It is impossible to be strategically successful if you are not an excellent communicator. Strategic communicators communicate with confidence, clarity, Emotional Intelligence and motivational skill.
7. Become Emotionally Intelligent – Strategic manoeuvring is a psychological game where you need to manage your own emotional projection as well as the mind-sets of your fellow business partners and clients. Once you learn how to communicate with Emotional Intelligence, the other parties tend to fall in to place.
8. Reach Out and Align Interests – Figure out what drives people and how your interests meet theirs by asking them about their goals and projects. Let them feel like you are on the same team, working for a common vision to create synergy between you.
9. Learn how to Sell – You can only achieve your strategies if you learn how to sell yourself and your products and services effectively. Great selling ability requires confidence, great communication skills, Emotional Intelligence and tenacity. Excellent entrepreneurs have learned how to sell and market themselves with ease.
10. See ‘The Bigger Picture’ – The best strategists not only see the ‘bigger picture’ in their personal space and designated goals. They also take a bird’s eye perspective of life and business and in doing so can predict trends and leverage opportunities in the market.
Once you have learnt to become a strategic communicator, business tends to become far easier. You tend to set bigger goals, achieve better outcomes and have far more fun along the way. So, why be like the rest, when you can up-skill yourself and become the best?