Determine The Sum of Your Values

“Our value is the sum of our values.” –Joe Batten

Dear Persuader,

I’ve always said that if you want to make an advancement in your persuasion ability, you need to make an advancement in yourself. This is advancement.

This is a great process that will help you in your persuasion skills. I think you’ll find it quite interesting…

What we’re going to do is get our top values and put them in rank order. It’s pretty easy to do, and in future articles we’re going to take this on to new and interesting levels for you and then show you how you can use it to help persuade the affluent. (In the meantime, check out other articles on values and criteria and how understanding them will increase your ability to influence the affluent.)

I’m just going to give you some examples of core values and please, feel free to add to the list as you put this into practice with your affluent clients:

* Honesty
* Freedom
* Security
* Passion
* Freedom
* Recognition
* Integrity
* Health
* Family
* Spouse
* Friends
* Spirituality
* Money
* Love
* Success
* Recognition
* Education
* Self improvement
* Adventure
* Fun
* Financial independence
* Variety
* Knowledge
* Self actualization
* Wisdom
* Accomplishment
* Power

Notice that happiness is missing. . .that’s because happiness is not a value, but what will come if the core value is actualized.

Now, we’re going to put them in rank order.

Take the top ten from the above list, along with any you’ve added in, and from there we’ll determine the top five in this way:

Say your list, in no particular order is: health, love, money, passion, freedom, knowledge, wisdom, friends, accomplishment, recognition. These are your top ten core values.

We’ll start with health and move through the list. If you could have either perfect health and no love, or you could have perfect love and no health, which would you choose? We’ll just randomly choose health for the sake of this example.

So if you could have the best health or all the money you wanted, which would you choose? And we’ll choose health again.

Okay, if you could have perfect health and no freedom, or absolute freedom and poor health?

In this way, we go through the list to determine the top five.

What’s the value in this, you might ask? Well, if a sales professional had these top five values, (security, wealth, family), do you think they might be able to effectively interweave your security, wealth and family into the conversation about their product or service?

Of course, this isn’t information that we readily give out to everyone, nor do we elicit our prospect’s values, but what are we doing when we elicit criteria? We’re eliciting their specific values/criteria as they relate to the situation we’re asking about. In other words, make it relevant.

And as you begin to really see the value of this information, you’ll want to check out this blog regularly in the future for more on how these values affect you and the way you sell.

Until Next Time,

Kenrick E. Cleveland