Determine The Sum of Your Values

May 27th, 2010

Dear Persuader,

"Our value is the sum of our values." --Joe Batten

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

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

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.

I’m just going to give you some examples of core values and please, feel free to add to the list.

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 and with the ones 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.

Eliciting criteria is one of the most effective ways to connect your prospect with what you’re selling. It’s easy to do and once you really get the hang of it… it’s really fun!

Happy persuading,

Kenrick