Don't Think You are in Sales?

Think again.

You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can't get them across, your ideas won't get you anywhere...

- Former Chrysler Chairman and CEO Lee Iacocca

To just invent something and have a great idea is a lot of work, but it is not enough. You need to know how to get people excited.
- Larry Page, cofounder of Google Inc.

While companies sell their products and services, people in organizations sell their ideas.

Your success depends on how well you sell.

But selling ideas - especially the kind of ideas that make organizations work - is a skill shrouded in mystery. The ancient Greeks considered idea selling to be one of the most critical subjects an educated person could learn. Oh, they called it "rhetoric," but that's what it was.

It takes real skill to push your ideas and initiatives through the dense network of relationships that exist in organizations today - organizations just like yours.

Richard Shell and Mario Moussa, authors of "The Art of Woo," have turned the mysterious, intuitive art of "winning others over" into a clear, systematic science.

Shell and Moussa have discovered that relationship-based persuasion follows a distinctive, repeatable four-step process that leaders can master to achieve their goals:

• Step 1 - Survey Your Situation
• Step 2 - Confront the Five Barriers
• Step 3 - Make Your Pitch
• Step 4 - Secure Your Commitments

A typical organization has many speed bumps, stop signs, and "wrong way" signs for people who want to sell their idea. Standard operating procedures, policies and procedures, and the like are often ignored - and everyone knows it.

To move your idea through the maze, you have to navigate by keeping your eye on the right people and avoid obstacles such as conflicting interests, hostile belief, cultural missteps, and political minefields that can come out of nowhere and derail you.

Woo.

Simple to say. Hard to do.

How will you practice Woo today?