Have you ever tried to sell an idea?

One of the best skills you can have as an entrepreneur is the ability to get people to easily jump on board. You’re probably wondering how you can do that, right?

You have to be persuasive!

Being persuasive gets a bad rap, people think it’s a bad thing to be persuasive, but that is EXACTLY what you want to do. You want to persuade people to work with you.

So, how do you yield the best results from being persuasive?

It’s a little known secret, that sales men and women don’t use enough… Sell an idea by making the other party think the idea was theirs all along.

Sound tricky? It doesn’t have to be! You just have to create a real and authentic relationship with your clients, and then work with information that is personal to them.

Using this exact method with my last Company, FITzee Foods, I was able to get FITzee Foods into the biggest hospital chain in San Diego, Scripps Health. Scripps is MASSIVE, they have multiple hospital locations which means a large number of staff members and employees.

I had the dream and the desire to bring my healthy prepared meals into the Scripps hospital organization. At the time, the hospital was providing inexpensive food choices to their employees for about $2, but it was soda, burgers and french fries, hardly healthy.

We all know that the cheapest food tends to be the worst possible food for you. Sadly, that’s how it works.

Scripps also wanted to provide healthy meal alternatives to their employees, but it had to be at an affordable price. We just needed to figure out how to keep costs low for thousands of employees spread throughout thirteen different locations.

People were against us and believed that it wouldn’t work. I knew that it would work and so did the Head of HR and the Head of their wellness department, so we put our heads together to come up with a solution that would work for the employees and for those that thought it might not work.

We ended using their employees benefit program, which subsidized the meal cost and kept the meals affordable at about $3 to $4 each. It was wildly successful!

My point is, that it was their idea. I helped execute it, but it was the Head of the HR and the Head of Wellness who made things happen. He was an absolute superstar, who helped persuade others in the organization others that it would work.

Get on a Personal Level

Using this method for sales is incredibly effective! My guest on Success Unfiltered, Trina Gray, used this method in order to get her dream of a medically based health club created.

Trina is from Northeast Michigan, which isn’t known for its health, but her goal was to work to change that. She felt this dark cloud over the entire community, but saw the potential for it to be happy, healthy and fit. For this reason she decided to pursue this idea of opening a huge medically based health club.

In order to build a facility like this, Trina needed a bank to lend her money to create it. Trina’s proposal was sent to 12 banks and other lenders, but only ONE said YES. However, it wasn’t an easy YES, Trina had to work for it.

Trina was given feedback from the other 11 lenders and took that and used it when she had the opportunity to have a live meeting with the lender that ultimately decided to work with her.

Getting to meet with the decision-makers face to face made a huge difference. She was able to make real and authentic personal connections with them.

Trina was able to show them social proof on how her facility would work, even though nothing like it existed, yet. She was able to show how it would help and grow their communities.

There was one man in particular that Trina knew who had grandchildren who were going to be growing up in the community. And, since people make their decisions based on their emotions, more than facts, being able to connect with this man and share how the facility would help his grandchildren grow-up healthier than he did, or even his children, allowed Trina to bring him to her side.

It’s as if they were on the same side, or the same team, focused on the same cause and mission.

Even though he wasn’t looking to open a business, Trina was. They were able to join together for a common cause, by creating a better place for their children and grandchildren to grown up.  

Allow Someone Else to be the Superhero

The medically based health facility that Trina was creating was going to be based in a huge regional medical center in Michigan. At the start of the process, she had all of the partners on board and supporting her, excited to sign all the paperwork.

However, when Trina went into sign the final paperwork, the CEO, who was likely having a very bad day, told her NO. That he wouldn’t sign anything and threw the stack of papers, right back at Trina.

Trina was rightly devastated, she had believed that everything was going to go through. She had money lined up, the floor plans were drawn, all they had needed was the final approval from the CEO, who would then make the final recommendation to the board to go ahead with the project.

This put a HUGE stop on the plans. Trina wanted to leave the area and move away because she was so distraught from the encounter and her dreams falling through.

A few days after the meeting, Trina was contacted by the other people involved in the meeting who wanted to be a part of her plans, who encouraged her to come back and try making the idea be HIS idea.

They reworked everything so that he would look like the superhero.

Trina says that one of the most valuable things she ever did in her career was figure out how to meet with the executive team again, and to persuade the CEO that this was HIS idea.

What Trina and the other executives tried to do was approach John who has always been a fan of health care and health and wellness and show him how he had the ability to change a lot of lives in the community.

In the end, the CEO not only signed the necessary paperwork, but became one of the biggest advocates for the fitness and health center!

In Conclusion

I hope you can see how valuable of a sales technique it can be to sell an idea by persuading someone that it’s their idea. That’s when the magic happens. They start supporting the cause and working their hardest to bring it to fruition. It might seem counter-intuitive, but I swear it works!

I would LOVE if you shared a time when were able to sell an idea by persuading someone else it was theirs.