To kick off the New Year, our Influencers from Around the World series starts with Sean Patrick. Sean is originally from Dublin, Ireland, but now resides in London where he works in sales and sales management. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn or Twitter. Sean also owns a sales training and coaching company, SPT (Sean Patrick Training), Ltd. Always thought provoking, I know you’ll enjoy Sean’s point of view on “authorities” and their content.
Brian Ahearn, CMCT® Chief Influence Officer influencePEOPLE Helping You Learn to Hear “Yes”.Beware of the Bogus AuthorityI’ve just finished a well-written book by Georgia attorney Loren Collins called Bullspotting. It was a nice segue from another brilliantly written piece by Massimo Pigliucci called Nonsense on Stilts. As you can probably tell, the book attacks the nonsensical logic behind some of today’s content that craftily bypasses the critical filters of its followers, making absurd claims believable. Ironically, the author himself was a proponent and follower of such people who disseminated misinformation. This got me thinking about how dangerous it is when we open up to pseudo-authority. This isn’t just a phenomenon that exists on the fringes; it is everywhere.In business, we have the same problem but not quite to the same extreme. Misinformation is like a mind virus that quickly infects those who really need information to back up their status quo. We’re living in a time where content is everywhere; it’s like drinking from a fire hose. What kind of misinformation am I referring to? Half-truths mainly, or tactics that worked for the author on one very lucky occasion but are now claimed as a breakthrough. There’s also the other kind, the kind where we think we know about a subject because we read one article or in some cases, the first couple of paragraphs. Our ability to contaminate information further has to be taken in context. Our ability to recall accurately goes through a process of bending, shaping, remodeling until we think our warped view is exactly how we saw it. And bogus authority figures really know this sharing of half-truths is immensely powerful, so we can dot the lines ourselves as part of the journey to finally agree with the author’s claims.In business a client base is like a portfolio of investments and treating them as such will create long term of value and recurring revenue. Our job as salespeople is to go deep and create ongoing change and help clients solve their next problem, and the next and so on. We strive to drive results with practical solutions and provide serious impact continually on the relationship. Great sales people earn higher fees via commissions because of their ability to create huge impact and provide value. One of the key areas in providing value is overcoming the hurdle of misinformation that clients buy into. As I noted above, most people who consume so much information on a daily basis fail to employ quality control. Over the years as a coach, one of the misdemeanors that some of my clients were guilty of was dining out on so-called authoritative content on sales topics and stuff that overlapped into self-development. What the information consisted of mainly was of brain candy quality. The kind of content I’m referring to is the stuff that isn’t earth shattering (but is marketed as so) and if you sat and thought long enough you’d probably have come to those conclusions without any help from the author…and you would have dismissed them!As people who sell, own a business, or provide professional services, it’s up to us to engage the client in a way in which we become the authority and the go-to-favorite of the client. We can achieve this by proving concept, demonstrating value, helping a client take ownership of a problem by providing deep insightful information that is contextually relevant to their most pressing problems.Focusing on conversations that move things forward are essential in setting boundaries and prove to the client that we have a proprietary approach in getting grounded and having more clarity in aligning themselves with their key priorities.In this age of content creation and re-creation, we are deluged by pure nonsense most of the time or at the very least someone’s biased, one-sided view on matters. This is dangerous if we fail to act objectively. Thanks to the internet, everyone is now an “expert” and we sit there in a glassy eyed daze agreeing with what’s being presented to us, largely because it passes through our filters — but only if we let it. 
Sean Patrick