Influence is intangible. You cannot see it at work, yet it is all pervasive in any corporate organisation and Public Sector organisations are no different. In any sales situation, if we can identify who the politically influential people actually are, we can tailor our proposals to meet their needs as well as the needs of their organisations'. This can markedly increase our chances of winning the sale, particularly in a very competitive sales situation.

In our analysis we identify the politically powerful people as the "Influencers". The routes to them we term the "Conduits", who are people we can use to pass messages when we cannot get access to the Influencers directly.

The STRANDS

The "STRANDS" of Influence is a tool which can help in identifying who are the really influential people in any organisation. If we can test the way people respond in any situation and how other people react to them, we can start to characterise influence. The best times to do this are when there is great organisation upheaval or change (merger, reorganisation, downsizing, etc.). At such times influence becomes very much more apparent and easier to discern. For instance, the people with high levels of influence are usually the survivors!

However, in day-to-day activity, particularly when you are dealing with an organisation which you are new to, the STRANDS of Influence can be a valuable diagnostic tool. The STRANDS are separated into seven tests, each of which may help in finding either where the seat of influence lies, or useful connections to it.

For each of the tests, described in detail below, the sales team will need to take a view balancing what they know about each individual against each of the seven headings. They may base their views upon their own knowledge and observations. However, these views need to be checked against others in the client's organisation.

The Tests

The seven STRANDS tests are pointers to where real influence may reside in any complex organisation. The same tests can also be used to flush out some suitable Conduits. However, some Influencers and Conduits may still be difficult to find if the relationships between people are not obvious. Nevertheless, the STRANDS will flush out the majority of the relationships that are important to the sales campaign and will provide a basis for greater insight into how the organisation actually works.

Status and Responsibility

Status and responsibility are a good starting point when looking for influential people. However, beware the "figureheads" and the high ranking academics who have no decision making powers whatsoever.

People who report directly to high ranking people may have a high degree of influence. We have all heard tales of the Secretary who had more ability to direct the organisation than his or her boss.

People who are high in the organisational ranks may have influence if they are climbing, but less if they are on their way down. Some people are placed into areas of lower than expected status so that they can get experience and prepare themselves for an important and significant future role. Here influence greatly exceeding that expected from the role may be clearly evident.

The Conduit may not have the status themselves, but they will be able to interact easily with one or more powerful people. The interaction may not be as a result of the work environment. Watch for links that may be through sporting or family connections.

Trusted Aides

Someone who has the ability to surround themselves with people they select and trust, maybe recruiting people with whom they have worked before, show signs of having influence. Of course, the ones they pick to surround themselves with are natural Conduits.

One other often overlooked factor is that the most powerful people need powerful allies. They are very often "Trusted Aides" of even more powerful people above them. Look and see who your target individual mixes with and who might be a mentor for them. Find out who their friends are and who are their allies.

Respect

Some people have "Presence" and you can feel it when they walk in to a room. As they arrive the room will fall silent until they are settled. Then the conversation will be directed around what they want and the order they want it in. This is a natural response to someone who has a high degree of power or influence.

The ones who are most openly deferential may be the Conduits. They may also be sycophants with no value in the sales campaign whatsoever!

Authorship

The most powerful people in an organisation are the ones who create the culture by generating the templates by which others manage their work. They are the people who agree the Mission Statements, Operational Policies, and put in place the fundamental internal processes.

The people who conduct their lives and businesses by these maxims are the Conduits. The test for both is to see if they know these policies and statements without prompting. The Influencers will know because they helped create them. The Conduits will know because they use them every day in their business.

Network

Knowledge is power and powerful people know what is going on all the time. They do this by creating information networks that reach throughout the business and even outside of it. They have many people in a wide range of positions who they can talk to and who feed them information, often entirely separately from the formal channels of communication set up within the business. Other less influential people outside of this network may know what is going on and, although they might not like it, they may be powerless to stop it. Such communications can completely bypass the formal authority structure even though the powerful person will know that this type of networking can undermine other, less powerful, individuals' positions in the management hierarchy.

Of course, the Conduits are the end nodes of this network and they collect information and pass it on. By doing so, they strengthen their own positions.

Definition of Value

What is value in any business is defined by people within the business. In a commercial sense it may be profits or it may be the ability to remain trading. In the Public Sector it may be the recognition of top performance or the lowest staff turnover. Whatever the metric is used by the organisation to measure itself and, therefore, dictate the direction the organisation will move in, the people who define these metrics are the most powerful and influential.

Interestingly, if anything goes wrong, it is the same group of influential people who can rewrite history so that they never had anything to do with the failure. If it all goes right, then the powerful people somehow manage to get a share of the credit, even if they had been against it, or not involved, in the beginning.

It is this ability to define value and the redefine it if necessary which is the mark of a powerful person. The Conduit will be willing to accept these definitions and will be in the forefront of perpetuating them.

Success

To have any influence on the organisation, the person with the influence must be perceived as having a track record of success. The more influence they have the greater this perception will be and the longer the claimed timescale of successful performance. After all, no one will take notice of a person who has a reputation for failure.

This success may only be perceived success and not real. However, if they truly have the ability to disassociate themselves with failure, this may also be a sign of political power?

Conduits must, themselves, have a reputation for success. If they do not, no really influential person will go near them.

Triangulation Questions

What is difficult to do, is to ask direct questions to any individual about the level of political power and influence they might have. Even if you do, the answers might not be entirely true. We have found that to get more representative answers to these types of questions a technique called "Triangulation" can be used.

We know that asking people about their own level of power and influence in their organisation is unlikely to give useful answers. However, asking a third party, who knows the individual, is more likely to give value, e.g. asking "How much influence does Fred have over the committee?" is more likely to produce the answer "None!" than asking Fred "How much influence do you have over the committee?" if Fred actually has none. To get the best idea, questions covering all of the STRANDS should be asked to several different people to get a cross check of how much influence a particular person actually has.

Conclusion

The STRANDS is not a mathematical diagnostic tool. However, it is very useful to allow a sales manager or sales team to take a view on who they should be targeting their sales messages at and, possibly, the content of the messages. Use it as one of the tools in your armoury; you will be surprised and delighted with the results!