Influence as a Currency
“Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go.”
—Mother Teresa
Habit #4: Influence as a Currency
Every office has one: the super-nice employee who brings cookies to the office and remembers every birthday, then breaks down in frustration when they are passed over for the big opportunities.
There are two ways to look at this scenario:
1. The default belief is that all successful people are complete asses, mostly sociopaths and don’t appreciate a nice, hard-working person. While this belief may be true in some cases, it’s a limited view of the way relationships truly work.
2. Cookies and staff morale, while important, may not be what the leaders of an organization are looking for when deciding to invest in someone. Therefore, they are only somewhat effective in building relationships with the influential leaders within an organization.
We all have different ways of moving energy back and forth to create relationships with other people. For example, with your best friend, your currency might be that you listen to each other and help one another solve problems. Or you may have friends with whom you trade services, such as helping each other with projects around the house.
Influencers tend to use influence itself as the currency of building relationships. In other words, if the currency of influencers is influence, you want to accumulate this currency to spend on your relationships with them. Other means of building relationships aren’t as meaningful. If you offer to buy them lunch or help them with home repair, it might be a nice gesture of friendship, but they’re not going to value it as highly as if you give them access to other forms of influence.
The unspoken rule is: If you use anything other than influence as the currency of relationship building, the exchange rate will be quite high.
If you charge by the hour, an hour of your time may not be the same value as an hour of an influencer’s time. That attempt will show that you don’t quite understand the Influence Game.
Influencers powerfully build win-win relationships by gifting influence to each other. Examples of ways to gift influence include getting or helping an influential person get any of the following:
Notice that you can already do some of the things on this list even if you have only a small following of your own.
It’s not about score keeping or “you do this for me and I’ll do that for you.” It’s an authentic give-and-take that happens naturally between influential people who respect each other—not unlike two best friends who naturally trust in each other’s help. We’ll talk about these cycles of reciprocity more in Chapter 10.
In later chapters we’ll also explore the concept that traditional techniques for referral marketing and lead generation don’t work well in the Influence Game. Any request that requires high time input, or high risk to an influencer’s reputation, will likely be seen as evidence that you don’t understand the game.
Asking influencers to sample your work can be a mistake: it can feel to them like a request, even if you intend it as an offer. Your book or CD might be great. But consider the following analogy—your children might be awesome, but you would never dream of saying to your new neighbor, “You’re going to love my kids. You’ll really enjoy babysitting them.” You’re asking for a big time commitment from an extremely busy person, and unless your product is something that they would use or sample naturally in their daily routine, such as a beauty or food product, this kind of offer is not a great relationship-building technique because it has nothing to do with influence. Any time you offer something that’s not influence-based, tickets to a sports game, a gift, or free services, they may be grateful, but this kind gesture will not have relationship-building potential. Consider doing something that helps them with what is really important to them, growing their influence and growing their reach.
Unspoken Rule #5
If you wish to play in other currencies, the exchange rate is extremely high.
