These are just four situations where having ability to be more influential could make a big difference in our effectiveness.

Regardless of our role, rank or seniority; no matter what our job, we can all benefit from being more influential. After all we are all trying to influence others all day long.

One key to achieving that greater influence is credibility.

Credibility

Enhancing your credibility with others is one of best ways to become more influential. People want to follow advice and counsel of those with expertise, and you want to be one of those people!

It is not enough to be an expert on a subject matter or a situation though. You must also be perceived as an expert. That perception comes from how you carry yourself and interact with others on this subject AND in every other way as well. You see, credibility is more than just expertise. Credibility is a combination of expertise and trustworthiness.

Kevin Hogan, in The Science of Influence states it as a formula:

Credibility = Expertise + Trustworthiness.

Very few people can maintain great influence without both parts of this equation. There are certainly situations where expertise is so profound that idiosyncrasies and even rudeness will be tolerated because person is so knowledgeable. This is likely not case for all of us.

On other hand, there are situations where you have likely trusted someone so much that they were credible on subjects they might not have been so expert about. They were still influential with you because of that extremely high trust level. After all, you reason, they care enough about me that they wouldn’t steer me wrong with their advice or suggestions. These cases too, are isolated.

So we need to work on both parts of this combination in order to become more influential.

Expertise

Behavioral economics is study of how and why people make money-related decisions. As a science it is relatively new, although some of its findings have been known intuitively by good salesmen and marketers for many years. Much of what has been learned from recent studies, however, has not yet been applied systematically in real world of business. Here are some of things studies have shown thus far:

Confirmation Bias

We tend to act economically in a way that confirms current belief. When buying same model of Mecedes, for example, current owners, who presumably already believe in value of a Mercedes, pay $7,000 more, on average, than new Mercedes customers. I'm sure you can imagine value of this knowledge to companies that sell high-priced items.

Decision Paralysis

Studies show that, given four samples of jam, for example, people actually spent more than when they had twenty to choose from. You may not want to tell customer about all 84 colors he can choose from. Limiting options may be a useful sales technique, according to this research finding.

Sunk-Cost Fallacy