How to Build Influence at Work (And Stop Being Invisible)
- Kristaps Volkovickis
- Jul 16
- 6 min read
You are staring at an email draft to the head of marketing, your cursor blinking
aggressively, and you have no idea how to hit send. You know your project needs their team's budget, but the thought of asking feels pushy, political, and entirely outside your job description. You just want to do good work—but somehow, your best work is stuck in a bottleneck because you don't want to feel "salesy." If you are wondering how to build influence at work, you are already making the most common mistake: you are pretending you aren't in sales.
Key Takeaways
Influence is a daily requirement: You likely spend about 40 percent of your time on the job persuading, influencing, and moving others.
Information parity changed the game: Buyers (and colleagues) often have as much information as the sellers. They need you to curate and make sense of it.
Replace the old ABCs: Drop "Always Be Closing" and adopt the modern framework of Attunement, Buoyancy, and Clarity.
The Consequence of Collaboration Drag
We all have an allergy to ambiguity, particularly when it involves asking people for their time, budget, or resources. So, we retreat into our silos. We assume that if our spreadsheets are accurate, our code is clean, or our product is superior, the work will simply sell itself.
It won't. The consequence of avoiding persuasion is steep. When you refuse to advocate for your ideas, cross-functional projects stall, priorities misalign, and your pipeline of good work goes completely dead. This isn't just an annoyance; it is a fundamental threat to business survival. Organizations with high cross-functional "collaboration drag" are 37% less likely to exceed revenue and profit targets. If you cannot sell your vision internally, you will watch less talented people take the roles, budgets, and promotions you actually deserve.
The Core Belief
Influence is not a personality trait. It is a sales process. And sometimes we need to help people see it.
When Anna joined my team, she had everything I look for. Passion. Energy. She knew the product inside and out — the history, the craftsmanship, the details most reps never bother to learn. And in every client interaction, she gave them all of it. Her reasoning was simple: if they know everything, they'll buy.
Three weeks in, she had zero sales.
Not because clients didn't like her — they loved her. She just never asked for the close. In her mind, asking felt like taking. So she gave and gave, and let people walk out the door with a head full of knowledge and empty hands.
So we had the talk. Her salary was tied to commission, which meant this wasn't a polite service — it was her livelihood. And my job was to help her see that selling and closing wasn't for her benefit. It was for theirs.
I asked her to think of herself as Cupid.
Right now, I said, you're making someone fall in love — and then walking away before they ever get to speak to the person. Before they ever get to spend a life with them. You've done the hard, beautiful part. And then you've refused to make the match. That's not generosity. That's a lose-lose. She loses the commission. They lose the thing they already want.
Speak less. Get curious. Make the match they deserve — and then give them the perfect beginning to a lifetime together. That isn't you taking something away. That is you giving them the most beautiful begining you can.
Will Cupid work in every industry? Absolutely not. In high-end luxury, where people buy things they keep for decades and pass down for generations, it was exactly the frame Anna needed. Yours will be different.
But the thing underneath it doesn't change. When you refuse to sell — a product, a service, an idea, yourself — you're not being humble. You're creating a lose-lose situation. Someone who needed what you had walks away without it where you could have helped.
The Modern Blueprint for Influence: A Three-Step Framework
To thrive in an environment where everyone has access to the same information, you must abandon the manipulative 20th-century sales tactics. We have moved from a world of information asymmetry, where the sellers always had more information than the buyers, to one closer to information parity. Today, it is "seller beware" as much as "buyer beware".
Because of this, the traditional, high-pressure approach—often summarized as "Always Be Closing"—has given way to the three qualities most necessary to sell ethically and effectively: Attunement, Buoyancy, and Clarity.
1. Attunement: Mastering the Geography of Trust
Attunement is the ability to bring one's actions and outlook into harmony with other people and with the context you're in. This goes beyond basic emotional empathy. It requires rigorous perspective-taking.
If you are pitching a new initiative to your CFO, empathy is sensing that they are stressed. Perspective-taking is understanding why they are stressed—they are staring down a quarterly earnings report and have no margin for experimental spending. When you attune yourself to their reality, you adjust your physical and intellectual approach. You navigate the spatial zones of trust, recognizing when to lean in with data and when to step back and give them space to process.
2. Buoyancy: Surviving the Ocean of Rejection
If you are trying to change how your company operates, you will face rejection. Buoyancy is your ability to stay afloat in an ocean of rejection.
Amateur influencers try to psych themselves up with blind, pump-up affirmations. Professionals use interrogative self-talk ("Can I get this budget approved? If so, how?"). By asking a question, you force your brain to actively search for tactical solutions and rehearse conflict resolution. Buoyancy also requires maintaining a healthy positivity ratio. For example, once positive emotions outnumbered negative emotions by 3 to 1, people generally flourished. You must reframe a "no" not as a permanent, personal failure, but as a temporary external condition that can be navigated.
3. Clarity: Problem Finding over Problem Solving
We are drowning in data but starving for clarity. If your colleague comes to you frustrated because their CRM dashboard is broken, fixing the dashboard is problem-solving. Realizing they are actually tracking the wrong metrics entirely and helping them redesign their workflow is problem finding.
Clarity is helping others see problems and information in new ways. One of the most effective ways of moving others is to uncover challenges they may not know they have. To sell well is to convince someone else to part with resources—not to deprive that person, but to leave him better off in the end. When you curate the overwhelming noise into a clear, actionable path forward, you instantly become the most influential person in the room.
Who This Is For
Sales Reps & AEs: If you are losing deals to the status quo because buyers are overwhelmed with choices, you need Clarity to curate their options and Attunement to understand their internal buying committees.
Sales Managers: If pipeline reviews feel like interrogations and your reps are burning out, you need to model Buoyancy. Teach your team interrogative self-talk to navigate rejection without losing momentum.
Business Owners: If your cross-functional teams are suffering from collaboration drag and missing profit targets, you need to stop expecting the product to sell itself. You must train your entire leadership team in non-sales selling.
Action Steps for This Week
Audit your "sales" time: Track how many hours you spend this week attempting to persuade colleagues, negotiate resources, or align a cross-functional team. You will likely find it approaches that 40 percent mark.
Practice interrogative self-talk: Before your next high-stakes meeting, replace "I will nail this" with "How will I nail this?" Write down three specific ways you will handle objections.
Find a hidden problem: Look at a chronic complaint your team has. Instead of offering a quick fix, dig two levels deeper. Frame the real issue for them in a way they haven't seen before.
Building influence isn't a soft skill you hope to absorb through osmosis; it is a rigorous, trainable process of non-sales selling that directly impacts your bottom line.
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