The skills you need guide to interpersonal skills

Additionally, you need to understand how your audience thinks.
Key skills here include empathy, and good listening skills, including active listening. 
If you listen, your audience will usually tell you what and how they are thinking. It 
also helps to be able to build rapport; people like those who take time to become 
a friend, as well as an influencer. It follows, really: if we are honest, we would all 
much rather do what a friend suggests than someone we dislike, however sensible 
the idea. Building rapport also helps to build trust.
Good persuaders or influencers also have very good communication skills.
It is essential that you can get your point across succinctly and effectively, 
otherwise you will never persuade anyone of the merits of your position. For a 
quick summary of basic communication skills, you may want to read our first 
eBook,
An Introduction to Communication Skills
.
The final skill of good persuaders is being organised. They do their homework, 
they know their audience and they know their subject. They have taken time to 
organise themselves and think about what they want to achieve.

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2.
ADVANCED COMMUNICATION SKILLS
DEVELOPING YOUR 
PERSUASION SKILLS
Being able to influence and persuade others is a crucial part of leadership and 
management, but it is also important at home as well.
The ideal way to persuade others is to get them to want what you want. Working 
out how to do that in practice, however, can be tricky. Some people are naturally 
good at it, but others find it much harder.
This section describes some models of persuasion, including Tim Baker’s Four 
Persuasion Strategies and Robert Cialdini’s Influence Weapons. It is designed to 
help you to develop your persuasion skills in a rather more scientific way.
TIM BAKER’S PERSUASION STRATEGIES
In his book 
The New Influencing Toolkit: Capabilities for Communicating with 
Influence
, Tim Baker develops a framework for persuading others effectively. 
The framework describes two different styles of influencing and two different 
influencing approaches.