The father of all persuasive communication, Aristotle, taught that persuasion results from a combination of logos, pathos and ethos, and that ethos is the most important persuasive device.
While I believe this is not necessarily true in all persuasion situations, it is definitely true that who you are perceived to be by your audience is a huge factor in the success of your persuasive efforts. Their readiness to listen and to act on what they hear is powerfully affected by their perception of you as the messenger, and that perception is situational: it depends on your fit with that particular audience’s expectations for your particular topic.
Ethos often works not only by credibility but also by inspiration. If the audience looks up to the speaker, they want to be like him or her; they want to gain by association and agreement with his views.
Ethos gains special importance from the fact that it begins to work on the audience before you open your mouth. How you appear, what they know about your reputation and credentials, even the way you approach them, all send loud signals that affect how they will respond to your words.
In sales and marketing, we see that ethos can even affect how objects are perceived. A well-established brand influences how potential buyers perceive a product. Commodities can be turned into sought-after treasures simply by carrying a certain brand. Even price can be a form of ethos. An expensive bottle of wine has a different ethos than a cheap one. It works in reverse as well—many people refused to buy BP gasoline after the Gulf oil spill in 2010.
Although it seems like a simple concept, ethos is a product of many elements, including your appearance, credentials, motives and actions.
Appearance: It helps to be attractive, and it helps to fit the audience’s expectations. It’s unfair but true that attractive people are also seen as smarter and more likeable, which definitely helps their persuasiveness. Appearance can also be affected by what you wear. Robert Cialdini showed in experiments that people wearing suits were given more respect and achieved greater compliance with requests, for example.
But appearance is not all-powerful, as was demonstrated last week by Bobak Ferdowski. Who would have picked this guy for a NASA flight director?
Credentials and reputation: Ferdowski’s credentials as a NASA flight director far outweigh the audience’s expectation of what a flight director should look like. Credentials are a form of brand. A Harvard professor speaking about a topic in her area of expertise will automatically be accorded greater credibility than someone with less impressive academic credentials.
While credentials are about qualifications, reputation is about your qualities: who you are, what have you done,and how you have done it. I recently taught a class to a group of engineers, all of whom had advanced degrees from top schools. They told me that, within their company, they pay very little attention to where someone went to school, but a lot of attention to which projects they’ve been involved in; the more prestigious the project, the more prestigious the engineer.
The irony of credentials and reputation is that if you spend too much time emphasizing them, you may come across as either defensive or boastful. You’ll be better off if you can get your introducer to say something about you.
Motives: Any time you’re trying to “sell” ideas, your listeners will be more receptive if they feel you share their values, and will be sensitive to your motives. Although they know you will benefit somehow if they acquiesce, try to make your message as listener and customer-focused as possible by couching it in their language and in accordance with what they value. But don’t carry this too far: when the benefit is entirely on your side, be up front about it. Sometimes a heartfelt, “I need your help” goes further than a listing of advantages and benefits.
Action: During spoken communication, ranging from face-to-face to large keynote speeches, the speaker’s actions, such as their tone of voice, facial expressions, stance and gestures all contribute to the ethos component of persuasion. The main keys here are to be authentic and confident.
In my own work as a presentations trainer, ethos is especially dependent on actions. If I tell my students that they must carry themselves or express themselves in a certain way, you can bet that they will immediately notice when I don’t follow my own rules. Do as I say, not as I do, does not work for presentations trainers.
What applies to presentations trainers actually applies to anyone: who you are and what you do often speaks much louder than what you say. Don’t just say it—be it.
If it doesn’t fit here, it won’t be clear
The first step in planning a strategic sales presentation is deceptively simple: knowing what your key message is. When you take the time up front to write a theme, it provides brevity, clarity and impact, which helps you and your audience. The theme gets right to the heart of the matter.
Have you ever come away from a presentation and had trouble figuring out or remembering what the speaker was trying to say? Usually it’s not your fault—the speaker probably did not have a clear idea in his or her own mind why she was there or why you should have been.
When that happens, a tremendous opportunity has been wasted by the salesperson, not to mention the valuable time of the high-level decision-makers in the room. How likely is it that they will be able to act on your message when decision time comes, or that you will be invited back?
The bottom line is that you want your listeners to be absolutely clear what you want them to do and why. If you’re not clear on that, why should they be?
The solution to this all-too-common problem is, rather than immediately creating an outline of your points or creating your slides, you should take a few minutes to crystallize a theme for your presentation. The theme is simple: what do you want them to do and why should they do it? To make it even simpler, complete the following sentence before every presentation:
You should __________, because __________.
“You should”__________: What do you want them to do?
Always remember that a sales presentation is still a sales call. Any good sales call begins with a clear purpose: why are you taking time out of your busy sales day to go on this call? What do you intend to accomplish? How will it advance your sale or your position within the account?
So, the first part of the theme is to spell out your purpose in specific, output-defined terms. In other words, don’t have something mushy such as, “educate them on the benefits of cloud computing”. How will you know they’re educated? Will you give them a test? A better way to write this would be: “Gain agreement to form a task force to explore cloud computing”. (Naturally, if it’s a closing call, your purpose should already be pretty clear.)
Just the exercise of forcing yourself to be specific will clarify your mind tremendously and will make the rest of the presentation go much more smoothly.
“…because________: Why should they do it?
This is where you state your value proposition for this particular audience—not the generic one that says, “We are the nation’s leading provider of blah-blah-blah…” Based on your work before the presentation, you should a very clear idea of the specific reasons they should buy your solution. Although it depends on the audience, very rarely will those reasons be based on product specifications. At senior decision making levels, the why is generally expressed in terms of business improvements, solving problems, or improving processes.
“…because you need it to meet your goals of increasing flexibility and lowering your IT costs.”
Even better: “…it is the only way you will meet your ambitious flexibility and cost reduction goals.”
When you write your theme, it is for your use only, to help you organize the presentation, so you don’t have to write it down in marketing language. For example, your theme could be: “Buy our solution, because if you don’t there is a good chance your project will fail.” That’s probably not something you would say in exactly those words, but it very easily could be the impression you want to leave in their minds.
Think of your theme as the elevator pitch for a very short building. If it takes you more than about 25 words to craft it, you probably lack clarity.
My friend Bob Terson just wrote a blog post about the difficulty he had trying to buy a bicycle at Toys R Us for his grandson. The bike they wanted was not in stock, they would not sell them the floor model, and they could not figure out a simple way to get one from another store. The funny thing is that none of what he was asking the store to do was really that difficult, and I suspect that they knew exactly what had to be done—yet they could not just do it.
Billions of words are written every year about business and personal productivity; I’ve added my part, but I would be the first to admit that very little is a breakthrough that readers don’t already know about. There are only so many things you can say about being customer-focused, and about giving lower level employees the power to make decisions that make sense for the customer at that specific time, yet the gap between knowing what to do and doing it is as vast as ever.
Is there a salesperson left that does not know it’s important to understand your customer’s business, or to ask questions and listen, or to prepare for sales calls? How many actually do it?
It’s kind of like diet books: thousands of new titles come out every year, each claiming that this time it’s really something new and different, and Americans get fatter every year. More knowledge does not automatically translate into results.
Think of it: if people just read one book on dieting and managed to consume fewer calories than they burn, or actually just did what the motivational speaker told them to do, two multi-billion dollar industries would cease to exist overnight.
I’m definitely a big fan of knowledge, don’t get me wrong. But the problem with learning new stuff is that, if you don’t have the time or motivation to implement the basics, why would you do any better with the new stuff? Along those lines, here’s a quote by a Ranger Command Sergeant Major: “It’s still the basics that makes us who we are, hooah. We don’t do anything that the regular Army doesn’t do. We just do it better.”[1]
At this point in my typical article, I’ve laid out the problem and the next step is to make suggestions for what you can do about it. But I’m going to skip the second step.
You already know what to do. Just do it.
I’m a big believer in the dignity and worth of sales as a profession, and have always had a strong desire that it be perceived that way by its practitioners and especially by its clients. On the face of it, the notion of sales as a profession seems absurd. To most people, professional is not an adjective that springs readily to mind when they think of salespeople. The stereotype: out only for themselves, unqualified, dishonest…
Who is a professional? Some answers immediately spring to mind: doctors, lawyers, military officers. What they all have in common is that they have clearly specified paths to attaining their status, and sacrosanct standards and certifications by which they must earn the title of professional. Sales is a long way from that, and I’m not sure it will ever get to that point.
Yet, just as a printed certificate is no guarantee that someone will act professionally, I believe that one can be a professional by acting like one. Professionalism does not come from a certificate; it comes from conduct and action.
What does it mean to behave and act professionally?
- Professionals put clients first. Do you look after the best interests of your clients, even if it will cost you a commission in the short term?
- Professionals keep up with a recognized and growing body of knowledge.
- Professionals act ethically at all times.
Do you personally want to be viewed as a professional? Do you want to improve the image and status of the sales profession? Act with these three things in mind, and you will be a professional.
