Archive for the ‘Persuasive communication’ Category

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Knowledge and Persuasion

Thursday, May 17th, 2012

It's always half empty.

Last week I went on a little rant against those who tell us that in this Google Age it’s not important to stuff your head with facts. I showed how on having a deep well of knowledge to draw from is so critical for effective thinking.  But what about persuasion? Compared to clear thinking and compelling communication, it would seem that having a lot of facts at your command would seem to be relatively less important. In this article, I’d like to show that depth of knowledge is a huge asset for persuasion as well.

Regular readers know that one of my key themes is that content is king. It’s wonderful to have a gift of gab and to know how to pull all the persuasive strings, but without a lot of facts at your immediate command, you can look like a fine pen that is running out of ink.

Unless you make a living as a writer, most of your persuasion is real time, so you’re not going to have time to look up the information you need to support your point. In a dialogue where two people are trying to influence each other, the one who has the necessary facts at their command when they need them is likeliest to prevail.

Have you ever seen someone deliver a slide presentation and look at the slides most of the time? They use them as a crutch and a memory aid for their “talk track”, and it’s obvious that they don’t have full mastery of the material. Yet, they’re trying to talk you into something based on that material. The content may be airtight, but yet it’s unconvincing; they come across as content mercenaries, fighting for someone else’s ideas.

If you’re a salesperson, it’s especially because knowledge is so readily available that you have to “add value” and that is in the form of proprietary knowledge. You are the one who knows how to diagnose needs (which require a much deeper knowledge and analysis than wants). The customer knows about his or her own business operations and processes, and they can look up and compare product specs easily enough, but you make a living with your special expertise that connects those two pools of knowledge.

Having a facile and fluent command of facts and detail has a strong subliminal effect in its own right. Knowledge is impressive. We admire those who have a deep grasp of their topic, who can pull up concrete and specific facts to support their arguments. On the flip side, we see this every political season, in which an inexperienced candidate is lambasted in the press for not knowing the name of a key foreign leader, for example.

Deep knowledge can also make your communication more compelling by adding specificity and concrete detail. It’s one thing to say that your product makes your customer’s business process more efficient; it’s far better to say, “We speed up the reconcilement process by 35%, which cuts an average of four days out of your accounts receivable.”

Want to impress an audience, especially one comprising senior level executives? Then tell them something new and be prepared to deep dive, both of which require you to know a lot. When you’re presenting to an audience, it’s often the detailed grasp you can demonstrate during the Q&A that will convince the listener. When I interviewed senior executives for my book on sales presentations, several of them told me that they like to “scratch beneath the surface” of the presentation to test the presenter’s depth of knowledge. If it’s a technical presentation, they may not personally have the knowledge to assess everything that’s told to them, so they use this tactic as a gauge of the presenter’s credibility.

There’s a cute story about the physicist Max Planck, who used to travel around Germany delivering physics lectures. One day his chauffeur made an interesting proposal: he said they should trade places at the next lecture, since he had heard the lecture so many times that he was sure he could deliver it word for word. Planck agreed, and the plan proceeded. Everything went perfectly, until the question and answer period, when a distinguished professor asked a difficult question about some esoteric detail in the lecture. The chauffeur, without skipping a beat, said: “Herr Professor, I am surprised that someone as knowledgeable as yourself would ask such a question. To prove how simple it is, I will let my driver answer it.”

Unlike Planck’s driver, you probably won’t have the luxury of someone sitting in the audience to bail you out, so you had better become that expert.

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Selling to the Amoeba Brain?

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

Who's the decision maker?

I bet you never thought you would learn about one-celled organisms in a blog about persuasion, but bear with me for a few paragraphs because I want to make an important point.

It’s been quite the fashion over the past few years in sales and persuasion circles to focus on our three brains: the reptilian brain, the rat brain, and the human brain. The idea is pretty simple: our human brains have evolved over eons in a different environment than our modern world; since evolution by definition proceeds from what went before, as our newer brain structures and functions evolved, the old structures remain and continue to be quite active. It’s kind of like the separation of powers in the Federal government: all three branches get involved in the process. So, if you want to persuade someone, you have to appeal to the simpler brains as well as to our logical faculties.

That may be true, but why stop at the reptile brain? If we trace our ancestry even further, we all evolved from one-celled organisms—amoebas, if you will, and we were amoebas even longer than we were reptiles. So, should we also tailor our persuasive efforts to the amoeba brain that surely lurks within all of us?

I can see it now: make sure you have a lot of light when you make your presentations, because amoebas move toward the light. You wouldn’t have to explain your solution, because people can get it by osmosis. We could call it “celling”. I realize I’ve reached the point of absurdity, but unfortunately so have many of the “scientific” persuasion experts.

The basic idea is sound, as long as it’s not carried too far. Aristotle, the father of modern persuasion science, made it the core of his Rhetoric, acknowledging that persuasive appeals comprise three strands, ethos, pathos, and logos. More recently, research has categorized and measured myriad ways in which our decisions and behaviors deviate from the purely rational. Science has learned a lot about the brain in the past few decades, and technologies such as functional MRIs let them see real time into our brain activity as we make decisions, respond to stimuli, etc. A lot of that research has confirmed, refined, or changed our understanding of how our minds work.

But new scientific discoveries are inevitably seized upon immediately by modern-day snake oil salesmen to add some legitimacy to their half-baked ideas. The ink was barely dry on the first edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species when the Social Darwinists hijacked his theories to justify their own notions of how society should be organized. In the same spirit, a lot of experts have picked up on the colorful pictures showing various areas of the brain lighting up during controlled laboratory experiments to market their services to companies, promising that they can read consumers’ brains and know what makes them tick, even better than the consumers themselves can. (By the way, if you’ve ever been inside of one of those machines, you know just how “natural” that situation is.)

When a book applies the idea to B2B sales, telling us that, “In spite of our modern ability to analyze and rationalize complex scenarios and situations, the old brain will regularly override all aspects of this analysis and, quite simply, veto the new brain’s conclusions.”[1], then the idea has gone too far.

I have a lot of respect for the work of one of the deans of persuasion science, Robert Cialdini, but even he goes a little too far. His six principles for influence are implied to be so powerful that you can’t sell a good idea without them, and you can definitely sell bad ideas with them. You can trigger fixed-action patterns that cause people to act like a mother turkey does when she hears “cheep-cheep”, and that’s what his book is about.[2] Cialdini at least acknowledges the importance of rationality—in a footnote—saying  of course material self-interest is important, but that it goes without saying.

Yet, that’s the problem: it doesn’t go without saying. When a Harvard Business School professor tells us that “what you say is less important than how you say it”, and “style trumps content”, then it has to be said.

Content has to come first

This article is a plea for a little more, well, rationality in the understanding of what it takes to get ideas approved and products sold. Of course it’s important to be able to appeal to more than just the rational parts of the brains of your persuasive target. I’ve written about ways to do that many times on this blog. But it has to start with a sound, logical and defensible business or personal case—with what Cialdini called material self-interest.

One of the oldest sayings in sales is that you should sell the sizzle, not the steak. But what happens when they buy the appetizing sizzle and then find out the steak is crappy? They won’t come back. That’s why you have to make absolutely you have an excellent steak before you worry about the sizzle. Regardless of how many persuasive cues you employ, or which regions of the brain turn which color in the fmri, if the idea does not work, you soon won’t, either. Bad ideas are bad ideas, no matter how they’re dressed up.

One problem with fixation on techniques to appeal to the old brain is that they distract from the main job of putting together a strong proposal. There are people who spend most of their time learning “the tricks of the trade” in the hope of finding shortcuts, when they should be learning the trade itself. I’ve seen people put more time in the choice of fonts for their slides than they do in critically examining the strength of their ideas.

Whether you’re trying to get a proposal approved internally or selling a solution to a customer, most business decisions are complex enough to require extensive data, deep analysis, and careful decisions. That’s the reality of our modern world, which was built by the human brain. Never forget that it’s still the most important decision maker.

[1] Patrick Renvoise and Cristophe Morin, Neuromarketing, viii.

[2] Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: Science and Practice.

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Posted in Clear thinking, Expression, Persuasive communication | 1 Comment »

The Halo Effect and the Power of First Impressions

Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012

Even your handshake will make a difference

There’s a scene in the movie Moneyball that wonderfully captures one of the most important hidden influences that affects our judgment and decision-making. The Oakland As manager, Billy Beane, is presiding at a meeting in which his scouts are discussing prospects they like. The discussion is heavy on references to looks, such as “he has a strong jaw”—as if that has any correlation at all to the real question: can he produce runs? Another does not like a prospect because he has an ugly girlfriend; it tells him the player lacks confidence.

This bias is called the halo effect, and it has a powerful influence on the success of your persuasive efforts. The halo effect means that we have a tendency to let a judgment of a particular trait affect our judgment of other unrelated traits. For example, attractive individuals also tend to be perceived by others as more competent or likeable.

Because of the halo effect, we may perceive individuals differently depending on the situation, or may perceive the situation differently depending on the individual. For example, here are descriptions of two executives: (more…)

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The Ambivert Advantage

Thursday, February 9th, 2012

You can always choose which face to present to the world

I’ve just finished reading Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain. If you consider yourself an introvert, as I did, the book will help you recognize and apply your strengths to be more successful in a predominately extraverted world. If you’re an extravert, it will give you a greater appreciation of your own blind spots and help you get the most from the introverts around you.

But a word that only appeared once in the entire book sparked my greatest interest: ambivert. I’ll explain why a little later in this article.

Today’s business and culture glorifies the extravert ideal. We watch reality shows in which the brashest, most outgoing and shameless people grab the limelight. We put charismatic business leaders on the covers of our magazines.  In meetings, those who speak up the most are seen as smarter and better leaders, and they are the ones who tend to get the promotions.

Business today glorifies teamwork, which is tailor-made for extraverts. Open-plan offices are thought to encourage more interaction, teamwork, and creativity. (From the 1970s to the 1990s, the average space per office worker declined from 500 to 200 square feet.) Yet, research shows that open-plan offices impair productivity and increase stress. Group brainstorming has been found to produce fewer good ideas than people working alone. That’s because the extraverts tend to take over, and introverts clam up.

No less a business leader than Jack Welch said: “big companies are so tilted towards extroverts that introverts within them often experience a dynamic not unlike the one faced by many women and minorities. They have to constantly overdeliver just to stay even.”

Welch further went on to say that introverts in large organizations need to release their inner extravert; they have to get out more and “deploy all the energy and personality they can muster.”

It sounds like excellent advice, but is it necessary? Are extraverts automatically better leaders and better salespeople? In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins tells us that all the great companies he studied had quiet leaders in common. Peter Drucker said that, of all the most effective leaders he had ever met, all had little or no charisma. And, as I recently wrote here, pundits who are the most confident and bold in their predictions are the most likely to be heard and the most likely to be wrong.

More recent research shows it might be more complicated than that, indicating that what matters is the relationship between the styles of both followers and leaders.  A recent study showed that better group performance resulted when extraverted leaders led passive employees, and when quiet leaders worked with outgoing and proactive followers. When both leaders and followers have similar styles, performance went down.

In today’s fast-changing world, leaders  rightly want to empower employees to take initiative, but that means they then have to act more introverted by asking more questions, listening more, and being more accepting of others’ views. Otherwise, it can lead to a struggle for dominance with followers ultimately becoming disenchanted that their leaders were not listening to them and following their advice. This may be especially important for sales managers. If you’ve risen from an extravert pool to your current position, you may need to tone down your need to be the center of attention and to always be right.

Even in sales, a profession which seems to be tailor-made for extraverts, the picture is not so clear.

Extraverts have some definite advantages in sales. They are action-oriented, confident, and gregarious. They’re not afraid to make the calls and reach out to high level decision makers, and they have the energy and enthusiasm to entertain and develop strong relationships. They are great networkers. I have 115 friends on FB and that’s too much. My friend John has almost 3,000 and is eagerly seeking more. Extraverts love doing these things and introverts find them to be work, so there’s a strike against introverts.

And yet, especially in complex systems sales, success comes to those who research the customer’s company, who put together effective opportunity and account plans, who ask questions and listen. Introverts may not like to make cold calls, but they are more likely to create a calling plan and have the dogged discipline to follow it. As one highly successful salesperson says in the book: “I discovered early on that people don’t buy from me because they understand what I’m selling. They buy because they feel understood.”

Because both types have advantages, it stands to reason that the most effective salespeople should combine the best traits of each, or who can flex their style to match the needs of the situation.

The key point in all this is that success in any profession is based on the effective performance of certain required behaviors and actions as the situation dictates, and these are products of will and skill. Practice and habit make things easier in the long run, so introverts can get better at doing the things they need to do, and extraverts can do the same. Personality is not destiny.

Labels can limit us. The first thing we should do is drop the labels we’ve imposed on ourselves. See, labels work both ways. If we behave as introverts, we—or others—place that label on us. Once we accept the label, it goes to work on us in the future. We react to situations the way we think introverts should react.

Labels can also empower us. If labels have that much power, why not change the label? The more I read the book, the less I identified with the pure introvert label. If you think of the distribution of personality types as a bell curve, most people will fall somewhere in the middle, so most of us are really ambiverts. This should be encouraging, because it means that you may not be as far from the center as you thought. From the center, it is much easier to move in either direction as the need arises. If you need to be assertive and outgoing, you can do so. Or, if you need to quiet down a bit and think a bit, you can also do it.

So, if you’re more introverted, take Welch’s advice and get out more; before meetings, think about what you’re going to say and plan to participate and speak out more. Seek out speaking opportunities; joining Toastmasters quite literally changed my life, because the confidence I gained in speaking in front of groups translated into many other business and social situations.

If you’re more extraverted, cut your talk/listen ratio way down. One CEO says that he purposely does not say anything for the first 15 minutes of any meeting. If you’re spouting opinions and nobody rebuts, don’t automatically assume it’s because they’re blown away by your brilliance. Maybe they just think you’re a jerk and want you to go away.

So, if you ask me which personality type is better, I’m firmly in the middle.

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