“I know what I was feelin’, but what was I thinkin’?”
Dierks Bentley
Is thinking going out of style? It seems by what is being written about presentations and persuasive communication in general today, that the answer is yes. We’re told that we have to appeal to the emotional brain, that EQ is more important than IQ, that stories are all that matter in persuasion. One of the top-selling persuasion books is Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion 
The technical terms are central versus peripheral processing. When a car ad shows a beautiful model, that’s a peripheral argument; when it touts fuel efficiency, that’s a central argument; when it shows a cute baby in a child seat and explains a list of safety features, that’s a combination of the two.
I’m not advocating one way as being better than another in all situations. Our thinking processes are complicated, messy, and incompletely understood. Besides, people differ in their “need for cognition.” Some people like to think deeply, carefully and analytically about things before deciding, and others like to trust their gut. This is not about intelligence: sometimes those with higher IQs are the least likely to need cognition.
But, in business persuasion, in which you’re trying to influence the behavior of a reasonably well-educated adult, approaches that focus primarily on emotional engagement can sometimes be insulting to the intelligence of your audience, and on some occasions are even dishonest. (If you can’t convince them with logic, but you can tug at their heartstrings, maybe you shouldn’t be trying to convince them of it in the first place.) The other problem with emotional arguments and cues is that emotions wear off. Have you ever made an impulse buy, only to wonder a few days later what the hell you were thinking? A decision or impression made under the sway of a compelling presentation may be difficult to explain a week or two later, when a committee gets together to make a decision. In addition, as Steve Booth-Butterfield tells us, “Change achieved through the central route is more persistent over time, more resistant to counter-arguments, and more predictive of future behavior than change from the peripheral route.” It makes sense: minds changed on a whim can be just as easily changed back.
In many situations, people do make decisions largely on their unconscious response to cues that they might or might not be aware of, and then justify them with logical reasons later on. If they’re already on your side, or if what you are trying to sell lines up with one or more of Cialdini’s cues, and if they’re going to make a decision right then, there’s probably no reason to get them thinking too much.
But usually when you’re trying to persuade someone about something important, you’re trying to effect change, which means that you have to change the thinking that led to the current situation. Before you can change thinking, you have to engage thinking. Everyone will think deeply when they have a good reason to. Here are some ways:
Make it personally relevant. Even people who have a low need for cognition will take the time to consider logical arguments if it is personally relevant to them. If you’re making a presentation, you must analyze your audience in retail not wholesale. Even if the business need is the same, everyone in the room has a different personal stake in the outcome, and if you address it early in the presentation you stand a good chance of having an engaged and thoughtful listener.
Ask questions. One of the surest ways to know that you’ve made someone think carefully is when the say “good question”, and then pause to search for a quality answer; even better is when they don’t know the answer, and realize it’s important. A question that shows that you have researched their situation or that you have specialized knowledge has the added benefit of building your credibility. Questions are also a non-threatening way to get them to change their perspective. For example, those of us who sell training are always dealing with the understandable demand by potential buyers to cut corners in the time it takes to run a class. My friend Gary has an excellent response when asked if he can take a day off the course length: “Do you want me to teach it, or do you want them to learn it?”
Break a pattern. It’s easy to stay on mental autopilot when everything is going as expected. If you want them to engage their thinking processes, you sometimes have to break a pattern. Give them new information, use humor, etc. One of the best ways to break expectations is to use humor to change their perspective. The essence of humor is surprise, by getting people to see a side of the issue that they never would have thought of, but which seems obvious when pointed out.
Make it easier for them. This is not about dumbing down something, but sometimes you have to take the time to clarify a complex idea for others. Strip out the jargon and the unnecessary detail, and build off something they already know. Analogies are very helpful for this.
Make it safe to open their minds. If you immediately launch into an attack on their point of view, they will probably shut down immediately. Acknowledge their position, and show that you understand why they think that way. In this way, you can earn the right to be heard.
[1] Cialdini’s six cues are: Reciprocity, likeability, consistency, authority, social proof, and scarcity.
No, it’s not all about you
Everyone talks about the importance of customer focus, but very few salespeople apply the idea to their sales presentations, according to my interviews with top executives who have sat through hundreds of sales presentations. They complain about presentations that focus primarily on the presenting company, with slide after slide detailing their story and showing pictures of their corporate headquarters. Or, the presentation is all about the product being sold. Even if they do care about your company, they probably already know all they want or need to know—buyers are better informed than ever.
It’s easy to fall into the trap when you’re preparing your presentation. First, you are justly proud of your company and of your offerings, so it’s altogether human to want to talk about them. Second, you probably have no shortage of presentation templates available to you, put together by your marketing department, so it’s very convenient—maybe even mandatory to use them. Out of habit, you fail to realize how seller-centric your presentations might be.
So, here are a few filters you can use to test your own presentation before you go out and bore yet another prospect. They broadly fit into two categories: content and demeanor.
Customer-focused Content: Problems, Processes and Profits
Problem first, then solution. Solutions are unnecessary without problems. You might think that the problem is understood by everyone, so there is no need to talk about it, yet that’s wrong for two reasons.
First, talking knowledgeably about the customer’s problem is the best way to establish your credibility, far better than touting your credentials or telling them how many locations your company has. And I’m not just referring to a generic description of the problems your solution addresses—you have to show that you have done the research to understand this specific customer and their perspective on the problem.
The second reason is that even when the audience agrees on the description of the problem, they don’t all agree on its impact. In fact, everyone in the room may be impacted slightly differently, depending on their function or position within the company. Buying a solution represents change, and change is risky. So, your goal is to make the listeners feel that not changing is the greater risk.
Take a look at your presentation: do you talk about their problems, challenges and opportunities? How many slides are about them vs. about you?
Process improvements. Another excellent way to gain credibility and respect is to talk about their processes. Most B2B sales opportunities are about improving some aspect of the customer’s business processes. Show your expertise in their business by describing a day in the life of a process owner, both before and after, using their own language or terminology when possible. In my own sales processes, I try to spend time with a typical sales rep during the fact-gathering stage, and when I talk about this in my own presentations, it’s usually the most engaging part, especially when I can bring up anecdotes or examples. Showing that you’ve been on the scene where the process takes place is enormously credible. Do you talk about their business processes? Do you understand their steps, inputs required, outputs, and limitations? Do you talk about how to make their processes faster, better or cheaper?
Talk profits, not products. The language that resonates with the highest-level decision makers is that which talks about their own personal scorecards: the financial impact of their decisions. If solution selling is about solving problems and fixing processes, consultative selling is mostly about understanding and being able to express the business impact of your product or service. How much of your presentation addresses the business impact? What is the effect on revenue, costs, or asset efficiency?
Customer-focused Demeanor
Besides content, the way you present yourself can also demonstrate how customer-focused you are. Although it may appear to contradict what I said earlier about showing your knowledge, you have to be careful how you do it. If you try too hard to show how much you know about the customer, they may decide to cut you down to size a little. Be confidently tentative when you present your perception of the problem, and invite their comments. This will put you on the same side of the desk with the people in the room and ensure a shared understanding of the situation.
Another very simple test is to pay attention to your pronouns. How many times do you use “I” or “we” vs. “you”?
Finally, don’t be so focused on getting your message out that you forget to monitor messages in. Are you paying attention to the audience’s reaction and adjusting your talk accordingly? Are you encouraging questions and interactivity?
If you apply these test to what you are saying and how you are saying it, every member of the audience is likely to come away feeling that you have been speaking directly to them, and that is a wonderful thing to strive for in any presentation.
Everyone loves stories, but be careful how you use them
Everyone loves to hear stories, don’t they? We’re in the era of story for business presentations. All the experts tell us that stories are the best vehicle for making your content engaging and convincing audiences, and for making your points stick in their memories. Use stories for persuasive presentations, we’re told, because so much of our decision making takes place in the fast, intuitive System 1 thinking process in our brain. For the most part, I agree with this advice, and I can personally attest in my training and speeches that using stories to illustrate my points can boost credibility, engagement and retention. (It also boosts my instructor ratings—not that I pay any attention to that)
But stories do not always work for every audience, and may even backfire in some situations.
Audiences can differ in their need for cognition, which is a fancy way of saying that some audience members like to think carefully and deeply about the points that are being presented to them. In fact, everyone has a need for cognition in the right circumstances. If you are being asked to make an important decision that requires considering various complex factors, you are much more likely to engage your slow, deliberative and analytical System 2 thinking. But some audiences place much more emphasis on careful thinking than others, especially if you’re presenting a proposal that will cost a lot of money or require major change.
Besides, not everyone in the audience is the same. When you consider the social styles of individual audience members, roughly half may be analytics or drivers. In some audiences, you will have a much higher proportion of analytics and drivers. If you’re presenting to a high-tech company that has a very engineering-driven culture, you will often have a majority of analytics in the room. Or, if you’re presenting to senior managers, they will tend to have a higher share of drivers than a regular audience. Analytics will be automatically suspicious of stories because they think they are being deliberately used to hoodwink them, and drivers will become impatient for you to get to the point.
Once, after running a sales training class, I received a complaint from their sales director that I should have told fewer stories and finished the class earlier. Yet, I later heard from others that he often repeated a couple of the stories he heard during the class to make his points in sales meetings. So, I’m definitely not advocating that you dispense with stories altogether—just make sure you modify your approach to match the needs of your audience. For analytics you should lead with data to earn the right to follow up with an anecdote to make it real; for drivers, keep the stories as short as possible, and be prepared to cut one short if you notice signs of impatience. Above all, make sure they are spot-on relevant to your point.
What if the audience is mixed? That’s where your preparation and audience analysis are critical. Make sure you know the style of the most important decision-makers in the room and plan your use of stories accordingly.
The only way to bring them to your side is to go over and get them
Presenting to a skeptical or hostile audience is usually a very bad idea, and strategic presenters do everything possible to shape opinions and gain supporters before the actual event. If you can’t do that, it’s often a good idea to “lose early”, because failed persuasion attempts often make the intended target even more committed to their original positions.
Yet, in real life you can’t always choose your battles. The prospect may be so high profile that you have to at least go down swinging, or you may have an important project that you’re trying to obtain funding for internally. In this situation, you will need to put away your standard structures and deploy an indirect approach that will to maximize your chances of success. I call it the USE structure, which stands for understand, small agreement, explanation.
Understand:
With most presentations to high level decision makers, it’s a good idea to give them your bottom line up front; it works because it reinforces an existing level of shared understanding. That shared understanding is precisely what’s missing with a skeptical audience, so it’s exactly the wrong approach to take with skeptics. If you do, their likely reactions will be either to ignore you or to begin formulating counterarguments in their mind as they listen. If that happens at the beginning of your presentation, nothing you say afterwards is going to help.
The most important principle is to begin with something they agree with. If you think of yourself and your audience standing on opposite sides of a chasm, you can’t yell across the gulf and compel them to cross over—you have to cross over and get them. That means you begin from their point of view and work backward: What parts of it are non-negotiable? What parts are based on incorrect or incomplete information? What has changed since they formed their opinion? As Covey said, “Seek first to understand, then be understood.”
(One side benefit of this is that, by taking their perspective, you might learn something that improves your own perspective or position. It will also help you to temper your goals for the presentation. Because minds can usually only be changed a little at a time, aim for something challenging but attainable.)
By starting with their point of view, you’re showing yourself to be reasonable and well-informed. You’re also enlisting the persuasive power of similarity (showing you’re like them) and reciprocity (give them the gift of understanding and they are more likely to give it back). Besides, you may surprise them a little bit, which definitely helps get their attention.
It’s not enough to thoroughly research and understand their point of view; you also have to show that you understand their point of view, by articulating their position as well as they can. For excellent demonstrations of this, check out any editorial in The Economist.
Small agreement
So, you’ve crossed the chasm to their side and now you want to bring them over to yours, but the chasm is usually too wide to cross in a single jump. You need to get them to a safe position somewhere in the middle. You do this by getting them to agree to a smaller point, which then makes it possible to cross the rest of the way. When opposing sides see the situation in pure black and white, the only way for them to agree is for one side to “lose”. When the issue is what shade of grey you’re talking about, there is scope for agreement.
Here are three of the many ways to get a small agreement:
Reframe: Reframing is about getting them to look at a different aspect of the situation than the one they are focusing on. For example, in sales presentations, one of the most common sources of skepticism may be that your solution is perceived as too expensive. Your job would be to change the frame: maybe to look at the total lifetime costs rather than the upfront price; or reframe it as an investment so that they will focus on the return instead of the cost.
Change the analogy: Everyone reasons by analogy—that’s the essence of learning from experience. The trick is to understand the analogies your audience is using to view your proposal, and then either stress the differences between that situation and this one, or get them to substitute a different analogy. When presenting to customers, the most powerful analogies are those that compare your approach to the way that they do business.
Reversal: This is a form of verbal jiu-jitsu which uses the weight of their own argument to lead them where you want them to go. “You’re right: we did have problems with the last implementation. But because we learned from it, that’s what makes us the best qualified to make sure it goes exactly right this time.”
Explanation
There’s not much to say here, because you will know your own best reasons that support your position. Just make sure that what you say in this part of your presentation connects to the “US” part. I’ve seen too many presentations where the presenter did a great job showing empathy and understanding for the audience’s point of view, then ruined it by merely bolting on something generic at the end.
In summary, it may be uncomfortable to contemplate presenting to a hostile audience, but you will have no greater satisfaction than winning them over, when you USE the right approach.
