226 Unit 3: Brief Business Messages

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Persuasion skills for every business professional

Persuasion is an essential business skill, no matter what career path you follow. This video offers great tips for understanding, practicing, and applying persuasive skills. Go to http://real-timeupdates.com/bce6 and click on Learn More.

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■Be objective and present fair and logical arguments.

■Display your willingness to keep your audience’s best interests at heart.

■Persuade with logic, evidence, and compelling narratives, rather than trying to coerce with high-pressure, “hardsell” tactics.

■Whenever possible, try to build your credibility before you present a major proposal or ask for a major decision. That

way, audiences don’t have to evaluate both you and your message at the same time.5

Careless production undermines your credibility, so revise and proofread with care.

Step 3: Completing Persuasive Messages

The pros know from experience that details can make or break a persuasive message, so they’re careful not to skimp on this part of the writing process. For instance, advertisers may have a dozen or more people re-

view a message before it’s released to the public.

When you evaluate your content, try to judge your argument objectively and try not to overestimate your credibility. When revising for clarity and conciseness, carefully match the purpose and organization to audience needs. If possible, ask an experienced colleague who knows your audience well to review your draft. Your design elements must complement, not detract from, your argument. In addition, meticulous proofreading will identify any mechanical or spelling errors that would weaken your persuasive potential. Finally, make sure your distribution methods fit your audience’s expectations as well as your purpose.

2 LEARNING OBJECTIVE

Describe an effective strategy for developing persuasive business messages.

Developing Persuasive Business Messages

Your success as a businessperson is closely tied to your ability to encourage others to accept new ideas, change old habits, or act on your recommendations. Unless your career takes you into marketing and sales, most of your persuasive messages will consist of persuasive business messages, which are those designed to elicit a preferred response in a nonsales situation.

Even if you have the power to compel others to do what you want them to do, persuading them is more effective than forcing them. People who are forced into accepting a decision or plan are less motivated to support it and more likely to react negatively than if they’re persuaded.6 Within the context of the three-step process, effective persuasion involves four essential strategies: framing your arguments, balancing emotional and logical appeals, reinforcing your position, and anticipating objections. (Note that all these concepts in this section apply as well to marketing and sales messages, covered later in the chapter.)

The AIDA model is a useful approach for many persuasive messages:

■Attention

■Interest

■Desire

■Action

The AIDA model is ideal for the indirect approach.

Framing Your Arguments

Many persuasive messages follow some variation of the indirect approach. One of the most commonly used variations is called the AIDA model, which organizes your message into four phases (see Figure 9.2):

■Attention. Your first objective is to encourage your audience to want to hear about your problem, idea, or new product—whatever your main idea is. Be sure to find some common ground on which to build your case.

■Interest. Provide additional details that prompt audience members to imagine how the solution might benefit them.

■Desire. Help audience members embrace your idea by explaining how the change will benefit them and answering potential objections.

■Action. Suggest the specific action you want your audience to take. Include a deadline, when applicable.

The AIDA model is tailor-made for using the indirect approach, allowing you to save your main idea for the action phase. However, it can also work with the direct approach,

in which case you use your main idea as an attention-getter, build interest with your argument, create desire with your evidence, and emphasize your main idea in the action phase with the specific action you want your audience to take.

When your AIDA message uses the indirect approach and is delivered by memo or email, keep in mind that your subject line usually catches your reader’s eye first. Your challenge is to make it interesting and relevant enough to capture reader attention without revealing your main idea. If you put your request in the subject line, you’re likely to get a quick “no” before you’ve had a chance to present your arguments:

With either the direct or indirect approach, AIDA and similar models do have limitations. First, AIDA is a unidirectional method that essentially talks at audiences, not with them. Second, AIDA is built around a single event, such as asking an audience for a decision, rather than on building a mutually beneficial, long-term relationship.7 AIDA is still a valuable tool for the right purposes, but as you’ll read later in the chapter, a conversational approach is more compatible with today’s social media.

The AIDA approach has limitations:

■It essentially talks at audiences, not with them

■It focuses on one-time events, not long-term relationships

Balancing Emotional and Logical Appeals

Few persuasive appeals are purely logical or purely emotional, and a key skill is finding the right balance for each message (see Figure 9.3 on the next page). An emotional appeal calls on feelings or audience sympathies. For instance, you can make use of the emotion inspired by words such as freedom, success, prestige, compassion, free, and comfort. Such words put your audience in a certain frame of mind and help people accept your message.

Many marketing and sales messages rely heavily on emotional appeals, but most persuasive business messages rely more on logic. And even if your audience reaches a conclusion based on emotions, they’ll look to you to provide logical support as well. A logical appeal uses one of three types of reasoning:

Emotional appeals attempt to connect with the reader’s feelings or sympathies.

Logical appeals are based on the reader’s notions of reason; these appeals can use analogy, induction, or deduction.

Using logical appeals carries with it the ethical responsibility to avoid faulty logic.

■Analogy. With analogy, you reason from specific evidence to specific evidence, in effect “borrowing” from something familiar to explain something unfamiliar. For instance, to convince management to add chat room capability to the company’s groupware system, you could explain that it is like a neighborhood community center, only online.

■Induction. With inductive reasoning, you work from specific evidence to a general conclusion. To convince your boss to change a certain production process, you could point out that every company that has adopted it has increased profits.

■Deduction. With deductive reasoning, you work from a generalization to a specific conclusion. To persuade your boss to hire additional customer support staff, you might point to industry surveys that show how crucial customer satisfaction is to corporate profits.

Every method of reasoning is vulnerable to misuse. To avoid faulty logic, follow these guidelines:8

Reinforcing Your Position

After you’ve worked out the basic elements of your argument, step back and look for ways to bolster the strength of your position. Are all your claims supported by believable evidence? Would a quotation from a recognized expert help make your case?

Next, examine your language. Can you find more powerful words to convey your message? For example, if your company is in serious financial trouble, talking about fighting for survival is a more powerful emotional appeal than talking about ensuring continued operations. As with any other powerful tool, though, use vivid language and abstractions carefully and honestly.

In addition to examining individual word choices, consider using metaphors and other figures of speech. If you want to describe a quality-control system as being designed to detect every possible product flaw, you might call it a “spider web” to imply that it catches everything that comes its way. Similarly, anecdotes (brief stories) can help your audience grasp the meaning and importance of your arguments. Instead of just listing the number of times the old laptop computers in your department have failed, you could describe how you lost a sale when your computer broke down during a critical sales presentation.

Beyond specific words and phrases, look for other factors that can reinforce your position. When you’re asking for something, your audience members will find it easier to grant your request if they stand to benefit from it as well.

Choose your words carefully to trigger the desired responses.

Anticipating Objections

Even compelling ideas and exciting projects can encounter objections, if only as a consequence of people’s natural tendency to resist chance. Anticipate likely objections and address them before your audience can bring them up. By doing so, you can remove these potentially negative elements from the conversation and keep the focus on positive communication. Note that you don’t need to explicitly mention a particular concern. For instance, if your proposal to switch to lower-cost materials is likely to raise concerns about quality, you can emphasize that the new materials are just as good as existing materials. You’ll not only get this issue out of the way sooner but also demonstrate a broad appreciation of the issue and imply confidence in your message.9

If you expect a hostile audience that is biased against your plan, be sure to present all sides of the situation. As you cover each option, explain the pros and cons. You’ll gain additional credibility if you mention these options before presenting your recommendation or decision.10 If you can, involve your audience in the design of the solution; people are more likely to support ideas they help create.

Even powerful persuasive messages can encounter audience resistance.

If you expect to encounter strong resistance, present all sides of an issue.

Avoiding Common Mistakes in Persuasive Communication

When you believe in a concept or project you are promoting, it’s easy to get caught up in your own confidence and enthusiasm and thereby fail to see things from the audience’s perspective. When putting together persuasive arguments, avoid these common mistakes (see Figure 9.4 on the next page):11

■Using a hard sell. Don’t push. No one likes being pressured into making a decision, and communicators who take this approach can come across as being more concerned with

Don’t let confidence or enthusiasm lead you to some common mistakes in persuasive communication.

It’s time to call the Fast Track program what it truly is—a disaster. Everyone was excited last year when we announced the plan to speed up our development efforts and introduce at least one new product every month. We envisioned rapidly expanding market share and strong revenue growth in all our product lines. What we got instead is a nightmare that is getting worse with every launch.

As a company, we clearly underestimated the resources it would take to market, sell, and support so many new products. We can’t hire and train fast enough, and our teams in every department are overwhelmed. Forced to jump from one new product to the next, with no time to focus, the sales and technical specialists can’t develop the expertise needed to help buyers before the sale or support them after the sale. As a result, too many customers either buy the wrong product or buy the right product but then can’t get knowledgeable help when they need it. We’re losing credibility in the market, we’re starting to lose sales, and it won’t be long before we start losing employees who are fed up with the insanity.

To make matters even worse, some of the recent products were clearly rushed to market before they were ready, with hardware quality problems and buggy software. Returns and warranty costs are skyrocketing.

New products are the lifeblood of the company, to be sure, but there is no point in introducing products that only create enormous support headaches and cost more to support than they generate in profits. We need to put the Fast Track initiative on hold immediately so the entire

The company has clearly staked a lot on this program, so opening by calling it a disaster will only put the reader on the defensive.

Word choices such as nightmare and insanity give

the message an emotional, almost hysterical, tone that and detract from the serious message.

The writer mingles together an observation that may be subjective (declining credibility), a hard data point (declining sales), and a prediction (possibility of employee defections).

The claim that recent products were “clearly rushed to market” is unnecessarily inflammatory (because it blames another department) and distracts the reader from the more immediate problems of poor quality.

The first sentence of the last paragraph is insulting to anyone with basic business sense—particularly the president of a company.