I’m putting together a sales training for a client, and I’ve been thinking about the best way to teach people how to persuade others. Last weekend, I was driving my grandkids to church, and I heard the following exchange – for real, I’m not making this up.
For context, my six-year-old granddaughter and I go to church together most Sundays, but her three-year-old brother was, until quite recently, a bit overwhelmed by the people, the music, all the other kids. So, he has just started joining us.
During the service, the children are invited to another room to what I used to call Sunday School, what the Episcopalians call “Godly Play” and what my granddaughter calls “kid church.”
I asked my grandson if he wanted to go to kid church or stay with me through the service.
“I want to stay with Nana,” he said firmly.
My granddaughter, who likes him to go to kid church with her, got stern with me.
“Nana, you can’t just say kid church. You need to describe it.” She turned to her little brother. “Do you want to go with me and listen to a story, have a yummy snack, and then play with all the fun toys? That’s what kid church is.”
“I want to go to kid church,” he said.
“See, Nana, you have to describe it.”
Of course, she’s right. The messaging is key. But to tailor your message to your audience you have to understand your audience. My granddaughter knows her brother; story time, snack, play, and hanging out with her are some of his favorite things.
Persuasion isn’t just a sales tool. If you are motivating a team, setting a vision, doing political or social advocacy you are persuading. Advertising and marketing is all persuasion. But so is every stump speech, homily and sermon. Often when I do trainings on sales or negotiations, people think it doesn’t apply to their job if they are not in a specific sales role. Until they realize that in their day to day they are often persuading people.
Ask the Questions
There are clips on the internet about the exercise of how to sell a pen. One person hands another a pen and says sell this to me. The unexperienced might point out the pen’s sleek design, the handy button at the end which you depress to hide the ballpoint, so you don’t get ink in your pocket.
The experienced will start by asking how are you going to use your pen? Are you hastily signing a permission slip on the dash of your car with one of the many loose pens you keep in your bag or car console? Or are you pouring yourself a nice glass of wine and opening your journal with the handmade paper and uncapping a fountain pen to write your reflections on the day? Skillful questions will establish what your prospect is looking for in pens, from function to price point to design.
If there’s one suggestion I offer most in my executive coaching practice, it is for leaders to ask more questions. For years, clients have come into coaching sessions with narratives about why a person or team is doing a thing. Sometimes these narratives are very complex scaffolding around assumptions of intention and motivation. When I ask how they know this to be true, they often look at me blankly.
“Have you asked them?” I will say.
Invariably, the answer is no.
I’m not suggesting that reasonable adults can’t extrapolate intention, good or ill-will and motivation from the actions of others. Of course we can, and for those of us who have been told that our intuition and insights aren’t valid, we need to believe what our intelligence tells us. Sometimes when we connect the dots, we get to the truth.
But sometimes we don’t, we stumble on our human tendency to make meaning out of patterns, the way we will see faces in everything from the moon to a leaf to a tortilla. For those of us who have had traumatic or damaging experiences at work or in our personal lives, we may be hypervigilant or dissociated, which can dial up or dial down our awareness of threat.
So, ask. Everything makes sense to the person who is doing it. If someone is doing something that makes no sense to you, it won’t work for you to outline why their actions make no sense to you. Because they do make sense to them.
But if you try to understand why it makes sense to them you can come to a better understanding. And, if you want to persuade them to approach a situation differently, then you have a basis upon which to build a persuasive argument. I may not like story time, or snack, but my grandson does.
Cultural baggage around asking questions gets in the way. Many people think asking a question signals a lack of authority or ability. Some worry it will be seen as too personal or invasive. But in my experience, curiosity, used professionally and with consideration, is a superpower. At the very least it gives you more information about what problem you are trying to solve.
Similar cultural baggage exists around persuasion, the vague odor of disrepute attached anyone who sells things for a living. From the snide comments I got throughout my sales career about not being like a used-car salesperson to the LinkedIn side eye given to those promoting their services – which is their way of making a living. Are we supposed to be professionally successful without trying? Are we meant to accrue advancement, wealth and opportunity without ever having to persuade anyone that we are good at what we do because that is, apparently, unseemly?
Which is ridiculous. And often the irritating salespeople are the ones who are not doing it well. They are not persuading me from an understanding of my needs, or offering me useful solutions, they are pelting me with hot clods of ego that some other salesperson persuaded them would be effective, or they are using tools AI spit out from the improperly digested work of others.
All of us, at some point, in or out of work, need to persuade someone to do something. Whether it is to get your toddler to go to bed, your teen to step away from their screens, your boss to give you a raise, or your neighbors to vote to add a stop sign to a dangerous intersection. Own it, ask the questions, and tell the story in a way that will be compelling to the audience.
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