Effective Persuasion Techniques

Before writing or presenting persuasive message, you may need to spend some time to think about receivers’ perspectives. Receivers will tend to ignore what you are offering them, if you only focus on the important strategies.  According to the book titled Business communication: Process and product, these techniques will help you to be more persuasive. 

·         Establish credibility.

In terms of receiver perspectives, it is important that you are creditable enough to hold their attention. You may need to support your point by research and expert opinion.

·         Make a reasonable and precise request.

An effective persuasion needs to be trustful and reasonable. Ask yourself, would you lend someone a loan worth $200,000, while their business assets were worth only $10,000, if you were a manger of the bank? Please keep in mind that be focused on the reasonable objective.  

·         Tie fact to the benefits.

Using the statistics, facts, printed resources, and examples to support and help audiences to understand you points. However, facts, number or graphs do not change their attitudes, it is important to summarize and converts those facts into benefits for the audiences.

·         Recognize the power of loss.

Presenting the advantages of your suggestion is important. Though, pointing consequences, which will occur if he or she does not agree, is also a good tool to motivate their actions. The threat of losing something that one has, such as money, time, and reputation, seems important to them, and thus they will likely to do what you suggest in order to prevent the loss.  

·         Expect and overcome resistance.

You, a persuader, need to overcome the conflicts that will occur. The conflict might be contrasting beliefs, opinions, and perception. Recognize the weaknesses of your points and encounter those weaknesses by facts and statistics.

·         Share solution and compromise.

 Persuasion’s procedure may require flexible and acceptable solution.  You might ask for audiences’ points of view in order to make the solution clear and avoid mistakes. Furthermore, asking the audiences to share their thoughts is a significant tool to make them appreciated that they are parts of the solution, and therefore they “buy in” and become more eager to implement the solution (Guffey, Rhodes, & Rogin, 2011, p. 274). 

Try this clip!!!

References

Guffey, M.E., Rhodes, K., & Rogin, P. (2011) Business communication: Process and product (6^th Canadian ed.). Toronto, ON: Nelson.

Anti1347. (2010, December 4). Persuasion techniques to get anyone’s attention fast [Video file]. Retrieved from http://youtu.be/w-6MPbTLnbY