The ability to communicate persuasively is a cornerstone of both personal and business success. Most everything you want to achieve in life is dependent on your ability to persuade others, whether it’s a job, a date or just about anything else. When you applied for your first job you had to persuade the person that interviewed you that you were the right person for the position. When you asked someone out for the first date you had to convince that person that you are fun or otherwise interesting to be around. It’s no different in our professional lives. If you want to promote yourself as an expert, you need to persuade others to trust in your expertise. Likewise, when you want someone to buy your product or service or otherwise embark a desired course, you must persuade them to take action.
Whether it’s in person, online or through any other means, effective persuasive communication takes work—it doesn’t just happen. The following three steps are involved in the persuasive communication process:
- Build a relationship with your audience (customers): In order to sell yourself, your company, your product or your service you must establish a relationship with your customers—the audience for your message. This is also known as building rapport. By definition rapport refers to relationships of mutual trust among people, feelings of sympathetic understanding and sympathetic compatibility. People pay attention to those they trust, have confidence in, look up to or respect.
- Uncover their wants and needs: If you don’t know what your audience wants or needs, you won’t be able to persuade them to do what you want them to do—read your article, brochure or proposal; click a link; make a purchase or take some other desired action. People take specific actions because doing so fulfills a particular want or need.
- Make certain that your work speaks to those wants and needs: When your message doesn’t speak to your audience’s desires and needs it is ignored so if you want people to pay attention you have to quickly grab their interest and engage them. Your audience only cares about what you do when you can meet their wants and needs so your message needs to address their concerns and speak to their interests, values and aspirations. You must tailor your message to clearly demonstrate how you, your product or your service delivers benefits that fulfill your audience’s wishes or needs.
Notice that not one of the three points above is about you, your company or your service. It’s all about your audience. They are the ones who determine whether or not you succeed. Therefore, it’s your responsibility to connect with your audience, establish rapport with them, determine what they want or need and then tailor your message to address their desires or meet their needs.
