If you're in business, you want to be persuasive, don't you? After all,
and nothing happens until someone makes a sale. Someone buys,
someone sells circle of life. In the great marketplace of ideas,
the most persuasive seller has the biggest booth,
but some people don't like feeling obligated to be persuasive.
The idea of hawking a product or service just feels soul crushing.
If you're uncomfortable with the idea of persuasion,
this one's for you.
When I was in Grad School,
I taught public speaking for a little while and one of the more interesting
things we learned was that all speech is persuasive. What do you think?
Welcome to the visible authority where we often gather around big dangerous
ideas. One of those is persuasion. Now,
here's an example from as far away from marketing as you can get,
and I don't mean to be sacrilegious,
but I have heard that Jesus was pretty persuasive during the sermon on the mount,
not by lecturing though. He used analogies comparing the Kingdom of heaven to
this or that.
He used stories about sheep and goats and servants and rulers.
He used demonstrations, multiplying loaves and fishes.
We know this was persuasive because evidently tons of people gathered around,
drove him down the street on a donkey and so forth.
I'm sure they would've liked his Facebook page and live tweeted if they could.
Oh, how did we ever get along before Twitter? But the point is,
do you really think they would have done all that had he not been persuasive?
So maybe there's something wrong with our definition of persuasion because the
people who need to embrace persuasion the most,
the people with the best ideas are the very people who most reject the idea of
persuasion altogether.
Does that really seem like an accident or is it possible that we've been told
from an early age, "Don't get any ideas if you know what's good for you."
We don't want to upset the other inmates in the asylum that we don't know how to
get away from. But escape, we must. Now,
the only way to escape is to persuade the gatekeeper to open the door.
And the best way to do that is to give him what he wants.
And that's your first win/win deal. So here's my definition of persuasion.
Persuasion is the art of giving people what they want and marketing is the art
of giving people permission to want it. Once they feel free to want something,
all you have to do is lay out a clear path that leads to it.
The path of attraction with reminders,
sign posts up and down the road because after all the other roads around this
great marketplace of ideas can be a little distracting.
I call persuasion and art because it's not easy to give people what they want.
Even free things. It's like trying to feed a wild animal. The deer may be hungry,
but she's more afraid of you than of starving. You can't just say to the deer,
"but it's free!" You can't say that to people either. No.
It's an art to understand the subtle influences that drive us illogical humans
to do the things we do,
so to approach persuasion with the idea of winning as though this is some sort
of competition is both short sighted and kind of ugly.
I think that even those who try to make persuasion a science would agree,
they would love to think we could all be mastered like tinker toys,
but in their heart they know there's more to it than that. And of course, yeah,
we can all be manipulated. We all have the same emotions and we can,
we can even feel it happening as we fall under a spell.
We just get annoyed with ourselves when we do,
even while we're hoping against hope that that marketer isn't as sleazy as he
appears because the problem with sleaze is not that the merchant's stuff is bad
or doesn't work for certain people.
The problem with the sleaze is that you will never fully trust his solution.
So if you want to take the sleaze out of your marketing, it's really simple.
Use analogies,
tell stories and do demonstrations, because no matter how sophisticated your
audience might be,
they share all the same emotions we've all had since we were children.
We all just want to be loved. That's why it's better to engage people,
not impress them, to invite them to draw closer,
not admire us from afar.
Persuasion is service, making this world a slightly better place to hang out.
Master this art and watch everything get better, including your business.
And yes, we'll show you how, if you want. Thanks for watching.