Virtual Meeting / Presenting – Tip #11

Creating Your Content – Part Two – Three Paths to Persuasiveness

Welcome to our new world. As someone who has worked from home for the past 27 years, today is…Wednesday, just like any other one, unless I’m in a classroom.

Most of our business (pre-Covid-19) has been delivered in-person, 75% of which are two-day classes, the other 25% are one-day. Several years ago, we started experimenting with the various web-based platforms and created a concept we call the Virtual Classroom, and yes, it’s the next best thing to being there in-person. We do role plays, there are large and small group discussions, we white board; participants are talking, others are sending instant messages. I’m talking, typing and listening. (It also takes two people to deliver the class – I have a producer / co-facilitator helping me.)

We’ve had years to figure this out, and we’ve had a LOT of practice doing it. So now, you find yourself working at home, involved in virtual meetings and you think technology will “make it easy.” It won’t!

Each Virtual Presenting tip will come in a bite-sized chunk, so it can be implemented more easily. Plus, as this spills out of my brain, I’ll one day organize all of these tips into a book on the subject. (That was just a thought bubble, right?)

And one shamelessly salesy moment before I launch in…all of our classes (sales, presentation skills, negotiation skills and influence) can be delivered virtually!

You can contact Joe Friedman (love to speak of myself in the third person) by phone or email – 312-841-3364, jfriedman@zehrenfriedman.com. Zehren♦Friedman Associates website is www.zehrenfriedman.com.

Tip #11 – Creating Your Content, Part Two

Three Paths to Persuasiveness

There are three components involved in planning your content when meeting or presenting virtually:

Analyze the Audience (Covered in Tip #10)
Structure the Content
Create Visual Support

I’ve mentioned visual support in a couple of postings already, and there’s probably a blog or two more to come. Today’s topic is all about persuasion – we can debate alternatives for informative structures next week.

How do you create alignment? Get everyone on your (or someone else’s) camp? Motivate people to take action? All of these questions bring us to WIIFT! (Not the common What’s In It For Me or WIIFM.) Rather, it’s What’s In It For Them? Way back in Tip #1, we addressed creating an objective for your meetings. The fastest path to getting people to do something is showing them how the meeting / a decision / your idea / etc. serves them.

Persuasion Path Number 1: Understand their priorities.

If you put what you want in the context of the other person’s or the audience’s priorities, it makes you more persuasive. You may be thinking, “well, duh!” OK, fine, but here’s the mind-blowing part. How are you going to know what their (individual or group’s) priorities are?

You’ve got to ask!

Persuasion is often a probing exercise, not a speaking exercise. Let me give you a moment to have that sink in, and to find the pieces of your mind a just blew apart. The challenge when you’re talking to a group is that they may have different, or even competing priorities. I didn’t say this was easy.

Let me give you an example. Over the years, we’ve served many commercial banks, and done a lot of negotiation skills training for them. Ask a typical banker what’s on the top of a client’s / prospect’s priority list and the answer will be “rate.” Yet, I’ve heard (a hundred times) about someone looking to borrow to purchase real estate, the parcel in question has just come onto the market and the buyer has a “ticking clock” to deal with…where “I have to secure funding in two weeks.” Knowing this priority will not only help make your offer more persuasive, it may warrant even a slightly higher rate!

Here’s another way to look at priorities. What has the organization made the person / people you’re trying to persuade responsible for? What are their personal motivators? What obstacles are in their way? Wouldn’t it be nice to have an acronym right now?

The concept of GAP (which spung from the mind of my genius business partner David) identifies the difference between the existing state and the desired state. In other words, what’s the difference of where we are, compared to where we’d like to be. GAP is also an acronym!

What Goals has the organization made this person / group / team responsible for?
What are the Aspirations of the individual / group?
What Problems is/are the individual / group experiencing / anticipating?

Persuasion Path Number 2: Use Contrast.

Contrast is a common tool of influence – offer alternative paths and make one seem more desirable. How do you do that?

· Show the consequences of one path versus the other(s)

· Show the value of one path versus the other(s)

· Show the consequence and the value of one path versus the other(s)

Now it’s time for the in-tip quiz! See if you can identify which form of contrast is being used in the following statements:

If we use this rotation schedule to switch people onto and off of the production line, we’ll be able to achieve 100% uptime.
We can make the change you proposed to our project plan – we’ll exceed our budget and our due date will get pushed back four weeks.
Yes, we’ll pay rush charges to have these parts delivered and that will impact our budget, but imagine missing delivery dates for our customers.

Pat yourself on the back if you guessed, “value, consequence, both.”

Not surprisingly, Contrast is also a major tool of influence. Political advertising, way too often, talks about the evil that comes should you vote for the wrong choice. Products which are faster acting, longer lasting, extended relief, reduced sugar, fewer artificial additives, better, leaner, blah, blah, blah, are all comparing / contrasting relative goodness or badness in order to get you to act a certain way.

Persuasion Path Number 3: Structure a Persuasive Presentation.

Make it listener / audience focused. Tell them what you’re going to tell them; Tell them; Tell them what you told them!

Purpose – in terms of value to the listener / audience – biggest benefit they will get!
Problem / Obstacle – what’s in their way? Why change? Why now?
Solution – your idea or recommendation
Benefits – the entire list

Here’s an example – A manager in a pooled resource (Human Resources) wants to implement a new piece of software to track employee claims which had been done manually. She knew that there was going to be pushback and could have used her authority to mandate the change. “I’m your boss, just do it!” She happened to be working on this announcement in a presentation skills class, so I offered up an alternative.

“You can certainly command that people use this new program, and they will. Why not use persuasion, and let the idea stand on its merits? You’ll get less pushback since people will more willing adopt the change.” Here’s how it sounded:

I’m going to present and idea to you today that’s going to free up your time, so you can get more done during the workday. (Purpose in terms of value to her people.)

We’ve been processing employee claims manually since forever, and as our company has grown and volume has increased, errors have also been on the rise. Several of you spend the better part of your day, several times a week processing these claims. (Problem / reason to change.)

On July 1st, we’re going to switch to handling employee claims using a software package from XYZ. (Solution.)

This switch will improve our tracking, speed up responsiveness (from the perspective of our internal customers), and reduce our processing time per claim by 75%. Many of you have complained that “there aren’t enough hours in the workday” to get your work done. Automating this manual process will free up your time, so you can get your work done at work! (Benefits.)

There are going to be many questions and objections. People are going to want more detail on this plan, the transition to it, training, etc. Even though it’s a time saver, there will be pushback because it’s new and calls for an entirely different way of handling employee claims. All of that goes into the next part.

Details and Support – while this looks like the shortest piece of my explanation, it is the longest part of the presentation. Explain the solution in more detail; answer obvious objections you can anticipate; show the data provided by the software provider on average time saving per day/week, etc.
Summary – Tell them what you told them – Review the Problem / Solution / Benefits
Call to Action – who does what and when?

In the example I shared, the manager could have said, “we’ll stop handling claims manually on June 23; you’ll attend training on June 25; we’ll test drive the new system on June 30 and go ‘live’ on July 1.” That’s too many steps! The call to action should be the next, simplest thing the audience does. If there are many next steps, make that a slide in the “Details and Support” part of the presentation. Now the call to action of this presentation becomes, “pick the time slot that works the best for you to attend training on June 25.”

You say it would be nice to have a cheat sheet of this methodology? You’ll find it at the end of this blog. It’s titled POPS – Persuasion Or Problem Solving and will help you structure anything from a skeleton (8 sentences!) to a full-blown five hour mega-spectacular.

Lesson? Successful meetings happen by plan and not by chance. Have a meeting objective. Send an agenda (and related material) in advance. Allow time for brainstorming and questions. Make decisions, then ask, “what ripples get created by these decisions?” Create next steps and end on time. Start this process by knowing as much about your audience as possible. Then, when your objective is to persuade, understand priorities, use contrast or POPS!

Stay Safe!

And, if you have suggestions for future blogs on Virtual Meetings / Presentations, let me know!

Joe Friedman is co-founder of Zehren♦Friedman Associates, Ltd, which sells and delivers sales, presentation, negotiation and influence training. Joe spends over 100 days a year in the classroom (virtually and in-person).

You can call Joe directly at 312-841-3364 or email to jfriedman@zehrenfriedmam.com.