Consulting at the Naval War College

When I was a college persuasion professor, I consulted with lots of friends about situations in their lives that needed better persuasion. They were starting new businesses, and they needed cost-efficient messaging that was going to be effective. Or they were established, but couldn’t get clearly profitable, and needed to upgrade their sales techniques so they didn’t rely on easy options, like giving everyone an instant discount. Or sometimes it was more personal, maybe they wanted advice on how to get an important person in their lives to make health changes. I liked being able to give people new approaches that could solve problems they had decided were basically unsolvable.

Then, one day, my casual consulting ramped way up. I was contacted during the Iraq war by the Naval War College, to come in and run a seminar for admirals, commanders, and other leadership personnel from every branch of the military. These were people who were actively engaged in life and death situations, and as we talked, it became clear that even though military work was their job, they were all interested in knowing more about how to affect people in ways less traumatizing than the use of military force. One commander had a 20-year-old son in the army in Afghanistan, who was charged with overseeing a village, and who needed to know the answer to a question that literally determined his safety every single day:  “How do we convince these people that we are not their enemy?”

We accomplish things like that through the power of insightful, super-creative, well-implemented persuasion. Knowing how to persuade means you always have an active say in your life and your business. Not being persuasive means you have to watch as things happen that you can’t affect. When you’re confident in your persuasive abilities, you take action. You look out and think: “What’s the best way to get people toward this, and away from that? What will work here to get the behaviors I need?” And you actually have answers to those questions.

And to be clear about it, effective persuasion isn’t about scamming or manipulating people. It’s about moving people toward options that are good for both you and them. Successful persuasion doesn’t leave the persuadee psychologically wounded or financially cheated, because that ruins your relationship forever. It also doesn’t leave the persuader barely making ends meet.  Successful persuasion means everyone in the transaction wins.  Being a good persuader means once you’ve persuaded someone, they come back to you for more business because it worked out well for them and now they know they can trust you. If you're good at this stuff, the second round of persuasion with someone is easier than the first.

In business, successful persuasion means using messages to get huge numbers of people to know who you are, and what you do. It’s about convincing people before you meet them that you have a service or product they want. It’s about face-to-face interactions that are so positive that you turn people into the most powerful persuaders of all -- unpaid evangelists who will go out and super-recommend you to others who need the same services.

That’s persuasion.  That’s what great persuaders do every day. And it determines whether you will be successful in your business, and, really, in your life.

And I still really enjoy helping people get better at it.

Pre-Persuasion

One of the more common misconceptions about persuasion is that people are persuaded toward something in a single, perfect interaction, that it's about creating a moment of precise persuasion that no one can resist.  In this view a great persuader creates massive change in unsuspecting persuadees with nothing more than the magical powers at their fingertips.

It really doesn’t work that way.  In fact, most persuasion is not done in the moment of the actual persuasive interaction.  Most of it is done in the pre-persuasion period, where people slowly gather information and form opinions about services, products, and organizations. It's during this stage that people become either positive or negative toward you, your services/products, and your industry. Pre-persuasion goes on when people don't feel actively advertised to, it's more about being casually informed, reminded, and even entertained about a product, service, or company.

That’s why companies (ie, Geico insurance) spend so much on saturation advertising.  They have to get their name into the national consciousness, repeat it, repeat it, repeat it, visualize it for people, give it an emotional tone, character it (gecko, pig, camels, puns) -- so that their persuasion actively carves out room inside people’s minds.

With good pre-sell, when someone needs something, much of the persuasive work -- where to look for this product/service, what to expect, how to feel about a specific company -- is already done for the salesperson.  The customer comes in already informed about, primed on, and positive about the company. The salesperson’s main job is literally to continue the same flow and feel of the pre-sell -- in other words, not to mess up the pre-work that’s already been done to make this person persuadable. Without good pre-sell you have to do a ton of work in the moment -- including things like gathering and giving out information, creating trust in the brand/product, adequately answering all resistances -- and the possibility of the sale going wrong dramatically increases (due to issues like conversation fatigue, information overload, a waning of your interpersonal connection, etc.).

Pre-sell is why a brand’s external messaging is so important, it pre-sets the landscape and takes some of the pressure off the actual sales interactions. Customers arriving pre-sold means they’re much easier to persuade, so you get far more conversions per interaction -- and the process is way more efficient -- than if customers come in under-informed, confused, or distrustful of your company or product.  

Are You Expressive or Rhetorical?

When I teach courses in Communication, I always start by describing a useful little continuum that shows how different people approach their communication lives.  

On one end of the continuum are “Expressors.”  These are people who feel that real communication comes naturally from within, that words are there to accurately capture how you feel, what you think, who you are. Expressors believe that good communication is mostly unfiltered, unedited, it flows out from you in an authentic, genuine “expression” of how you truly think and feel.  

On the other end are “Rhetoricians.”  Before “expressing” something, rhetoricians first craft their messages so that they can better achieve their intent. Instead of just “letting it flow,” a rhetorical communicator will first think a little about who is receiving this, how it will be heard, how to adjust the message so it has its best chance for success. Rhetoricians are careful and intellectual about their talk, they want more control over how the communication will flow.

Expressive and Rhetorical theories of communication are both powerful, both valid, both very familiar in the world.  Think about which side you are on, because understanding where you stand on these theories is important if you’re trying to improve your communication experiences, skills, and outcomes.  

Here are a few bullet points about each of these theories that can help you better understand the strengths and weaknesses of each.

*  Expressive v. Rhetorical camps naturally war with each other.  “You just blurt out whatever’s in your head!”  “You never say what you really, really think.” This also means they usually mis-understand each other, and misrepresent each other to others.

*  No one is exclusively just an expressor or just a rhetorician.  We all edit our messaging somewhat, and we all express our thoughts and feelings without censorship sometimes.  But people tend to be more toward full-on Expressiveness, or more toward full-on Rhetoricalness.

*  Rhetoricians value being adaptive. They are open to new techniques, in fact, they avidly want to learn new techniques, and perfect techniques they already use.  Expressors often want to get better at expression -- ie, to really capture and clearly communicate their feelings -- but they tend to pull back from “artificially” learning techniques that don’t feel natural or authentic to them.

*  Rhetoricians can be authentic expressors, but they can also use “authentic expressiveness” as a technique to influence others (esp if they are influencing expressors who are only comfortable with other expressors).

*  Both Expression and Rhetoric have moral strengths and failures.  If you are truly expressing your inner thoughts in an honest way, then you would be constantly saying awful things to people, and no one is ever completely and unbendingly honest (we’d hunt you down as a social monster if you were). However, if you never express your true inner states (ie, politicians, at least in public), then you’ll probably go nuts as a human being.  And being rhetorical doesn’t simply mean being fake or “manipulating others,” it means trying to craft messages so they accomplish something that’s important to you (and, at least in good moral rhetoric, accomplish things that are also important and valuable to the person to whom you’re directing those messages).