Information alone doesn’t persuade people. If it did, no one would smoke cigarettes or drink too much alcohol or abuse drugs. No one would poison the air with toxic fumes or neglect their health or vote for inferior candidates or buy shoddy merchandise.
Want to persuade someone? Do more than give them “the facts.” Convert information—the facts and figures—into elements meaningful to your audience, enough to influence their behavior, to activate them to action.
I’m thinking about the sales manager giving his annual pep talk to his sales force, where he’s expected to detail the year’s performance quotas. Instead of simply explaining the new bonus plan and how many widgets need to be sold to qualify, he instead displays a luscious photograph of a blue-water sailboat on an idyllic sea and tells his audience, “If you want to visualize your sales objective for the coming year, visualize this!”
Only after the people in room privately connect their personal dreams of success with their bonus potential did their sales manager begin the more detailed briefing. But he had established an entirely new context, you see. He had taken raw, usually boring statistical information and given it tangible meaning and value for this audience.
He did more than motivate them; he activated them.
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