Patrick Forsyth - Smart Skills: Persuasion

Smart Skills: Persuasion

Legend Business, 2 London Wall Buildings,
London EC2M 5UU
www.legendpress.co.uk

Contents Patrick Forsyth 2011

The right of Patrick Forsyth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

ISBN 978-19082480-5-3
eISBN 978-19082483-5-0
Set in Times

Printed by Lightning Source, Milton Keynes, UK

Cover designed by:
EA Digitial, Leicester
www.eadigital.com

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Foreword

Myriads of management handbooks in print purport to provide guidance on the key skills to success and business training manuals also abound. Generally, they suffer from one or both of two defects.

Sometimes, the scope of the book is too broad. Attempting to provide comprehensive advice on all the basic business activities, there is no clear message. Nobody can gain proficiency in every field of marketing and sales, administration, purchasing, bookkeeping and financial management in a short period of time, although those who start their own businesses do need to acquire a working knowledge of most. Other titles fail to distinguish between technical capability and personal skills.

However, there are a handful of personal and interpersonal skills that are essential ingredients for success in any business: the private or public sectors and the professions; large or small organisations; employees, business owners or management consultants. These are the subject matter of the Smart Skills series on which all readers can focus to advantage because mastery of them will surely enhance both job satisfaction and their careers.

The ability to persuade others is fundamental to achieving the outcomes that you want or are, at least, are acceptable to you. Whether in meetings, negotiations, making presentations, or on less formal occasions working with others skill in persuasion is an invaluable attribute. In this step-by-step guide, Patrick Forsyth explores the various aspects of persuasion and the alternative approaches you can adopt to be successful employing practical psychology in a variety of situations. As readers would expect, this further title in the Smart Skills Series represents Patrick at his most persuasive.

In the Smart Skills Series Patrick and his fellow authors bring together their know-how of core skills into a single compact series. Whatever your level of experience and the rung of your career ladder that you have reached, this book will help you to audit your personal effectiveness and raise your game when interacting with others.

Jonathan Reuvid

PREFACE

I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up.

Tom Lehrer

This is a good book. Read it.

If only persuasion was that easy, but it involves more than just telling. Some people seem to have the knack as it were. As the banker and author Herbert Prochnow said of sales people: The best we ever heard of was the one who sold two milking machines to a farmer who only had one cow. Then this salesman helped finance the deal by taking the cow as a down payment on the two milking machines.

Sometimes being persuasive is very simple. The caf owner saying, Another coffee? is selling. More often it is more complex and, whatever inherent feeling someone has for persuasion, most must work at it many things must be got right or, however pleasantly a conversation may progress, it will not be possible to close (closing securing agreement is just one specific technique that must be acquired) and you will fail in your intentions. But it can be done. You may not always get agreement, but you can increase the likelihood of things going as you wish by going about it the right way.

Persuasive communications is a main role for some people; it may be referred to as selling and the recipients are normally clients or customers; whatever terminology is used. For most people working in organisations of any sort, and who are not or do not see themselves as sales people, persuasion is still important. You may need to be persuasive with colleagues, staff or your boss, or people more senior than you, with people who are potential collaborators, and many more from someone on a committee you sit on to someone external like a supplier.

Whoever you must persuade and whatever you must persuade them to do, you must go about it in the right way if you are to have a chance of being successful. This book sets out practical, proven approaches to making your persuasive communication successful. It presents powerful methods, concepts and techniques designed to win agreement and prompt action from other people.

Overall, it sets out to:

The ideas are presented in an accessible way and will link easily to many everyday situations in the workplace. If getting your own way is to be possible or at least made more likely then you need to gain agreement from other people and doing so is not about blackmail or brute force. We all want people to go along with our ideas willingly and this is not so easy to achieve.

If I tried to persuade you to cut off one of your fingers, no form of argument is likely to persuade you to do so. Yet if you have read this far then it may well mean that something persuaded you to buy this book. Persuasion may not be easy, but often it is possible.

The techniques that make it possible to get agreement are not themselves complicated. By and large they are pretty much common sense (or how else could I write about them!). The complexity comes in orchestrating the process in a way that deploys the various techniques appropriately, integrating them into a flowing conversation. Your final chosen approach must be acceptable to the other person and yet also present a persuasive case one that prompts the desired agreement.

There is no magic formula and, though some overall approaches are certainly important, success is to some extent in the details.

Note: those aspects of the techniques discussed that have a disproportionately positive effect on the likelihood of success are highlighted as we proceed.

A firm foundation

Overall, the key to being persuasive is to see what needs to be done in the right light. Whatever you may want, the focus must be on the other person and what will persuade them. Whoever they are staff, colleague or boss if you make a good case, then they will perceive the advantages of agreeing with you as outweighing reasons for not doing so. You have to make a case to them in their terms. You must put matters over to them clearly and in a logical manner: the logic describing what may be the many and various advantages of them taking a particular action; while at the same time you must address and minimise anything they may see as a snag.