Hey, if you want to be a more persuasive person, here’s a place to start, with the first rule of advertising: the pitch you make ought to be about the person you’re talking to. Because if you want them to do something, they’ll naturally be thinking “What’s in it for me?” And what’s in it for them has to be something they want. The more they want it, the more open they’ll be to persuasion. The opposite is also true. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, you can’t get someone to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it. So, step one, how do you know what someone wants, or doesn’t want?
Well, here’s how Amazon and Facebook and YouTube do it. They follow your every move. They know what you click on, what you watch, what you read, what you buy, where you live, who your friends are, in some cases what you eat and how much exercise you get. There have been cases where young women started getting online ads for diapers, only to find out later they were pregnant. The algorithms knew before they did. That’s the power of observation.
Now, you don’t have the benefit of someone’s purchase history right in front of you when you’re trying to persuade them, but what you do have, as a human, is the benefit of empathy. You can imagine how someone might feel if you understood what they’re going through. And you have the ability to ask, what keeps them up at night? What problem can you help them solve? If you start with empathy, then you start as a friend. And people can feel that. If you are someone who hears them and understands them, they’ll like that, more than an algorithm.
We live in the age of permission marketing. As people have gotten better and better at avoiding traditional advertising, they’ve become more and more annoyed by it. People dislike being sold at. But they like it when someone wants to help. And they like being heard.
So, if you’re making a speech, a presentation, a pitch, try this. The first thing you lock down is: how do you intend to help the audience? And how do you know it really will help? There’s no law of the universe that says you can’t ask ahead of time.