Persuasion

Successful Persuasion and Leadership
Dr. John Daly

Successful leaders are great persuaders. Now there’s been thousands of years of research on persuasion. One strand of that research gives us a model of successful persuasion. What do we do if we need to persuade somebody to adopt our proposal?

Step number one, always create a need. The secret of good persuasion is a need. You know, the truth is when things are doing fine, no one wants to change, but if there’s enough pain, there will be change. So good persuaders always create initially a sense of pain in decision makers. You want people on the edge of their seat saying, “Oh, my gosh, what are we going to do?” That’s creating the need.

Then you offer your plan or your proposal. Now one of the biggest mistakes most of us make is we present a plan, a proposal before we create the need and surprisingly, we get rejected. You see this every day. In a meeting somebody says, “Well, I want us to do this.” And people respond back, “We don’t have the time. We don’t have the money. We don’t have the people for it.” What you should do is, as I said before, get everyone on the edge of their seats saying, “We are so screwed.” And then you offer your proposal. People will listen more when they perceive a need. First step, create a need, second, offer a proposal.

Thirdly, show people there are benefits to what you’re proposing. People want benefits. They want to see they're getting something out of what you’re proposing for themselves. Now two things to remember about benefits. Number one, people want short term benefits more than they want long term benefits. I’ll give you fifty dollars today or a hundred dollars six months from now. “Give me the fifty,” you say. People always want short term benefits. So when you’re presenting anything, give people some immediate reward.

Secondly, you’ve got to figure out what their reward is, not what your reward is. In the persuasion research, we call it the WIIFT question. What’s in it for them? People always want to know what they’re going to be getting out of it. But the mistake a lot of persuaders make is they assume that what excites them will certainly excite everyone else. Not true. Successful persuaders systematically figure out each person, each decision maker’s WIIFT. What is it they really want out of that proposal?

By the way, another mistake is we assume every decision maker in the room has the same WIIFT. If you have more than one child, you are sometimes amazed they came from the same genetic pool. If you have a brother or a sister, you may wonder sometimes how can you be related. Everyone has different WIIFTs. They all want different things out of an idea. The root word of customer is not cus, it’s custom. So what you’ve got to do is show benefits for each decision maker in the room.

Final thing, and this is relatively recent research, people fear regret more than they get excited by opportunity. We’re more hesitant about losing out on things than we’re excited about gaining things. Losing a hundred dollars feels more painful than the joy of gaining a hundred dollars. If you have children, you know what I’m talking about. Suppose you have a five or six year old daughter. You and your spouse are talking. “What should we do for a holiday?” You say, “Well, I think we ought to go to Newfoundland, Gander. It’s really cool up there, even in the summer time.” Your spouse says, “What about Disney?” You say, “I don’t want to go to Disney. It’s hot, it’s humid, it’s the summer time.” But then your spouse says, “Yeah, but if our daughter doesn’t go this year, she’ll be too old to enjoy it next year.” Disney parking lots are filled with hundreds of thousands of people who really don’t want to be there. But they understand if they miss out, they’ll miss out on a memory that they won’t be able to get it again. There is with any proposal, not only a benefit, but there’s a cost for not investing. So a wise persuader always alludes to what happens if we don’t adopt my proposal.