Buyers are on a journey – from being unaware of a problem to solving the problem. Marketing Operations maps the buyer’s journey and finds ways to create value for the buyer at each stage.
Mostly you create value with your ideas – ideas that answer buyer questions and solve buyer problems. These ideas persuade your buyers to change how they think, feel, believe and act. They help buyers move from stage to stage in their journey.
How do we communicate our ideas in a way that the audience will hear, remember, and act upon them? Is there a general framework we could use that would apply to most situations – regardless of who the buyer is, where the buyer is in the journey, and what type of medium you are using to communicate to the buyer?
A few months ago I started reading about rhetoric, the art of arguing persuasively, to answer this question. The source that helped me the most was Jay Heinrichs. He has re-energized and re-invented rhetoric in a wonderful little book called “Thank you for Arguing.”
Whether you sense it or not, argument surrounds you. It plays with your emotions, changes your attitude, talks you into a decision, and goads you to buy things. Argument lies behind political labeling, advertising, jargon, voices, gestures, and guilt trips; it forms a real-life Matrix, the supreme software that drives our social lives. And rhetoric serves as argument’s decoder. By teaching the tricks we use to persuade on another, the art of persuasion reveals the Matrix in all its manipulative glory.
Rhetoric was the “essential skill of leadership” for the ancient Greeks and Romans. It was central to classical education for 2000 years.
After the ancient Greeks invented it, rhetoric helped create the worlds first democracies. It trained Roman orators like Julius Caesar and Marcus Tullius Cicero and gave the Bible its finest language. It even inspired William Shakespeare. Every one of America’s founders studied rhetoric, and they used it’s principles in writing the Constitution.
Over the next several days I’ll be exploring how rhetoric gives B2B marketers a framework to communicate persuasively at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
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About David Crankshaw