Before your buyers are ready to hear the airtight logic of your arguments, before they can accept a stirring emotional appeal from you, they must receptive. They must be paying attention. And, most important, they should like and trust you.

Trust is more than finding you to be a likable person. Your buyers must also believe in your judgment. Companies do business with each other where deals are measured in five, six and seven figures, where relationships can last for years, where organizations depend on each other.

When you ask a company to trust you, you make a statement to the buyer about

• what you will do when the customer is far away
• something you will do that cannot be verified
• what you will do at some point in the future

Business buyers need see you as “a good person who wants to do the right thing and will not use them for your own nefarious purposes.” Persuade buyers that you deserve their trust by demonstrating the three essential qualities of character: virtue, practical wisdom, and selflessness.

Virtue

You demonstrate virtue in an argument when you persuade the audience that you share its values. Like decorum, the virtue you demonstrate can change from audience to audience. Meeting with a group of engineers? Be prepared to show that you value logic and problem-solving. Financial executives on the other hand will appreciate seeing the importance you place on growth and profit.

The key is to understand the beliefs of your audience and show that you live up to them. You can do this by bragging on your own account, though most buyers will not find this credible. Far better to find character references who can brag on your behalf, especially if your references are other customers.

Practical wisdom

It’s not enough for your audience to believe that you share their values. They also have to believe that you will know the right thing to do at the right moment. You have to be seen as a practical person in the domain you share with your buyers, knowledgeable and experienced at solving the kinds of problems that your customers face.

Sales people who sell technical solutions are not always technical themselves. That’s why they often bring a pre-sales technical consultant along with them, a person who can represent technical experience and leadership on behalf of their company, someone who has practical wisdom.

You can demonstrate your practical wisdom by telling about your experiences (experience always beats book learning), by showing your ability to bend the rules when necessary (especially if it’s bending your company’s rules in order to get something done for the customer), and by a willingness to take a middle course between two extremes (unlike for example your competitors who you show to be hopelessly rigid or pathetically unorganized compared to your practical approach).

Selflessness

The old joke says that buyers are only listening to one radio station – WII-FM – “What’s in it for me?” Of course buyers know that you are selling a solution and that you have to be compensated for the value you provide. But mostly they are thinking about whether you have their interests in mind. Consequently, you have to demonstrate your selflessness. You can establish your goodwill by appearing to be completely objective or nobly self-sacrificing.

You can come to a reluctant conclusion. “Yes, like you I used to think that the deluxe model was more than most customers needed. But then I learned about the productivity gains our customers were seeing with this model and I finally came around.”

Or claim a personal sacrifice that will help the buyer more than it will help you. “I shouldn’t provide you with a day of free consulting, and my boss is probably going to hand my head to me on a platter, but I just can’t in good conscience let you install this equipment without one of my technicians on site to guide you through the process.”

And finally, you can demonstrate selflessness by showing doubt in your own rhetorical skill. People find a plain speaking and ingenuous communicator very persuasive. I knew a broker once who said that he always knew he was in trouble when he would get someone on the phone who would start the conversation in a Southern drawl by saying “Well, I’m from down here in Texas, and I don’t know too much about these fancy financial packages you boys in Chicago put together, but it seems to me…”

Virtue, practical wisdom, and selflessness. If you can demonstrate your character by showing these qualities, you’ll have an audience that trusts you. They’ll be receptive and attentive to the logical case you are about to make.

Your audience expects you to fit into their view of the world. They expect you to talk, dress, and gesture like them. They want to feel confident that you are “one of them.”�

It’s not just a matter of manners. When you fit in with your audience you are more persuasive.

People want to feel that you are part of their group, that you understand the world the way they do. If they identify with you, they are much more likely to listen to you and feel persuaded by you.

If you meet with your bankers dressed in business attire and adopt a serious demeanor, they are more likely to believe that you are taking the use of their money seriously before they ever hear your pitch.

But attend a Friday afternoon pizza party dressed and acting the same way, your co-workers are going to ask if you are going to an interview and wonder why you are so serious all the time. Before you have a chance to say anything they will be concluding that you are not “one of the gang.”�

Before entering a situation where you want to persuade, ask yourself, what do they expect? As Heinrich says, “To move people away from their current opinion, you need to make them comfortable with you.”

I’m not saying you should pretend to be someone else. But in order to be persuasive, think about your audience and then dress and behave in a way that both meets their expectations and that is authentic for you.

If two young engineers are meeting the bankers mentioned above, they could end up looking absurd in a conservative blue suit that they were uncomfortable wearing. And by the same token, an experienced financial executive from a Fortune 500 company in that meeting would look absurd in anything but a conservative suit.

Find the right balance in your decorum between being authentic and meeting the expectations of your audience. You will go a long way toward winning the persuasive battle.

Decorum is the first step in appealing to your audience on the basis of your character. In the next post we’ll look at three other qualities of a persuasive ethos by showing the audience that you:

• share their values
• have practical wisdom in the matter at hand
• primarily have a selfless concern for the interests of your audience.

You’ve established the goals you have for yourself and for your audience. Now you can decide how you want to control the issue in your argument.

What does that mean, control the issue? What are the types of issues that you must decide between?

Rhetoric characterizes three types of issue in argument:

• Blame=Past: The first issue is about blame, who did what to whom, guilt or innocence. This issue predominates in the courts. It’s about what happened in the past.
• Values=Present: The second type of issue is about values. Participants praise and condemn. They identify which group they belong to. It asks “Who are my friends and who are my enemies?” It is the language of sermons and toasts. It takes place in the present tense.
• Choice=Future: The third type of issue is about making choices. It’s not about facts; it’s about influencing others to make the choice you want them to make. It’s about making decisions that pay off in the future.

Doing business is generally not about blame or values, it deliberates about the future. To control the issue in these discussions, keep the argument focused on the future, on making choices. Avoid allowing the issue to become focused on blame or values.

You are asking your buyers to choose to work with you, to buy your solution, to let you into their company to help fix a problem. It’s a big decision for them. They are asking themselves lots of questions about what you will do and how you will behave in the future.

As Jay Heinrichs says:

If you want to make a joint decision, you need to focus on the future. This is the tense that Aristotle saved for his favorite rhetoric. He called it “deliberative,” because it argues about choices and helps us decide how to meet our mutual goals. Deliberative argument’s chief topic is “the advantageous,” according to Aristotle. This is the most pragmatic kind of rhetoric. It skips right and wrong, good and bad, in favor of expedience.

Seller: “It would be idiotic not to buy my solution today.”
Buyer: “Why would I want to buy from a moron who thinks I’m idiotic?”

Clearly this discussion has gotten off on the wrong track. Entering into a buyer-seller relationship is not a referendum on what anyone thinks of the other person’s intelligence. The relationship is about what is advantageous for each party.

Seller: “If you buy the solution today, you’ll start to see an immediate improvement in revenue and cost-containment.”
Buyer: “Sounds good. If I buy today can you provide some additional integration support?”

These two parties are much more likely to win each other over. They are deliberating about choices that are advantageous to the other. They are focused on the future.

You may believe that your buyers have a need for your solution. But they aren’t obligated to accept your choice or do what you want. They aren’t under any regulatory or legal or moral obligation. All you have on your side is a justifiable opinion.

Rhetoric, the art of persuasion, provides a framework to develop your argument to win over your buyers.

Start by deciding what you want from your audience, the choice you want them to accept or the action you want them to take.

Businesses have a clear goal. They find, win and keep customers. To become a customer, business buyers go on a journey from being unaware of a problem to solving the problem. Marketing persuades buyers to move from stage to stage on their journey. At each stage, Marketing asks the buyer to accept a choice or take an action.

Once you know your goal, then you can set a goal for your audience. In rhetoric, you change the mood of your audience, change its mind, or change its willingness to act.

Changing the mood of your audience is the easiest. You make your buyers more receptive to your ideas by changing their emotions. You can show the buyers how terrible life will be if they allow their problem to persist. Or how wonderful life will be if they were to make their problem go away.

Changing their mind is harder. You are asking them to change their opinion, to decide what you want.

Changing their willingness to act is harder still. Buyers might agree with you that your solution meets their need and still not do anything about it. Convincing people to act requires a combination. First it requires stimulating emotions so buyers feel engaged with solving the problem. And second it requires showing the buyer that it’s really not that hard to make the change, that you’ve made it easy for them to transition from where they are now to where you’d like them to be.

Once you know your goal for you and for your audience, then you can decide how you will control the issue. Will you frame the argument in the past, in the present, or in the future?