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?
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About David Crankshaw
[...] PERSONAL GOAL- Help the buyer move to the next stage in the buying process; get the buyer to accept your choice or do what you want the buyer to do. [...]