If you want to persuade buyers to move forward in their journey, you are asking them not only to change their emotions and their mind, you are asking them to take action. Some emotions are more effective at persuading people to take action than others.

Humor is persuasive because it puts people at ease and improves your ethos, it shows you are a good sport. But it puts them so much at their ease that they are unlikely to take action. According to Aristotle, Heinrichs says “Other emotions�such as joy, love, esteem, and compassion�work better.”�

An audience is most likely to take action if they identify with you and the action you are promoting. The emotions most associated with identification and group identity are anger, patriotism, and emulation.

When an audience desires something, they can be persuaded to take action if you stimulate their anger by showing how another party has belittled them. Tell a customer that you competitor is laughing at them behind their back or that the analyst consultants are taking advantage of them and you’ll have a customer angry and ready to take action.

But anger is short-lived and unpredictable. People take fast action but they don’t think very far ahead. So instead of turning your customer against your competitors and the analysts, appeal to their patriotism�not for country but to their department, their division, their company, or their industry.

And finally, the best way to persuade your audience to take action for positive reasons is through emulation. Choose a role model for your audience to emulate.

When you want to persuade your audience, you can appeal to them in three ways.

You can persuade them that you are of good character�that you share their values, have practical wisdom in the subject at hand, and that you have their interests in mind, not just your own.

The second way to persuade your audience is by appealing to logic. You begin your argument with something the audience already believes and lead them to the conclusion you’d like them to make.

And finally, you can appeal to their pathos, or emotion.

When you appeal to the emotions of your audience you can cause a change in its mood, you can make it more receptive to your logic, or you can make it feel an emotional commitment to the choice or decision you’d like it to make.

Done properly, pathos affects an audience’s judgment. Our brains are wired such that emotions can overpower rational thought.

In Thank You for Arguing, Jay Heinrichs explains: “Emotion comes from experience and expectation – what your audience believes has happened, or will take place in the future. The more vividly you give the audience the sensations of an experience, the greater the emotion you can arouse.”�

How to change the mood of your audience? Tell a story�a story that makes them feel they have had the experience or one that makes them feel what they can expect in the future. Heinrichs says that Aristotle believed “one of the most effective mood changers is a detailed narrative.”�

“The more vivid you make the story, the more it seems like a real experience, and the more your audience will think it could happen again. You give them a vicarious experience, and an expectation that it could happen to them.”

In addition to storytelling, pathos depends on your self-control. You’ll be more persuasive if you hold your emotions back than if you wear them on your sleeve, revealing every feeling. Understate your arguments, speak simply using simple language and shorter words.

And finally let the emotion build. Appeal to your character and your logic while early in the argument. Bring your emotional appeals later.

“Some say the sun rises in the east, some say it rises in the west; the truth probably lies somewhere in between.”�

Fallacies are everywhere. Some are easier to spot than others. The fallacy above about the direction of the sunrise is clearly wrong. It’s logic is a victim of the fallacy of False Compromise. Television news often commits this fallacy in the name of “balanced”� coverage.

Not all fallacies are so easy to spot. And though you might flunk a philosophy test if you commit a logical fallacy, it won’t happen in rhetoric. As Jay Heinrichs says:

In rhetoric, on the other hand, there really are no rules. You can commit fallacies to your heart’s content, as long as you get away with them. Your audience bears the responsibility to spot them; but if it does, there goes your ethos. Your audience will consider you either a crook or a fool. So before you commit a fallacy, learn your fallacies.

Logic in rhetoric consists of the proof and the conclusion. To find fallacies hidden in arguments, Heinrichs says to ask three questions:

1. Does the proof hold up?
2. Am I given the right number of choices?
3. Does the proof lead to the conclusion?

Bad proofs occur when an argument includes a false comparison (grouping examples into incorrect categories), a bad example, or uses ignorance as proof (claiming that if it hasn’t been proven it must be false).

Bad conclusions mainly happen when we’re given the wrong number of choices, either too few (you must take the high road or the low road”� when actually there are many roads plus planes and boats) or merging two or more issues into one (when you buy this refrigerator will you be wanting the 5-year or the 10 year maintenance agreement?”� even though the decision to buy the refrigerator does not imply a decision to also buy either a 5-year or a 10-year maintenance agreement).

Disconnect between proof and conclusion produces arguments with sneaky distractions (the red herring), unlikely projections (the slippery slope and reductio ad absurdem) and correlation without proof of causation (post hoc ergo propter hoc).

If you are on the receiving end of a fallacy, gleefully drawing attention to their mistake is unlikely to win over your audience or your opponent. Instead, simply point out to the other person that their logical fallacy is not rhetorically persuasive.

If you’d like to see a list of rhetorical fallacies, you can find them here and here.

Rhetorical methods are very flexible. If the facts are on your side, then use deductive or inductive logic to help the audience reach the conclusion you’d like them to make.

But if the facts don’t work in your favor, then it’s time for some redefinition, either the terms of the argument or the issue. Let’s start with the terms.

“Training our sales people is going to cost a lot.”

You could change the term:

“It’s not a cost, it’s an investment in future high-margin revenue.”

Or you can redefine the term:

“If by “cost a lot” you mean spending funds to improve the productivity of our revenue producers, then yes, it’s going to cost a lot.”

What if it’s not just a term, but an issue that you’d like to define. Attach words to the issue so that every time someone thinks of it, they think of your word to define it.

Apple defined their personal computer as “A computer for the rest of us.” This not only let them define the issue of what computer to buy (one that a normal, everyday person could use and love), they also contrasted their computer with the IBM personal computer that was seen as something people in business used for work. They made all the language from IBM about work, productivity, and power work against them. None of those terms sound like something that “the rest of us” would want to use.

If your audience currently thinks of an issue with a label that doesn’t favor you, then frame the issue differently.

First, find the commonplace words that favor you of your persuadable audience, the people that are moderate in their position or who haven’t made up their mind.

“Save money,” “improve productivity,” “grow revenue and earnings,” “more customers” are all commonplaces that have wide appeal to business customers.

Then define the issue broadly so that it appeals to the beliefs of the largest possible group.

If you define the issue in terms of saving money, saving time, making work more productive, winning new customers, you’ll be reaching a high percentage of your corporate audience. Avoid defining it in terms that only a CFO could love (reduce the size of your workforce) or that a techie could understand (high bandwidth throughput).

Finally, address the specific decision or action that you want your audience to make. Be sure to communicate in the future tense.

Ask the audience not just to agree with how you’ve defined the issue, but to take action based on your definition.

“See how to become more productive by reading this white paper, watching this demonstration, or buying this solution.”

In many arguments, your opponent will disagree with you or in some other way try to put you on the defensive. You might be tempted to reply with a snappy comeback, a sarcastic remark, or an angry comment.

But remember, you aren’t trying to win a fight, you are trying to win them over. You won’t win them over by making them angry or by making them look like an idiot.

In these situations it’s time to try a little verbal jujitsu. Be inspired by the martial arts. Jujitsu techniques were developed around the principle of using an attacker’s energy against him, rather than directly opposing his attack. Learn the art of concession.

Concession buys you time. Concession prevents you from seeming to disagree. Concession allows the other person to save face.

Remember, the goal of persuasion is not to win the fight but to win over your audience. It’s likely that your opponent isn’t thinking in rhetorical terms, they just want to win. So let them. They want to score some points, so concede and allow them to score. Concession is a jujitsu move where your opponent is no longer pushing against you.

Once you’ve conceded (at least tactically), then you can use their point to change their mood or change their mind.

Imagine that you were selling a web development project to a company. You are talking to the team of people who will be involved in the decision and the person representing the Information Technology department says:

Techie: “We don’t need to spend the money to pay someone else to develop this application. We can do it ourselves internally.”�

Uh-oh. These guys could sabotage the whole thing. Not only are they over-confident about their own abilities, no one else at the table is technical enough to challenge their assertion. But if you just shoot him down, he’ll be angry and you’ll look like a bully to the rest of the group. How to respond? Concede!

You: “You’re right. Your group probably could do this project as long as you brought in a few specialists to cover the database development on the back end and the AJAX for the client side.

Great. You’ve conceded the point and used some code grooming to show that you know the technical terminology. You’ve also poked a few holes in the assertion that the IT group can do this project with their existing staff.

Now that you’ve agreed tactically, it’s time to move on.

You: “Of course, this assumes that you’ve got plenty of time on your plate to take on a major new project. You’ll be climbing a steep curve to learn how to develop this type of application. What we’ve found is that it takes our teams about half the time to develop a web application compared to an internal group, simply because we’ve developed many applications, we’ve seen all the problems that can come up, and so we can get it done more quickly than a team that is doing it for the first time. Although it’s an additional expenditure for your company to hire us, when you do the ROI calculation, it’s cheaper to go outside and hire us because your application will be ready to go live and start producing revenue for you much sooner.

Ok, you’ve used inductive reasoning with facts and comparisons to show why it’s advantageous for your client to use you rather than to use an internal group. You’ve used commonplace language that will appeal to the financial people in the room. To make your argument even stronger you could use a story of a client that considered using an internal group and then decided to use you for the project.

If you had gotten into a back and forth argument with the IT person about technical capability, you would no doubt have lost your audience. Your techy person would have won by derailing your project. But by conceding, you allowed the technical person to save face, you bought yourself some time, and you were able to get the conversation back on track to persuading the client to take action on your proposal.