Make people fall in love with your ideas. How’s that for a compelling subtitle? It made me buy the book. A small 150-page book, well designed with interesting illustrations and well written. A thoughtful and practical book with proven methods and fresh ideas.
Read MoreMost of us can remember where we were when events, both good and bad, have happened in the world. Or remember being in the audience for a great or inspirational speech. Some remember a show or musical that fed the soul or just made you laugh to the point of tears. I still remember how elated I was seeing the Lion King for the first time in London. Or more recently being dragged by my cousin to see the Book of Mormon, irreverent, but very funny.
Read MoreWhether you are a Star Wars fan or not, Yoda shared some great insights in the Star War movies that will stand the test of time. When it comes to focus his quote is a gem, with persuasion it has 100% applicability to your success – do, or do not.
Read MoreEvery year, for every person in Australia the government spends $20,000. Every year, for every person in Australia the government collects income tax of $10,000. Can you picture that?
Read MoreOver the past 25 years, as I have worked with individuals, teams and companies on how to be persuasive in front of groups to buy your message, I am always asked the quickest way to be successful.
My comment is always the same, have a solid process behind your message and practice, practice, and then more practice.
Read MoreHave you ever needed to change a large group’s thinking or behaviour? A difficult situation, but recent research can help with this. As always, remember to stay ethical, you can use this for good and bad.
How many people in a group do you need to change the minds of others?
Read MoreWhen changing made-up minds, we looked at some Cialdini tools and the power of stories. Once you understand the foundations of persuasion, there are many insights from persuasion research that can help in specific practical situations. The book The Small Big written by Steve Martin, Noah Goldstein and guru Robert Cialdini is a fantastic source of ideas. The idea of the book is to share some small things that can make a big difference to persuasion. There are 50 short chapters each devoted to an idea supported by rigorous research.
Read MoreFor those cases when you face people with made-up minds, we continue to give you some ideas to get unstuck and to get other people to change their minds. In part 1 we used some of the ideas of persuasion guru, Robert Cialdini.
Many powerful ways to change made-up minds use emotion. Business psychologist Peter Sullivan often explains that the word emotion can be written as e-motion and explains this as e is the electrical force that puts us into motion.
Read MoreRegularly, clients ask how to change others minds, especially when it appears the other person has made up their mind and seems unlikely to change. Sometimes this is because you are not trying to persuade the other person, you are just giving them your opinion and then getting frustrated because they don’t agree with you. But let’s assume you have tried some professional ways to persuade and you are stuck. In a series of blogs, we will give you some ideas to get unstuck and to get other people to change their minds.
Read MoreThe word strategy is often misused and misunderstood. When we use the word we mean the simple definition used by the McKinsey consultant Kenichi Omhae: strategy is the intersection of three groups: customers, competitors and the company.
Read MoreYou have a mountain of data but how can you use it to persuade and provide you with a competitive edge?
Read MoreA story or metaphor is a persuasive use of words because stories persuade with emotion.
Some of the best persuaders: sales people, negotiators, psychiatrists, counselors and consultants persuade with stories and metaphors.
Read MoreYou must pitch for some business. Where do you start? Most managers answer this question correctly: with the customer and what they want. However most managers get the answer to the next question wrong: What should you do next?
What is the correct answer?
Read MoreHow do you make sure that your pitch is effective? Make your presentations relevant to your customers. Robert Cialdini, persuasion guru has been researching persuasion since 1970. In his 2016 book Pre-suasion, he explains when to use his six universal principles of influence. But how should you apply these during your pitch?
Read MoreSo, you need to persuade a customer you can't afford to lose? Where do you start? If we ask persuasion expert Robert Cialdini how to persuade your customer to act, he would suggest a few ways. Two are scarcity and consistency.
Scarcity is the best known technique, Consistency is not well understood and under-used.
Read MoreDonald Trump would probably say: Just tell em!
In the real world it's often not appropriate to just tell em! So, we need to have more sophisticated tools available.
At the end of 2016, Persuasion guru Robert Cialdini published his latest book Pre-suasion. To condense his 300 page book into two sentences he says:
So, what's so important about Pre-suasion?
Read MoreIt is not just the volume but the complexity of data being collected that makes it difficult for us to analyse and interpret in a clear and simple way. As we are bombarded with data, most people still reach for excel to create charts to explain this data. After all, it's easy. Select our table of data, find the command for insert chart, chose one of the types of chart and then choose one of the options for that specific chart. That's easily done.
But as Samuel Johnson may have written over 200 years ago: charts created without effort are read without insight.
So, with a little time and effort how can we create charts to be read with insight and pleasure?
Read MoreWith a tsunami of data it is easy to create large tables of data. However, with such large amounts of data, it is difficult to see what the message is. When presenting these tables, some people leave them in the default order. So, if it was a list of sales by country or sales by product then these would be listed alphabetically. Unfortunately, insights rarely occur alphabetically. So, if you sort alphabetically then you are burying your insights and making it hard for your audience to find the insights.
Find out how to make your insights clearer.
Read MoreThe third method of the 'interactive image' is the 'common image'. This special method has several features and benefits that warrant separate discussion.
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