Traditional sales training has been broken for quite some time.

Buyers today want something more than slick talkers and hackneyed 
closing lines. They don’t want to be put through a process that 
is designed to fit everyone, in fact, they are willing to vote 
with their dollars and long term business if that is what you 
offer.

What customers really want is access to relevant information from 
knowledgeable professionals who move them. 

Persuasion when done correctly creates change at a physiological, 
psychological and biological level in the person you are 
persuading. It allows them to check their internal map of what it 
true or not against a story that you’ve carefully crafted for 
them after eliciting their buying criteria, not a list of 
features, but a list of emotional criteria that allows them to 
say yes with total confidence.


How To Persuade

1. Open With A Powerful Persona
2. Elicit Information
3. Tell A Powerful Story To Lead Them To Their Own Most Logical 
   Conclusion

In order to persuade effectively, you start with your persona. 
Much of a decision about whether or not to buy from you comes 
within seconds of meeting you and long before you have a chance 
to open your mouth and say your first words.

In order to create a powerful persona you need to check several 
areas. First, take a look at your clothes, go beyond the basics 
like freshly shined shoes and pressed clothes. Ask yourself if 
your hairstyle is current (note, if it is over 3 years old, it is 
probably out of date whether you are a man or a woman). If you’ve 
gained or lost more than 10 pounds in the past year and haven’t 
had your clothing altered or updated they will not give you a 
powerful first impression. Are you dressed at the right level? 
You should dress at least as well as the CEO of the company you 
are selling to or one step better. But dressing is just the first 
step, there are at least a dozen other areas that you must 
consider.

Simply by making those small changes to your current presentation 
will increase your persuasive quotient instantly. If people are 
going to judge you by what they see, be sure that they see your 
very best package first. In my book Persuasion: The Art of 
Getting What You Want, you’ll find a complete persona checklist 
that includes clothing, your voice and communication skills and 
the presentation of your total package, your compete persona.

In order to craft a powerful story that will draw people in and 
resonate with them in a way that makes them want to draw your 
conclusion, you must ask better questions. The questions you want 
to ask elicit not only product or service requirements, but 
emotional requirements which will be the true criteria by which 
your offer is judged.

To elicit emotional buying criteria you have to ask very detailed 
and penetrating questions. Here are a few examples of questions 
that will begin getting to emotional buying criteria:

 * What specifically will successful implementation of this 
   product or service mean to you personally?
 * How will you define success in relation to this product or 
   service?
 * What was the final straw that made you decide to purchase 
   this product or service or to replace your existing product 
   or service?
 * Other than you, who will be evaluating the success of this?
 * If you could wave a magic wand and get exactly what you want, 
   what would it look like? Why specifically would you want it 
   to look like that.

When you begin to stop asking open ended questions and start 
drilling down, you’ll find the pain and the requirements to 
successfully position your solution.

Stories lead people to draw their most logical conclusion, 
the one that the moral relates to. We are deeply persuaded 
by powerful stories because they are the oldest form of 
communication we know. Rather than rattling off a list of 
features and benefits, if you tell a story about how someone else 
used the products specific features and benefits or used the 
service to get a similar set of results and demonstrate it deeply 
by using metaphor, the person listening can draw only one 
conclusion, the one you want them to, but they’ll defend it as 
their own forever.

Persuasion is both an art and a science, but one that everyone 
must master. Your ability to earn is in direct proportion to your 
ability to persuade. Persuasion truly is the art of getting what 
you want. 

Dave Lakhani is the author of Persuasion: The Art of Getting 
What You Want. The book covers 17 specific persuasion tactics 
and demonstrates the neuroscience and psychology behind true 
persuasion. Dave is providing a rare free tele-seminar for our 
readers. To register and to get a free chapter from his book 
visit http://www.askthepersuader.com right now, lines are 
limited, you can also learn more about persuasion at: 
http://www.howtopersuade.com.