Persuasion Atrophy (Part 4): Securing Credibility
Lonnie Pacelli is an Accenture/Microsoft veteran with four decades of learnings under his belt. He frequently writes and speaks on leadership, project management, work/life balance, and disability inclusion. Reach him at [email protected] and see more at ProjectManagementAdvisor.com.
In Part 3 of Persuasion Atrophy, I delved into the importance of connecting with your audience. Professionals now and in the future need to be intentional about how they build and exercise the persuasion muscle. This will ensure the skill doesn’t give way to equating persuasion to shaming—and thinking critical copy/pasting is in and of itself persuasive.
To continue with my case, I’ll use The Four C’s of Compelling Presentations as the roadmap for exercising the persuasion muscle and avoid persuasion atrophy. This installment focuses on securing credibility.
Some years back, one of my assignments was to research potential business process offshoring (BPO) partners we could potentially use for some finance and administration functions. A vendor caught wind of the initiative and asked to meet with me to discuss his company’s BPO capabilities.
The vendor came to my office, pulled out a presentation, and started reading the slides to me. I was genuinely interested in learning more about their capabilities and asked a number of questions. With each question, he responded, “I need to get back to you on that.”
Now I could certainly accept an occasional need-to-circle-back response, but this was happening with virtually any question I asked where the information wasn’t readily viewable on the slide. After about 10 minutes, the…
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You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it. - Margaret Thatcher |
