The following excerpt is from Jill Schiefelbein’s book Dynamic Communication. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes
How can you create persuasive presentations that help you connect with your target audience? Here’s a five-step model I call the TEMPTaction model. It’s created based on an understanding of persuasion, great public-speaking delivery and communication principles. Let’s take a deeper look.
Touch
The first “T” in TEMPTaction stands for touch. This doesn’t mean you need to physically reach out and touch your customers — it means you need to metaphorically touch them with your communication. People make decisions based on emotion. If there’s no emotional connection, they’re not likely to act. If they don’t see your reasoning or a need to act, people won’t decide.
Another way to think of touch is to think of hugging people with your words. You need to communicate in a way that makes people feel embraced by your message. They need to feel engaged listening to you, they need to trust you and they need to be able to take comfort in what you’re saying. When people are relaxed and not on guard, they’re more likely to be open to your messaging and your requests for action.
This metaphorical idea of touch is often best demonstrated by tying in analogies, metaphors and storytelling, and by making a direct connection to a person’s life or situation. And the bigger your audience is, the more important it is to think of the common communication denominators. This way you’re letting each audience member decide for themselves how to relate to your content, and they can pull in an experience from their life to make that connection. Let me share a story about a persuasive conversation that made a meaningful connection to me (and my bank account).
I’ve talked to a handful of financial planners in my life, and the one I chose is the person who sat me down in a room and asked, “Jill, what does money mean to you?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Let’s pretend you had all the money you needed to take care of all your bills, pay off the house, pay your health expenses, etc. Let’s say you didn’t have to stress about money in this way. What does money mean to you?”
With my response, we started a conversation about how I like to give back to the community, my philanthropic activities and projects I’d like to do that money would allow me to execute. We talked about how I want to travel more and take at least one longer international vacation each year.
Unlike other planners I’d spoken to, he didn’t have me look at money in the past or money in the future — in terms of where I’d like to end up during retirement, or what I need to leave behind after death (not such a pleasant thought). Instead, he first wanted to get a solid understanding of what money meant to me in my life. He made a personal and emotional connection.
From that, he was able to assess…