Persuade Prospects and Customers to Take Action

According to a recent Kauffman Foundation survey, 16.3% of aspiring entrepreneurs cited persuasiveness as a skill they would like to improve. No doubt, it's an essential skill underlying the success of most businesses, whether it's used to convince someone to invest or to compel someone to buy your stuff. So the better you understand your customer and where your product or service fits their needs and desires, the more persuasive you will be.

Here are a few tips for building up your persuasion muscle:

1. Think about your ideal customer and write down their attributes. We marketers typically place them in these categories: geography, demographics, psychographics and behaviors. Get the chart
2. Understanding psychographics — what your prospect thinks and cares about — will help you get into your customers' heads. These attributes often cross demographic boundaries. 
3. Behaviors have to do with timing, whether that's how frequently someone buys something, business cycles, seasonality or understanding the triggers that get them thinking about making a purchase. You have a better chance of connecting with a customer or persuading them to do something if you time it right. In my book, Social Persuasion I explain, "You want to be there when they're in the mood to listen or to buy."
4. Another important concept outlined in the book is Zen Marketing (it's really Judo, but Zen sounds better). It means going with the flow or "...taking advantage of someone's movement and momentum to drive them in the direction you want, rather than fighting it. It's simply too expensive and time consuming to do otherwise. ...don't spend your time convincing a vegetarian that they should eat meat. Better to use your time convincing a meat eater to buy your particular brand of sausage." And that my friends is persuasion in a casing.