Communicate to Influence: How to Inspire Your Audience to Action by Decker Ben & Decker Kelly

Author:Decker, Ben & Decker, Kelly [Decker, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2015-04-16T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Move from Information to Influence

What would happen if you wanted to persuade a bunch of people to come along with you on a journey? What are the two things you need to do? Well, you’ve got to start where they are and you’ve got to give them a reason to come with you.

—CHRIS ANDERSON

Old habits die hard. Not just the ones we’ve been talking about concerning behavior, but also habits surrounding how we prepare our content.

In May 2013, we sat down to prepare for our annual Decker board meeting in June. What was the first thing we did to prepare? Whip out the previous year’s PowerPoint deck, of course. We sat there for a good couple of hours, updating the 2012 charts and figures. Time went by, and our frustration grew—the story just wasn’t coming together. And we had a good one to tell! We kept flipping back and forth between the slides, moving them from one section to another, then finally … we slammed the laptop shut.

What happened? We had slid right back into our old habits, and we had gone about preparing a message in precisely the way that we should not. Taking out the previous Power-Point deck? Are you kidding me? It’s the cardinal sin of all message preparation. We should have known better—we teach this, after all!—but we fell into the trap ourselves, lured by the shiny structure, the completed slides. We thought, “We’re overcommitted right now and don’t have much time, so we’ll just use last year’s as a template.” So sad. As our boys would say, “Epic fail.”

Sound familiar? We’re all under pressure, and we all have zero time, so when we’re asked to create a presentation for an internal or external meeting, we head straight for whatever we’ve done before. The last quarter’s report: I’ll update the number. The last client presentation: I’ll change the logo. The result is a data dump, a whole lot of PowerPoint abuse, and gobs of precious time wasted.

And it’s not just a data dump for your audience; it probably feels like one for you, too. Have you ever felt totally and completely bored by your own message? We’ve had many clients come in who were disengaged from their messages. And they should be! Their approach is, “Same story. Different day.” Think of wholesale insurance brokers who travel around the country selling products and services, product managers in a high-tech company conducting new product rollouts across regions, or senior leaders doing a town hall road show to launch a new initiative. They don’t shift the message; they just share it—again and again and again. And they get bored doing it. Shocker.

Now put yourself in the audience. Think of the meetings and conference calls you attended in the last week. How many of those meetings were necessary? How many of those meetings were frustrating? How many times did you think, “Why am I here?” Did you leave with a clear plan? Did you think an e-mail could have

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