Persuasive Pitching

Sometimes, making a pitch to a roomful of organizational decision makers feels painless: Your audience is engaged, connected and clearly came to the meeting convinced of coaching’s benefits. After hearing just a few of your clients’ case studies, they’re ready to take the next step and begin negotiating a contract. 

Often, however, one or more audience members may broadcast reluctance, or even outright resistance. Perhaps they don’t believe that coaching is the best investment in their organization’s talent. Maybe they’re prepared to invest in coaching, but aren’t certain that you’re the right coach for them. Regardless of its underlying cause, this reluctance is a roadblock standing between you and your goal of securing a new customer. In these situations, leveraging persuasive communication skills can make the difference between forging a fruitful business relationship and walking out the door without the contract.

As a coach, you let your clients take the lead, supporting them as they draw their own conclusions and design actions that will help them reach their goals. As a persuasive communicator, however, you’re tasked with directing your audience to take a specific action or series of actions. While this may feel uncomfortable at first, there’s an array of proven techniques you can adopt to communicate persuasively without feeling that you’ve compromised your integrity.

The Power of the Persuasive Communicator

Utilizing persuasive communications techniques connects you with your audience in a way that provides symmetry between the message you are trying to convey and the way the audience receives and responds to it.

Every audience and audience member is unique, bringing distinctive and diverse goals, experiences, contexts and beliefs to their conversation with you. A persuasive pitch is an opportunity to tell them your story as a coach and, more importantly, to convey that yours is the story they should believe, advocate for and take action in accordance with.

Elements of Persuasion   

There are three steps you can take that will empower you to connect with your audience more easily.

1. Step into your audience’s shoes. This is the most important step you can take on your journey to becoming a persuasive communicator. Do your homework in order to understand your audience members and their goals. This in-depth research will enable you to craft a story and visual materials that connect the audience members with these goals and guide them in the direction you are pointing toward.

2. Craft a compelling story. Don’t just share statistics and data with your audience. Instead, develop a story that connects with your audience and incorporate statistics and data to support your points. Remember that simplicity is essential to persuasion, and simplify your story to be results-driven. However, telling your story is only half of the persuasion equation. The best persuasive communicators also show what they want their audience to understand by crafting visuals to support their presentations. People tend to believe what they see and not always what they hear; therefore, the audio and visual elements must work as a unit. This combination raises retention by 70 percent.

You, your story and your visual materials need to create a unique experience that weaves the visual elements, statistics, stories and themes together based on what you know about your decision maker. Strong, well-integrated visuals serve another key purpose, providing a tangible item (e.g., handout or downloadable slides) that your audience can refer to at a later date to bring your story and your message back to mind.

3. Build trust. Even the most compelling story and visuals will fall flat if you don’t gain the trust of your audience. Building this trust is a process. In order to gain trust, you have to demonstrate the ability to relate to audience members by stepping into their shoes and speaking to their goals and fears. You can also build credibility and, therefore, trust by showing your proven track record. In other words, don’t just tell a story about what professional coaching can do. Tell a story about how your services have helped clients achieve their goals in the past.

Finally, remember that your audience needs to trust that what you are saying is true, so be honest even when tough questions come your way. Answering questions with honesty, clarity and precision will leave little room for doubt about the facts you are presenting.

Striking a Balance

You already know that no two audiences are alike: Every audience and every audience member brings a unique, highly personal combination of experiences, beliefs, backgrounds and education to the table. In order to be a successful persuasive communicator, you’ll need to negotiate the strategies presented above to find the balance that best positions you to overcome reluctance and guide your audience toward the desired action. Make sure your message is clear and concise and contains a directive for your audience. Know who your decision makers are and speak directly to them. They want to make a decision they feel good about, so use your expertise as a communicator and your proven track record as a coach to empower them as they choose the professional coach who will help them achieve their goals: You!