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Using the concept of Leverage to dramatically improve your ability to persuade your audience.
Winter 2005
Volume III, Issue 1
The Latimer Group is solely focused on helping
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Understanding Leverage
The very essence of all power to influence lies in getting the other person to participate. The mind that can do that has powerful leverage on his human world.
- Harry A. Overstreet
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In early 2004, I spent several months working with a client who is in sales. Let’s call him David. David and his company had spent resources in the past on sales and presentation training for him and some of the members of his sales team. The focus had always been on delivery - eye contact, body language, and a good handshake. Someone once told David that doing these things the correct way was a requirement for sales success.
Taking this to heart, David had even gone to Toastmasters to try and improve his ability to speak “off the cuff.” His training had been all about “David,” and about his delivery. His training had always been about how he said things, rather than on what he said.
Readers of The Beacon have seen me write this before: effective communication is about both content and delivery. David was extremely focused on delivery, but not as focused on his content.
As with most people in sales, David’s goal was simple - sell more. He works hard, he is diligent, he understands his product, and he is very intelligent. But the success he sought was not occurring for him to the degree he desired.
I spent time with David, even following him on some sales calls. I sat in his office and listened to him speak with clients and prospects on the phone. And before every sales call, I would ask what his plan was for achieving success. His answers always centered on his ability to explain why his product was superior. After every call, if he had not been successful, I would ask why. His answers always centered on his performance. There was something he had done poorly, or had failed to execute, or had neglected to say. It was always about David. In his preparation and his post-call debrief, David’s opinion of the cause of his success or failure always centered on himself, his actions and his performance.
The roadblock for David was clear. He needed a better understanding of the concept of leverage, and to apply the metaphor to his sales approach.
Leverage. We use the term all the time in our everyday language, especially in our professional lives. Sometimes, we use it so often and so broadly we don’t stop to consider if we’re using it correctly or if we understand the concept completely. This concept is a powerful one, especially when it is applied to the way we communicate.
Derived from the base word “lever,” leverage in the mechanical sense is the ability to use positional advantage in order to move a heavy object with relatively little effort. Archimedes, the ancient Greek mathematician and engineer, was the first to discover the power of a lever and a fulcrum. He theorized that given a long enough lever and an appropriately placed fulcrum, even the heaviest object could be moved.
In a political sense, leverage is the ability to exert greater influence than otherwise expected to move or motivate an audience. In a managerial sense, leverage is the ability to get more out of your resources by redesigning your work structure. In a financial sense, leverage is measured by a company’s debt in relation to its equity. In other words, shareholders benefit when the return on their borrowed money exceeds the cost of the borrowed money.
In all these examples, there is a tool - ideas expressed with words, intelligent organization of work structure, or careful calibration of debt vs. equity – that increases your power without a greater expenditure of resources. Now, if we can discern the opportunity for increased leverage (doing more with the same resources) in the way we communicate, lead, sell, or raise capital, we will have found something enormously valuable.
I am going to ask you to do the same thing I asked of David. I want you to envision yourself in a persuasive situation. You are trying to convince your audience of something, anything - you choose the details. But it is an important situation, and you need to persuade your audience to act in a certain way.
As you prepare to communicate with your audience, there are three variables at your disposal in your attempt to persuade - your understanding of your audience, the message you deliver to your audience, and the way in which you deliver that message. If you understand your audience well, and you can craft a good message for your audience, and you can deliver that message in a compelling way, chances are high that you will be successful.
Now let’s apply these three variables to our leverage metaphor. Your understanding of your audience is your fulcrum. And like the fulcrum in a mechanical lever, the closer it is to your audience, the easier they will be to lift. Next, your message is the lever itself. With a valuable message, your metaphorical lever gets longer and stronger. And finally, your delivery skills and your credibility are represented by the weight you have at your end of the lever. The better your delivery and the more reason your audience has to believe you, the more weight you can apply and the more you can lift at the other end of the lever.
To summarize, there are three metaphorical variables - the position of the fulcrum, the length of the lever, and the amount of weight you can apply at your end of the lever.
Returning to David, his focus had been on himself - his message (from his own perspective), his performance, his needs, which caused him to ignore his audience. In doing so, David neglected to do three things essential to gain positional advantage:
- First, he failed to embrace the notion that his audience is the most important element of the sales leverage equation;
- Subsequently, he did not attempt to understand his audience as intimately as necessary;
- And finally, because he did not understand his audience, he was unable to craft a message that communicated with them in a powerful and persuasive way.
Prior to our work together, David had worked solely on his delivery. Delivery is an important variable in your ability to persuade, and if you deliver well, you have more metaphorical weight to apply to your end of the lever. However, without a thorough understanding of his audience, and without crafting the appropriate message, David’s fulcrum was in the wrong place, and his lever was too short. He had focused on only one of the three variables of leverage.
My work with David consisted of encouraging him to stop worrying just about his performance, eye contact, and delivery, and to think about his audience first. I asked him to consider what their perception of him, his company, and his product might be. Why have they not bought in the past? What are the roadblocks for them? Once he had a better understanding of his audience, David was able to craft a message that specifically addressed their perceptions and the roadblocks to their purchase.
In the last issue of The Beacon, I wrote about The Latimer Group’s GAP Method, which stands for Goal, Audience, Plan. In its simplest form, the GAP Method states that in a persuasive environment, you need to be clear about three things: your Goal (where you want to take your audience or what you want them to believe); your Audience (who you are communicating with and their beliefs); and your Plan (your strategy to move them from where they are today to where you want them to be tomorrow).
The leverage metaphor provides a visualization of how the GAP Method works. It allows us to examine each of the central elements of the equation and determine where best to focus your efforts in order to improve your odds of success. And this metaphor takes simple mechanical tools - the lever and the fulcrum - and uses these tools to demonstrate to us how we can dramatically improve our ability to communicate with and persuade our audience.
The Power of Persuasion is not telling people what to think. It is shaping what they think about. Persuasion is not simply about polished delivery skills and it is never about slick manipulative tricks. Persuasion is about understanding your audience and what their perceptions are today, and then crafting a message that will help you guide them from where they are to where you want them to be.
Dean M. Brenner
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© 2005 The Latimer Group. All Rights Reserved.
Dean M. Brenner -
The Latimer Group: 203.265.4344.
Feedback or comments: dmbrenner@thelatimergroup.com.
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