Course: CMM 128 Interviewing Practices

Lecture Notes

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Persuasion

People engage in persuasion all the time, whether it is to persuade a friend to eat at a particular fast-food restaurant or to sell a service to a customer. Understanding how persuasion works can help you in your job by making you more effective in learning and meeting the needs of customers. It can also make you a better consumer by helping you understand how knowing about the process can help you get what you want.  A good starting point to understanding the process of persuasion is Monroe’s Motivated Sequence.

Monroe’s Motivated Sequence

Alan Monroe argued that there were five steps to persuading people: Gaining attention, establishing a need, the satisfaction of that need, and calling for action. The table below provides more details about these.

Step | Definition/Description | Example
Attention | In this step, you want to capture the attention of the listener. To do this, you might tell an interesting story, ask a thoughtful question, or use startling statistics. The attention step occurs in the introduction but there is more to the introduction than just capturing attention although Monroe did not cover these other functions of the introduction. As you might remember from the chapter on introductions, you want to establish rapport and create orientation in the introduction. In a persuasive interview, besides capturing attention, you might also include a greeting, find out if your proposed solution is relevant to the interviewee (the E), establish your credibility, give a preview of what topics you will cover, and state how much time you need. | Hello! I’m Rick Soller, from Rick’s Heating & Air Conditioning Company. Thanks for calling our company. I understand you need an estimate on a new furnace. Is that correct?  This is a great time to get one since we have a sale on them. If you have about an hour, I can determine what type you need, give you an estimate on the price, tell you about our warranties, and provide you with some references from a few of our over 1,000 customers.
Need | In this step, you want to determine what needs the customer has.  Sometimes this is done by asking the customer about their needs.  Sometimes the customer does not know much about a product or service so you have to suggest needs. | What are you looking for in a furnace? Many people want a furnace that is as efficient as possible to save on heating costs and to be eligible for tax rebates. A second consideration is getting a furnace that is reliable so you aren’t “left in the cold” in the middle of a winter night. Finally, you want a furnace that you can afford.
Satisfaction | In this step, you want to show that your proposal will solve the problem. | Our furnaces are the most efficient in the industry, have a 20 year warranty which is the longest in the industry, and are the same price as others.
Visualization | In this step, you want to focus on what will happen when the solution is adopted or not. You can discuss positive feelings of doing what you want them to do as well as negative effects of not taking action.  You can also give more detail on how they can do what you want them to do. | Signing a contract today will lock in a price that will increase in two weeks based on a news release by the manufactured. You can pay for the furnace using our 12 month, zero interest rate payment plan and will be able to get some of the money to pay for it through the tax break you get for buying a highly efficient unit.
Action | In this step, the interviewee should be asked to take action such as signing a contract. | If you sign here and write a check for the down payment, we can get started this week and finish by the weekend.

Some points to keep in mind about this process.

1. You can repeat the steps.  Most of the time, the person being persuaded will not take action when initially asked. You need to find out why and address that issue. It may be the persuadee does not think there is a need, does not believe your solution will work or is the best, or does not believe the consequences of inaction or action. You should then go through that step again. In fact, good persuaders probably go through the sequence several times before achieving success or giving up.
2. You can skip steps. If the persuadee already agrees to one of the steps in the sequence, you do not need to spend much time on the step. If they contacted you, there may be less emphasis on the attention step. If their furnace is clearly broken, you may not have to convince them of the need. If they have already done research and believe your furnace is the best, you don’t need to belabor that point.
3. You can do the steps in other orders. The order given above is probably the most common order but you could present the material in other orders. For example, you might describe a revolutionary unit to a person and then ask the question, “Why would you need something like this?”  You could then explain what problem (need) the unit solves that the listener might not know about and would not understand well without knowing about the solution first.

Since one step of the process is establishing a need, it is important to know about needs an individual has. If a person does not have a need, there is no reason to change. Abraham Maslow developed a hierarchy of needs to organize general categories of needs.