Getting a Squirrel to Focus

Engage and Persuade Today's Listeners

Patricia B. Scott

• Publisher: Uhmms
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780986124822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

What can achieve a 23, 900% increase in the attention span of a squirrel? An acorn! As listeners, our attention spans are more like a squirrel's than you might think. In this book, world-renown communication consultant and sought after speaker, Dr. Patricia Scott will explain how these message ingredients make your message an acorn for your listeners. A - Audience, C-Credibility, O-Order, R-Remember Me, N-Need to connect. Following this easy to use recipe, you can apply this time-tested persuasive strategy to any presentation, sales call, conversation, interview or negotiation. Who are the squirrels in your life? What is your communication strategy? Can you get your squirrel to focus?

Chapter One: Audience

Relevance

Let me put this bluntly: basically, we really only care about ourselves and our own needs. I am not talking here about the needs of the speaker; I am referring only to the audience. When I am listening, the only thing that will get my attention and keep it is something I need or care about.

As Dale Carnegie said, “You can close more business in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.”¹¹

As listeners, we live in a “remote control” society. I do it and you probably do, too: turn on the TV, start clicking through channels, and keep clicking until you catch a piece of information that you need. It is our search for relevance. As we watch, we think, “No, we don’t need the latest food processor right now, don’t need new jewelry, don’t need to know the scores of all the weekend football games, don’t need to see that report on the disaster again, but oh, yes, I do need to know the weather.” So we stop there until our need is fulfilled and then we move on.

It is the same for the squirrel and the acorn. The acorn represents the squirrel’s need for survival. That need surpasses all else so the squirrel has the uncanny ability to focus on it for a long time.

Your brain and relevance

Scientists understand how this process of focusing works. There is a part of the hindbrain called the Reticular Activating System (RAS). This is the part of the brain that serves as a filter for our incoming messages. It decides what information is relevant. The relevant stuff becomes part of our stream of consciousness.

It also controls wakefulness and the ability to let ourselves fall asleep.

How does the RAS work and how does it decide what is relevant for us? Quite simply, there is a hierarchy to determine relevance. When information comes into the RAS, the thing it looks for first is need. Does this information fulfill a need? Is it relevant to me? If it is not, it gets filtered out.

As audiences listen, they are listening to see what is important, needed, and relevant to them.

As audiences listen, they are listening to see what is important, needed, and relevant to them. Even if the subject is the speaker’s passion and the delivery is great, if I don’t care about it, if it is not important or relevant to me specifically, I will not continue to listen. The words will just become background noise.

Imagine yourself in a crowded train station. Lots of noise, lots of commotion, lots of announcements being made over the loudspeaker. You are aware of all of the noise, but not necessarily paying close attention to it. Then, the next announcement includes your train number and name, and suddenly you try to block out all the noise and listen to this relevant piece of information. The RAS tells the rest of the body to get ready to respond more specifically to input. It then tells the rest of the central nervous system to search for more information and coordinate the data to know what to do next.

What is not needed or relevant becomes “noise.” Keep in mind that what is “noise” to one person may be relevant to another. For example, each week I skim through the ads that come with my Sunday paper. Even if there is a killer sale on new refrigerators, I usually just throw the ad away. If I don’t need a new refrigerator, no matter how good the deal is, I am just not interested.

However, if my old refrigerator just died, the ad that was trash just a week ago now becomes the focus of my search and probably the focus of all our family discussions that Sunday morning.

Therefore, you have to find what is relevant for your specific audience. Even if your overall key message is the same, the strategy with which you deliver it has to change with the audience.

What’s In It For Me? WIIFM

As we craft our ACORN, how can we get the audience’s RAS to focus and take in the information?

WIIFM.

WIIFM is the key to the entire acorn.

WIIFM is the key to the entire acorn. WIIFM stands for “What’s In It For Me.”

As an audience member we need to hear and understand the WIIFM at the very beginning of the message.

At a seminar I taught recently for a group of middle managers of an organization, one of the exercises was for the participants to present a somewhat controversial topic and persuade me to their point of view. In this seminar I didn’t limit the topics to business, but to any persuasive conversation they were going to have in the next couple of weeks. Most of the time the participants stick to business topics, but there was one gentleman in my class who wanted to see if the tools we were teaching through the ACORN Communication Strategy™ would translate to improving his everyday life.

What was his burning controversial and persuasive topic? He wanted to convince his wife that they needed a 60" plasma TV in their living room.

“Fine,” I said, “pretend I am your wife, how will you start your request?” He thought for a moment and said, “Honey, you know how much I love to watch football…” I immediately made a buzzer sound and asked him to sit back down. He looked shocked. “My wife loves me,” he said, “and she would want me to be happy.”

While I am sure he has a great relationship with his wife, and while I am sure she wants him to be happy (maybe), there is nothing in it for her. The WIIFM of his statement was all about him—all about fulfilling his need.

This gentleman respectfully disagreed with me and decided to try that very approach on his wife that evening. When he came back to class the second day he told me about what happened. He did start with, “Honey, you know how much I love to watch football…” She immediately smiled and said, “I know,” and then she followed up with, “but it is just too expensive for the sixteen Sundays of football season. I just don’t think we should right now. We have other house priorities that need to come first.”

I have often seen the same pattern in failed sales calls. The sales representative has a couple of years of experience, so he or she is technically competent and has been around long enough to finally get a chance to talk to a key decision maker. No one will set up a meeting for the sales representative to extol the virtues of their product for thirty minutes, so the sales representative has to catch the client when he or she can.

In these instances I often hear the sales person say, “Good morning, I just wanted to talk to you today so I could show you our new product.” Then he or she starts the data dump. The client stops really listening after the sales person uses “I” twice in the first dozen words. Why should the client listen? What is in it for him or her? Even if eventually one of the product features would really help, it is too late, the client has stopped listening.

Remember, it is always about what’s in it for them. Unless we can get the listener’s RAS to see this information as something that is needed, it doesn’t really matter what the rest of the message is because it will just be noise.

Don’t think of what you want to accomplish with the message. What will your audience get from listening to you? It is not about what you want, but finding and solving the needs of the listener. As Dale Carnegie aptly said, “I like brownies, but I fish with worms.”

To provide you the opportunity to practically apply what you find in this book, I would like you now to turn to the ACORN Communication Strategy™ Worksheet in Chapter Seven. Feel free to make copies of the worksheet to use as you go through the chapters of this book.

Using this worksheet as an exercise, I would like you to think about a persuasive conversation that you will need to have in the next couple of weeks, whether it is for business or personal reasons. Be as specific as you can. Think of your intended audience and try to stay away from generalities like “upper management” or “client.” Use a specific example, like Lisa the head of human resources or Jim the purchaser at my target client’s office.

Now, think about how well you know this person or group. What do you know about him, her or them? As you can see, if you don’t know them well, the WIIFM is much harder to find. If you are tempted to think that you will just use the biggest benefit of your product or best piece of evidence regardless of the audience, you will only end up persuading those who by luck need what you are selling. Instead, provide them what they need.

Keep in mind that knowing your audience is far more than just knowing the demographics of the audience. While it may be somewhat helpful to know the age range, gender mix, tenure, education level, etc., those pieces of information generally do not lead to a really strong WIIFM.

Ask open-ended questions to find out:

What drives them?

What do they like?

What do they need?

What will solve their problem/frustrations/fears?

What goals do you have in common?

When constructing the WIIFM keep in mind that the more homogenous the audience, the easier it is to construct a WIIFM. You can create a very specific WIIFM customized for that person or specific group of people.

The more diverse the audience, the broader the WIIFM will be.

We see this every day on the news. What would appeal to a large and somewhat diverse audience? How will you stop them from changing the channel during the commercial? A really broad WIIFM is, “Five things you must know before your next visit to the grocery store.” The majority of the audience goes to the store or knows someone who does, so that very broad WIIFM may keep their interest and at least get them to begin listening.

Keep in mind that communication happens in a moment-by-moment way. The way we hear, understand and make sense of language happens as we listen to the individual words. For example, I might say, “Last night, I broke my toe…nail…clipper.” As the sentence progresses, the meaning and feeling associated with the idea change.

With the WIIFM, the goal is just to get your audience to start listening.

With the WIIFM, the goal is just to get your audience to start listening. That’s it. Just having the squirrel recognize and get excited about spotting an acorn has to be the first step. No matter how good the acorn tastes and how nutritious it is for him, none of it matters if he never saw the acorn to begin with.

Application

Now it’s your turn. Here are the pieces of information you need to complete first to start your message. Please feel free to use the worksheet from Chapter Seven to begin your practice.

Specific situation:

Audience

WIIFM

The TV guy I mentioned earlier had to re-examine his plan to sell his wife on the idea of a new 60" plasma TV. This time he thought about his wife, what she likes, what problems the TV could solve and what she really cares about.

It turns out that she loves to entertain. While she was growing up her mother and father often had parties and get-...