Chapter 10

Persuasive and Sales Messages

Persuasive skill is one of the important skill in business communication. In business communication, persuasive skills is defined as the ability of business people to make the audiences or target are interested and believe in what you offer to them.In order to develop persuasive skills, you should know some persuasion techniques which are :

a. Establish credibility

b. Make a reasonable and precise request

c. Recognize the power of loss

d. Expect and overcome resistance

e. Share the solutions and compromise

In making persuasive messages, you should understand and aware with the background culture of each country. You should understand high context culture and low context culture to make a precise persuasive messages. 

This table illustrates the difference between low context culture and high context culture.

In low context culture, there are some elements that you need in writing a persuasive message:

 - Directness : state your purpose precisely and directly

 - "You" view : emphasize the individual benefits 

 - Hard sell approach : provide a complete observation such as testimonial, deadlines, promotion, comparison with the competitors, etc

 - Superlative : using superlative word such as highest quality can interact the receivers.

In high context culture, you should pay attention with :

- Politeness

- Simple Facts without any superlatives

- Long term relationship

- Collective view : the use of we is better than you view

Those techniques can help you to make a good persuasive messages. A persuasive message can be considered as a successful message if you can gain attention from the receivers, build interest, reduce resistance, and motivate the receivers to do an action.