Persuasive Communication: Get What You Want Without a Gun!

By Maynard Garfield

Taking the art of convincing to new levels by teaching vital skills, this book offers helpful tips on presenting a point-of-view and achieving goals in a non-offensive way that will be useful in social situations, as well as business. Author Maynard "Garf" Garfield has 40-years’ experience teaching management skills and negotiation techniques to employers and their employees.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Maynard Garfield
• Release date: Nov 15, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452342023

Maynard Garfield

Maynard M. Garfield (Garf) is the founder and chairman of Persuasive Communication. After graduating from Northwestern University with a BS in business administration, Garf spent two years in the service. He was assigned to Scientific and Professional Personnel Services and carried a top secret security clearance.After discharge from the service he began selling medical and hospital equipment and became the top salesperson in the company for four straight years. At 31 years of age he was the youngest regional sales manager in the history of the company with his region number one in volume and profits.Garf was offered the position as lecturer in charge of the sales courses in the evening division of Northwestern University. This position lasted for some 12 years. During that time he became a sales editor for two national trade publications and was a regular contributor and lecturer for the American Management Association. He was consistently chosen as one of the highest rated lecturers and seminar leaders.It was early during this period that Garf wondered, “Could I make it out in the real world. Could I be successful selling and providing training services to industry?” Soon after, Persuasive Communication (www.ecgpc.com) was born. Looking back, Garf remembers that his very first account was Crib Diaper Services. He rode with route salesmen and taught them how to sign up expectant mothers for diaper service. Today he jokes, “If you haven’t been in a diaper truck in the middle of August with fifty soiled diaper bundles in the back, you haven’t earned your stripes as a training consultant.”The firm grew with clients the likes of Corning Glass, Johns Manville, American Hospital Supply, Market Facts, Environmental Resources Management, and Cincinnati Milacron. In almost every case there was something different and unique that distanced Persuasive Communication from other training firms. They almost never conducted a single stand-alone program. Instead they became an ongoing and integral part of a firms continuing training activities. Many clients used Persuasive Communication repeatedly over a ten to fifteen year period. Perhaps this is because of one of Garf’s underlying basic philosophies – “Training should not cost, it should pay for itself. If it does not contribute directly to the bottom line – don’t do it!”Today, Garf is semi-retired and teaches on a limited basis. “I am failing miserably at retirement. I need to be needed. Some people like to grow flowers: I like to grow people!”

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Persuasive Communication

Get What You Want Without A Gun!

By Maynard Garf Garfield

with Raquel C. Garza

Smashwords Edition Copyright © 2011 by Maynard Garfield

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

All rights reserved. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Chapter One: How it All Began

Chapter Two: The Secret of Power

Chapter Three: Concept versus Brand Sales

Chapter Four: An Idea Times Implementation

Chapter Five: The Right Mental Attitude

Chapter Six: Laliaphobia

Chapter Seven: Establishing Rapport

Chapter Eight: The Human Behavioral Approach

Chapter Nine—How to Present

Chapter Ten—Handling Complaints

Chapter Eleven: Handling Objections

Chapter Twelve: Making the Transition

Chapter Thirteen: The past predicts the future

Chapter Fourteen—Negotiation

Chapter Fifteen—Closing Techniques

Chapter Sixteen: Final Thoughts

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Chapter One:

How it All Began—the Key to Self-Empowerment

Selling. A dirty word, right? Well, this vice president of engineering obviously thought it was a dirty word.

In 1957, I taught my first evening course in sales at Northwestern University. A few years later, in order to get back out into the real world and away from academia, which frankly didn’t excite me, I had formed a small consulting firm. On a flight back to Chicago after teaching a seminar for Corning Glass, I struck up a conversation with the gentleman sitting in the window seat. He turned out to be a vice president of engineering and design for a high-tech medical equipment firm.

As he told me of some of the new technologies they were working on, I realized I was sitting next to a true genius. Finally, I said to him, How do you constantly come up with these new ideas and innovations? Doesn’t the well ever run dry?

Oh, the new ideas and concepts are the easy, fun part of the job, he answered. The excruciating part is getting management to give me the budget and resources I need. The hard part is getting plant engineering or manufacturing to do some prototype work for me, or trying to convince marketing and sales that there is an untapped demand for these new technologies, or trying to convince some of the people who work for me on the urgency of the project. That’s the hard part of the job.

The answer to his problem seemed simple enough to me.

You seem to have trouble selling your ideas, I said. What would you think about taking a course in salesmanship?

Since he had the window seat, there was nowhere for him to go. He looked disdainfully at me and said, Son, I will have you know that I have a master’s degree in engineering and a doctorate in mathematics. I am not about to subjugate myself to a course in salesmanship. The last thing I want to have anything to do with would be selling. In fact, most salesmen disgust me.

As he shifted in his seat, I knew what adjectives he was now applying: annoying, intrusive, loud, and pushy.

Okay, I thought to myself, Let’s find another term for sales.

I swallowed, regrouped and said, It sounds like your problem is trying to convince others to accept your advocacies and getting them to do what you want them to do willingly.

The man nodded in agreement, so I pushed on.

Perhaps you could use some help in the art of communicating persuasively. What would you thing about taking a course in persuasive communications?

He instantly answered, Persuasive communications? That really sounds intriguing. Where could I get a course like that?

So I renamed my newly-formed company to Persuasive Communications, Inc., and instantly copy-righted the term. Suddenly, whole new markets opened up. Cincinnati Milacron called, and said they had a group of service technicians they wanted trained. It seemed that there were times when the customer needed a preventive maintenance contract, or a spare parts inventory or an additional training session for their machinists. The service technician was the logical person to advocate these proposals. However, they were competently trained in technical skills, and had absolutely no training in advocacy skills. My associates and I were able to help turn that department from a cost center into a profit center.

Environmental Resources Management contacted us. They have a huge force of highly technical people—doctorates or master’s degrees in geology, hydrology, and civil engineering. Often their feeling was, This would be a great business if it weren’t for the damn clients. Just picture this, you’ve hired a doctorate in geology for your environmental consulting firm who must now negotiate on behalf of an oil company with the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as convince major clients to go green or accept a new remediation technology. These people had great thing skills and totally inadequate people skills.

One of the most interesting assignments was with hospital management teams. Canadian Kodak retained Persuasive Communications to conduct a series of advocacy training sessions across Canada. If the hospital signed a contract for radiographic film, Kodak would sponsor the seminar. In every case, my team and I found the same major concerns: I need additional lab equipment and I have trouble justifying my budget to our administrator, or We are going to lose good people if we don’t update our deferred salary plan, and I just can’t get the powers that be to listen to me, or We are understaffed and no matter how hard I try I can’t even get permission to hire some partials.

In every case; the frustration, the sore spot, the aggravation was that these conscientious people did not know how to sell their ideas.

Let me further explain with an organizational chart.

It’s budgeting time. The president/administrator of the hospital has received budget requests from all of the various departments and the total comes to $9,250,000. Unfortunately, the board of directors has only approved an annual budget of $8,500,000, which means the president is $750,000 short.

He is going to have to play Solomon the Wise. Which departments will receive their full request, and which departments will have their budgets cut? If he doesn’t want a hassle, he can simply tell everyone they must reduce their budgets by 10 percent.

He chooses, instead, to go to the various department heads and ask them to justify their budget requests. His hope is that by understanding the various departments’ needs, he can try to understand and reason out where to make the cuts in order to reduce the total budget by $750,000 and maximize the greatest value to the hospital.

His first stop is with the head of nursing services. When he asks her to justify her financial request, her answer is quite simple, "Why, better patient care, of course." He then moves on to the ICU and asks the same question and gets the same answer "Better patient care, of course. He then proceeds to a number of other departments and of course the answer is always, better patient care. Now at laboratory services, the answer is different but still not very helpful: I resent the fact that you even question my budget, which implies that you think I have not been very conscientious in my requests."

By now, the president/administrator is starting to get a headache.

Finally, he reaches the head of radiology who answers the question this way.

The request isn’t to benefit my department. It’s really to benefit surgery. As you probably know, when they do a procedure like a hip replacement they need to see an x-ray of the placement before they can close. Currently, they have a portable x-ray in surgery but they have to run the film down to my department for development. This can take as long as 15 to 20 minutes while the entire surgical team sits there and waits. My request is to put a small automatic developing unit right in the surgical wing. I can show you how, on a number of days, this could have optimized the surgical unit’s ability to do an extra surgery. In one case I know of, they needed an additional x-ray and had to cancel the last surgery of the day. I figure the unit will pay for itself in less than four months. It should generate at least a 300% return on investment (ROI) for the hospital.

By now, you are ahead of my example. You know who doesn’t get their budget cut. The head of radiology was good at persuasive communications. He knew how to sell his ideas. The sad part is that some of the other department heads who got their budgets cut are grumbling that It is just politics, and Those two play golf together.

Incidentally, one of these seminars provided me with one of the most memorable experiences in my consulting/teaching career. It was a Catholic hospital and there were 16 nuns in attendance, who served as the various department heads. It was one of those rare teaching moments when everything just clicked. They absorbed all of the material, and seemed to be learning much from me. On the second day, the sisters invited me to dinner at their home. We didn’t have far to go, as they lived in houses near the hospital. When we arrived, one of the sisters began to set the dining table, but was soon stopped by another nun, who said, No, no. Garf is family and not merely a friend. He eats in the kitchen with all of us.

As in all of our seminars, we gave the nuns the chance to grade the program. Given all of our positive interactions, I expected positive feedback. I was surprised to see that in this particular session, every single participant rated the program a 95. Afterwards two of the nuns told me that the session had afforded them tools to

Reviews for Persuasive Communication

[fod · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

He lost me at : « In fact, it is my firm belief that almost anything to do with human nature was originally covered in the Bible. »

More of a book on selling (except the chapter on presentations). Almost zero scientific or case studies. Compared with other books on persuasion, pretty disappointing.