🔒Post-truth era business development strategies

Many of the effects of the post-truth era (PTE) make business development more complex because its collective effects make it harder to break through the fog of accelerating information overload, opinions disguised as facts and the increasing emotional orientation of communication.

In particular, strategic deals that require major budget commitments and involve a long and complex sales cycle are highly susceptible to the symptoms of the PTE.

In my first article in this series I introduced several strategies to handle the post-truth era, including redefine, recalibrate, reorient and reinvent. Last month I discussed the first step in navigating effectively in the PTE, redefining the focus of initial discussions.

This month we continue to discuss strategies for redefining the discussion with business prospects, to shift away from what could be perceived as an attack on your prospect's facts, or worse, create the perception of a personal challenge in an increasingly personalized world.

The strategy of finding a more neutral way to establish initial engagement seeks to avoid a right-wrong paradigm with what-if considerations. Instead of trying to overcome the increasing background noise of “fake facts,” a redefining strategy side steps it. Let's consider a specific component of the post-truth era and how we may be able to use it to communicate new business concepts in a more effective way.

Who is driving?

Most business professionals have a reasonable confidence level that the superiority of their products and services is founded on substantial and material facts and that their value is competitive if not better than other options. The same is true with your prospect who believes their area of business is doing just fine, their facts are correct and priorities in the optimal order. But what is driving these beliefs, facts or emotion?

Consider how most information is presented in the post-truth era, and how the use of emotional hooks is increasingly threaded into the core fabric of communications.

According to a number of sources, there are over 1 billion websites on the internet, and the amount of information stored continues to accelerate, especially video. Video offers the most powerful mixture of energy, color, sound and special effects, delivered faster and in a medium that most people are gravitating toward. The shift to video content, and the powerful storytelling platform it offers, adds a new ingredient to communications that increases the cognitive impact and creates a veneer of credibility increasing its persuasive effects.

According to Zembula, a web marketing blog, the average internet user is spending about two hours per day watching video online. No other medium including social media, digital radio and even Facebook is growing as fast. Some forecasts predict 80 percent of online content will be video by 2019.

From an era of the thoughtful reporting of facts, including information on context and other considerations so readers could draw conclusions as to the merit of the substance and relative weight of the facts, today one increasingly finds studies and reports morphing into narratives complete with pictures and video clips. The communication of facts is increasingly evolving into stories with facts as one of the props.

The collective effect is higher emotional content that is reshaping the perceptions of facts. Whether or not the objective facts fully support the proposition being communicated, powerful narratives are increasingly being used to shape the story, not report it. The business world is not immune.

The power of the anecdote

A shift to using emerging post-truth era tactics is required if we are to break through, and emotion is more important than ever. Great communicators through the centuries have always achieved the optimum balance of the three means of persuasion (logos, pathos and ethos).

In our post-truth era world, pathos, meaning the appeal to emotion, may have eclipsed the importance of the other pillars of persuasion, and in our increasingly emotionally oriented culture, this means adjusting our business communications strategies to be more emotionally effective.

In the next article we will continue to discuss redefining strategies and explore insights into why storytelling and appealing to pathos is a critical success factor in today's post-truth era business world.

Chris Coyle is managing director of business development services for CBC GROUP. Contact him at ccoyle@cbcgroupwins.com.