To get your point across, aim to reach others on an emotional level.

Whether you want a customer to buy your product, a coworker to support your great idea, or your boss to give you a raise, there’s a surefire method to improve the chance the other person will respond in your favor.

Getting the result you intend is all about communicating effectively—a skill too often neglected, according to David Bartlett, author of Making Your Point: Communicating Effectively with Audiences of One to One Million.

“Nearly everyone takes communication for granted,” Bartlett explains. “You may assume if you say something clearly and succinctly, the other person will automatically listen to you, understand what you say, accept your point of view, and do what you want. But that’s not how human beings usually respond.”

Being Heard, Step by Step
Think of how many e-mails, phone calls, text messages, memos, news stories, conversations, or other communications come your way each day. If you didn’t filter out the irrelevant messages, you’d be mired in information. It’s the same for everyone else.

You need to ensure your message is heard above all the noise—and not only heard, but believed, remembered, and acted on. To help this happen, Bartlett suggests these strategies.

• Know your strategic objective. Are you trying to get the other person to do something? To stop doing something? To believe in something? It’s better to know your objective from the outset.

  “You have to be keenly focused on what the message is and why you’re seeking to deliver it,” says Bartlett.

• Know your target audience. Communicating effectively is always less about you than it is about the people you’re trying to reach, Bartlett insists. Try to get a sense of their needs and interests, and of how they tend to process information.
• Understand their specific concerns. What makes others tick on an emotional level? You may think the facts speak for themselves, but people’s emotions surrounding a given issue nearly always outweigh the facts alone.

  “If you can’t get in touch with what others care about, you’ve lost them before you’ve started,” says Bartlett. “What scares them? What makes them mad? What makes them happy? That’s where people really live, and where communication succeeds or fails.”

• Plan how you’ll respond to concerns. Anticipate the four or five broad categories of concerns or questions the other person is likely to bring up, and plan a solid, proactive response based on your strategic objective. If there are questions you should avoid, plan to do so while maintaining your credibility.
• Know your one key message. “Getting one key point across is as important a rule for effective communication as anything else,” Bartlett stresses. “People are only going to remember one thing you say, whether you talk for five minutes or five hours. So it’s up to you to say the right thing.”
• Get to the point right away. If you deliver all your supporting evidence before stating your key message, people’s attention may wander, or they may come to their own separate conclusions.

  Quickly and clearly make your point so they appreciate why it’s important to keep listening. By the time you get to the supportive details, they’ll know what they mean and why they matter.

The Key Message
If you remember just one word, Bartlett suggests, make it emotion.

“That’s what effective communication is all about,” he says. “Think of your strategic objective, what the other person is trying to get out of it, and how you can give the other person what he or she wants. If you can do that, you’ve communicated effectively.”

Polly Turner spoke with David Bartlett, senior vice president of Levick Strategic Communications in Washington, D.C., and author of Making Your Point: Communicating Effectively with Audiences of One to One Million, St. Martin’s Press, 2008, $24.95.

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