The perfect elevator pitch, business presentation, and TED-style talk, taught by the author of Thank You for Arguing at a one-day persuasion workshop, Rhetoric Summer School in Finland, June 2014.

1. 1. Remove anger from arguments
2. Create a persuasive image
3. Make your audience receptive
4. Learn to make a presentation
5. Spur collaboration through
questions
6. Redefine issues
7. Learn identity strategy
8. Solve American mysteries
Skills

2. 1. Remove anger from
arguments.

3. Rhetoric Types
Type Topic Tense
Forensic Blame Past
Demonstrative Values Present
Deliberative Choices Future

4. gottman.com
“YOU ARE ALWAYS…”
“KNOW WHAT YOUR PROBLEM IS?”
“I CAN’T EVEN TRUST YOU TO…”
Happily married couples argue as much
as unhappy ones. But the unhappy
couples tend to use the past and
present tenses.

5. Logic
Emotion
Character
Basic Tools

6. Logos
Pathos
Ethos
Basic Tools

7. Logos = Audience’s beliefs &
expectations
Pathos = Audience’s mood
Ethos = Audience’s view of you
Audience

8. • Arguments are not won on
points.
• The audience is all important.
• To remove anger, switch to the
future.
• Offer choices.
(Hint: In committees, speak last.)
Takeaways

9. 2. Create a persuasive image.

10. Caring
Craft
Cause
Ethos

11. Caring/eunoia
Craft/phronesis
Cause/arêté
Ethos

12. Caring/eunoia
Ethos

13. Santa: Buy this toy at another store!
Mothers: We can trust Macy’s!
“Miracle on 34th Street”

14. Caring/eunoia
Ethos

15. Caring
Malden Mills kept paying its employees after
the plant burned down. Customer loyalty in
the region highest in the world.

16. Cui bono?
Caring

17. Who
benefits?
Caring

18. Craft/phronesis
Ethos

19. Craft at its best: ripping up the manual and
improvising.
“Apollo 13”

20. Craft/phronesis
Ethos
The medical profession relies on Craft: book
learning + experience.

21. Tell a client why you are better than a
younger colleague.

22. Cause/arêté
Ethos

23. Cheerios ad deliberately
provoked racists to create a
“cause.” Buying Cheerios
makes people feel noble and
anti-racist.

24. Caring: What they want
Craft: “That depends”
Cause: Their greater good
Audience

25. Caring: What they want
Craft: “That depends”
Cause: Their greater good
Talk a business student into a poetry class.

26. • Talk about the audience’s
advantage
• Show how you don’t benefit
• Share your audience’s values
• Argue from a shared identity
• Create a common cause
Takeaways

27. 3. Make your audience receptive

28. System One System Two
People are more persuasive than
when they’re in System One, like
Homer Simpson: relaxed, not really
thinking.

29. • Simple, short sentences
• Make audience smile
• Build tension, release their
posture
• Make audience feel powerful
• Simple type
Cognitive Ease

30. Dana Carney, Asst. Prof., UC Haas School of Business
Make your audience receptive
by having them assume
powerful poses. Ask them to
stretch!

31. 4. Make a presentation

32. a) Pain Statement
b) Value Proposition
Elevator Pitch

33. a) Problem (the pain)
b) Solution (the cure)
c) Call to Action
Elevator Pitch: Key Elements

34. 1. Identifier: Who you are, what
you do
2. Pain: problem affecting
audience
3. Value Proposition : solution in
form of work/product
4. Validation: facts, examples,
statistics
Elevator Pitch: Outline

35. I am a persuasion consultant.
I create strategies to deal with a growing
problem: resistance to science. For
example, more and more parents refuse to
vaccinate their children. National
epidemics loom.
Identifier
Pain Statement

36. My strategies combine marketing
principles with persuasion theory to
change the conversation—and minds—at
low cost. I created a national strategy,
scripts, and a training program for
pediatricians to talk parents into
vaccinating their children. Similarly, the
same tools can help your organization
change the conversation on climate
change.
Value Proposition

37. Pediatricians using my methods show a
success rate among skeptical parents of
70% over the methods they had been
using. The results are being published in a
major medical journal.
Let me send you the link to my site. If we
can set up a meeting within the next
couple of weeks, I’d be willing to sketch
out a strategy for you at no charge. What’s
your email?
Validation
Call to Action

38. 1. Identifier
2. Pain Statement
3. Value Proposition
4. Validation
5. Call to action
Outline your own elevator pitch.

39. 1. Introduction (elevator speech)
2. Narration (story)
3. Division (the other side)
4. Refutation
5. Peroration (summary or
ending)
Cicero’s Outline

40. Stories lessen counter-
argument.
Narration
Lab experiment with 53 subjects on perils of drinking; study of
1,215 subjects viewing 40 prime-time TV commercials, USA.

41. Make a hero.
Narration
Persuasive narrators usually start with a
hero—a main character the audience
identifies with.

42. Represents a value.
Hero
The hero should stand for something—a
value the audience shares.

43. • Weight loss.
Hero values
Subway’s Jared, who lost
weight eating Subway
sandwiches, represents an
American value.

44. • Weight loss
• Patriotism
• Religion
Hero values

45. • Weight loss
• Patriotism
• Religion
Hero values
(Hint: Invite the reader into the hero story.)

46. Sword & Plough used its founder,
a captain in the U.S. Army, as its
hero. The company stands for
environmentalism and honoring
veterans.

47. • Weight loss
• Patriotism
• Religion
• Web 2.0
• Awesome youth
Hero values

48. Give the hero a quest.
Narration

49. 1. Leave comfort zone
2. Receive the mission
3. Face obstacles/enemies
4. Setback
5. Climax: charge!
6. Victory
7. Moral
Hero Quest (“Arc”)

50. 1. Leave comfort zone
2. Receive the mission
3. Face obstacles/enemies
4. Setback
5. Climax: charge!
6. Victory
7. Moral
Describe your career or work as a hero journey.

51. • Story removes counter-
arguments.
• Create a hero who personifies
audience’s values.
• Create a hero quest.
• Invite audience to join the
quest.
Takeaways

52. 1. Introduction (elevator speech)
2. Narration (story)
3. Division (the other side)
4. Refutation
5. Peroration (summary or
ending)
Cicero’s Outline

53. Two-sided argument:
• Less effective if audience agrees.
• Immunization effect.
• Must be rebutted immediately.
Division
Daniel O’Keefe, meta-analysis of 45 argument comparisons,
Communication Yearbook, vol. 22

54. 1. Introduction (elevator speech)
2. Narration (story)
3. Division (the other side)
4. Refutation
5. Peroration (summary or
ending)
Cicero’s Outline

55. • Summary
• Call to action (simple, easy, first
step)
• Vision (“I have a dream”)
• Emotion
Peroration (Ending)

56. 1. Summary
2. Call to Action
3. Vision
4. Emotion
Outline your own peroration.

57. Introduction, Narration 
Ethos
Division, Rebuttal  Logos
Peroration  Pathos
Cicero’s Outline Takeaways

58. Ethos, then Logos, then Pathos
(Character, Logic, Emotion)
Use Division only if audience is
skeptical or will hear opposing
view later.
Cicero’s Outline Takeaways

59. 1. Threat (pain statement)
2. Solution (value proposition)
3. Story
4. Evidence
5. Call to Action
Presenter Outline

60. 1. Threat (pain statement)
2. Solution (value proposition)
3. Story
4. Evidence
5. Call to Action
Threat

61. Less successful when audience
is aware of threat and solution.
Threat

62. “For
saving
life”
Body odor (B.O.)
Lifebuoy became a
huge seller by
inventing “B.O.”

63. Describe a threat that your work “cures.”

64. 1. Threat (pain statement)
2. Solution (value proposition)
3. Story
4. Evidence
5. Call to Action
Threat

65. Get audience involved: Ask for
solutions.
“Turn to the person next to you.
Discuss what should be done about
body odor.”
Solution

66. 1. Threat (pain statement)
2. Solution (value proposition)
3. Story
4. Evidence
5. Call to Action
Threat

67. Get audience involved:
Ask, “What would you do?”
“What would you do if you had a chance
to stop Kony? Wouldn’t you use all the
resources you had?”
Story
Ads calling for self-prophecies increase compliance.

68. 1. “Support the Cancer Society.”
2. “Ask yourself: Will you support
the Cancer Society?”
Story
Version 1: 31% response rate
Version 2: 52% response rate

69. 1. Threat (pain statement)
2. Solution (value proposition)
3. Story
4. Evidence
5. Call to Action
Threat

70. • Does not work if audience is
resistant.
Evidence

71. Al Gore turned climate change
into a cause of the American
left. Republicans suddenly
stopped believing in the facts
and data.

72. • Does not work if audience is
resistant.
• Use evidence to validate you.
Evidence

73. • Does not work if audience is
resistant.
• Use evidence to validate you.
• Precise numbers seem more
accurate than round numbers.
Hint: include sources.
Evidence

74. If you are obese, your risk of getting
heart disease is much greater.
If you are obese, your risk of getting
heart disease is more than a third
greater.
If you are obese, your risk of getting
heart disease is 42% greater.
More than one-third do not understand percentages! (2002
German study)

75. Get audience involved:
Ask for reasons.
“Think of five reasons why rhetoric
should be required in every school.
You’ll find it easy.”
Call to Action
Audiences asked to provide easy reasons for buying a product
rated the product higher. (1997 German study)

76. Get audience involved:
Ask them to imagine the
outcome.
“Imagine what Finland will be like when
every student knows the art of
persuasion. Can you picture it?”
Call to Action
Customers asked to imagine life with TV cable—saving money,
spending more time with family—were twice as likely to subscribe.
(1982 American study)

77. Make the action immediate, easy,
and low risk.
Call to Action
Persuasion scores of ads with easy action steps 19% higher than
those without.

78. • Present a novel threat.
• Get audience involvement. Ask:
solutions, what they would do,
imagine outcome, reasons for action.
• Use evidence only with supportive
audiences, and mostly to validate
you.
• Make action immediate, easy, low
risk.
Presenter Outline Takeaways

79. Compose a call to action to generate business.

80. 5. Spur collaboration
through questions.

81. Why?
What if?
How?
Collaborative
Outline

82. I got these questions from a terrific book. It doesn’t come
out until March, but I got to read this book in galley and I
think it’s going to be huge. Warren Berger spent two years
interviewing the most creative and successful people,
asking them what questions they ask. He figured that a lot of
great things come not from knowing the answers but from
asking the right questions. And he found that the most
successful basically asked three: Why? What if? and How?

83. You ever hear of Van Phillips? You certainly know his invention, which
came our of those three questions. In 1976, Van was a 21-year-old
college student who lost his leg in a freak waterskiing accident. Doctors
fitted him with a pink foot attached to an aluminum tube. Phillips asked
the Why question: “If they can put a man on the moon, why can’t they
make a decent foot?” He switched his college to Northwestern, where
they have the best prosthetics education in the world. And he spent ten
years trying to develop a better foot. He asked the What If question:
“What if I can design a foot that’s superior to the human foot? How
could you do that? And so he studied the biomechanics of animals like
the cheetah.

84. And he came up with the Flex Foot. These
days, Philllips is asking why the Flex Foot has
to be so expensive. What if it would be made
available to victims of land mines in poorer
nations? How can he make it cheaper?

85. In my conversations with the author of A More
Beautiful Question, Warren Berger, I I asked
him, Why limit these three questions to
creativity? What if the questions applied to
persuasion as well? How could they be used
to create an atmosphere of collaboration,
instead of hostility, in an argument? And it
really works.

86. Why?

87. What if…?

88. How?

89. Why?
What if?
How?
Collaborative
Outline

90. 6. Redefine issues.

91. Turn weak points into
strong.
Redefinition
One of the best ways to do this is to take the aspects of a
proposal that seem the weakest to you, and see if you can
turn them into your greatest assets.

92. One of my clients is the smallest Ivy League
university. To compete with other institutions,
I helped it turned turn its size into an asset
by having fundraisers refer to its “agility.”

93. Small size = nimbleness,
agility
Weak Strong

94. Limitations = forced to
innovate
Weak Strong

95. For many of my clients, I find
advantageous terms to replace weaker
terms.

98. Write down the terms you use
to talk about your work. Take the
weakest ones, and redefine them.

99. • Study your weakest points.
• Turn weaknesses into strengths.
• Use your audience’s values.
Presenter Outline Takeaways

100. 1. Broaden the issue
2. Redefine the terms
3. Personalize the issue
4. Switch to the future
Framing

101. Broaden the issue:
This isn’t just about rhetoric. It’s
about creating a generation of
world leaders.
Framing

102. Redefine the terms:
Economic data  Decision
metrics
Framing

103. Personalize the issue:
My son is graduated from a top
college. And he still isn’t ready
for the world.
Framing

104. Switch to the future:
The question is not what colleges have
done wrong. The question is how we’re
going to prepare students for the
challenges to come.
Framing

105. 7. Learn identity strategy.

106. Identity
Ernest Shackleton recruited his crew to sail to
Antarctica with an identity strategy.

108. The DVD workout P90X used the same identity
strategy. While other workouts claimed they
were easy. P90X said the opposite: That only
the toughest could do it. It’s now the bestselling
workout in the world.

109. I used a similar strategy with U.S. military
vaccinators. Instead of getting soldiers to
forget their smallpox scars, I urged turning
the scars into badges of honor with a

110. For America’s largest healthcare
provider, we used identity strategy and
changed the terms. “Vaccination” is now
called “protection.” Mothers want to
protect their babies at all cost.

111. Appeal to the audience’s best sense of
self.
Noble adventurer
Extreme-sports lover
Self-sacrificing soldier
Good mother
Identity Takeaway

112. Name an irrational political stand.
Now describe it using identity theory.
Can you suggest a “cure”?

113. 1. Remove anger from arguments
2. Create a persuasive image
3. Make your audience receptive
4. Learn to make a presentation
5. Spur collaboration through
questions
6. Redefine issues
7. Learn identity strategy
Skills

114. Jay@JayHeinrichs.com
JayHeinrichs.com
ArgueLab.com
Thank You for Arguing