The Artistic Side of Persuasion

My first book The Back of The Napkin is literally called solving problems and selling ideas with pictures and it’s based around the neurobiology of vision. What’s really remarkable is that we are beginning to understand how vision works and vision actually is human vision, a system. We are beginning to understand that system enough to be able to effectively kind of highjack it and say if I want to tell a story and I want to tell it visually, what pictures would I draw and in what sequence in order to make sure that I am effectively feeding the visual system of my audience so that the idea that is in my head is going to their head in an incredibly powerful, visual way.

The Back of The Napkin provides six discrete steps, which pictures you would draw to accompany which part of your story to make sure that it just goes into that persons’ mind and stays.

Let’s think about sales – here I am talking about things that are artistic – what is the ultimate art of selling something? Let’s think of what we really need to do when we’re selling something – we need to establish some kind of common ground with the person we are trying to sell to. So you and I are here and together we face this kind of a problem (whatever this thing is) and what I want to do with you is I have some solutions that will help us get over that problem. I am going to take you with me – the art of being able to communicate with someone and say here we are together, and here’s how I am going to help you do it – it’s a work of art. Sales is nothing but an art. There are a lot of us who will say, “there are scientific aspects to sales,” and we’re right and those are the tools, the training, the blocking, tackling, sequencing - but how do we put it all together? That’s when it really becomes the art of sales.