Persuasive writing skills
Taking your writing skills to the next level!
Writing to persuade or influence is very different form normal daily writing.
This highly practical and hands-on will give the skills and confidence to create clear, concise and compelling:
- Understand the principles of persuasion and how to apply them in business writing.
- Analyse the audience and tailor the message accordingly.
- Write persuasive business documents such as emails, letters, proposals, reports, and marketing copy.
- Revise and edit their writing for clarity and conciseness.
- Provide and receive constructive feedback on their writing.
The course also includes many proven models and examples. It will also include the essentials of better business writing skills in general.
Learning objectives
- Successfully plan, structure, and write your documents
- Be confident that your message is not lost
- Ensure your message is quickly understood and accepted by the reader
- Adopt a variety of preparation techniques using proven models
- Write convincing, persuasive, and powerful documents that achieve their objectives
- Avoid common mistakes that impact on your professional image and avoid word inflation
- Build successful sentences and paragraphs – using punctuation that guides your reader
- Use a checklist to help edit and proofread the final document
Who should attend?
Pre-course activity
Expert trainer
His work has taken him all over the world and involved him in working closely with hundreds of different organisations from all business sectors, his client list including such organisations as BT, Vodafone, AT&T, Orange, Pfizer, GSK, Boots, Unilever, American Express, Thomas Cook, Apple, Sony, Motorola, Cisco, MFI, Barclays Bank, LIFFE, Abbey National, Prison Service, Home Office, Law Society, BBC, Daimler-Chrysler, Citroen, Weetabix, Nikon, Shell and many, many others.
Some of the most popular areas in which he supports his clients are:
- Better business writing skills, including reports, bid writing, and technical manuals
- Value-added and consultative selling
- Presentation skills for managers and professionals
- Managing challenging client conversations / assertiveness
- Customer service skills
- Key account management
- Commercial negotiation skills and commercial awareness
- Time management (based on his book, Working Smarter)
- Sales prospecting and appointment making
- Management and leadership skills – coaching, team building, leadership style
Graham has written over twenty books, published in several different countries, including Working Smarter, Companies don’t succeed – people do!, Customer Relationship Management, Sales Training Games, 90 Brain-teasers for Trainers, and Telephone Tactics. Known internationally as both a trainer/coach and a popular motivational speaker, he believes that effective learning has to be interactive and challenging. All his learning events are built around practical exercises, role play and case studies. His training style focuses not on just explaining new ideas or developing new skills, but also on motivating people to use them and to develop themselves as individuals.
This approach gets results, as the following comments from programme participants show:
‘Very confident in the subject, and amusing too. Made the course very interesting. A very clear sales model to use going forward.’
‘Full of useful hints and tips which I will apply to my job.’
‘Extremely well presented and structured’
‘A very intensive course and a lot of concrete tools provided.’
‘Very good… contained everything we do on a regular basis and problems we have come across… the exercises made it very interesting too.’
1 Introduction
- Welcome and Introduction
- Personal learning objectives of the course
- Importance and examples of persuasive writing in business
2 Understanding persuasion and influence
- Definition and elements of persuasion
- The psychology behind persuasion
- Persuasion vs manipulation
3 The principles of writing to persuade and influence
- Key elements of persuasive writing
- Language and tone – with examples
- Structure and organisation: review of models such as AIDA, Minto and others
4 Knowing your objectives and audience analysis
- Understanding your audience
- Adapting your message to your audience
- Audience engagement techniques
5 Writing persuasive business documents
- Subject lines and openings
- Body of the message
- Closing and call to action B. Proposals and reports
- Executive summary
- Problem statement
- Proposed solution
- Conclusion and recommendation C. Marketing and sales copy
- Headlines
- Features and benefits
- Testimonials and social proof
- Call to action
6 Revision and editing
- Proofreading techniques
- Peer review
- Editing for clarity and conciseness
7 Practice and feedback
- Participants will write a short persuasive document
- Peer review and feedback
- Instructor feedback
8 Conclusion and wrap-up
- Recap of the day
- Q&A
- Course evaluation and feedback
Any questions? Please just give us a call on 01582 463463 – we’re here to help!