Stepping up to the plate: developing an effective business communication strategy: strategic and persuasive communication techniques can help professionals become significantly more effective at selling their initiatives and obtaining management support.

• Author: Neal, Ken
• Position: BUSINESS MATTERS

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Virtually everyone reading this article is in sales, regardless of title or responsibility. How? Because selling, essentially, is communicating persuasively to get others to take some action, which is what all business professionals are engaged in most of the time.

Gaining support for a records and information management (RIM) program (or any project, for that matter) requires more than sales skill, though. It requires an effective communication strategy, and that is dependent on having the ability to:

1. Show staff--particularly senior managers and IT professionals--how the initiatives will help them meet their personal needs

2. Establish professional credibility

3. Be persuasive

   Meeting Personal Needs

   One of the most important principles of persuasion is that people will tend to go along with you if they believe that doing so will fulfill their personal needs. Among people's basic needs are to: 1) be secure, 2) win, and 3) be accepted. Here is how those needs can be exploited to gain support for initiatives.

   The Need for Security

   Because security often plays a critical role in senior executive decisions, it should be addressed first. The following example shows how a records manager for a food manufacturer used that knowledge to help win a project that saved his company substantial money:

   The records manager puts together a business case to help protect the company against superfund problems. (A superfund site is a toxic site requiring clean-up mandated by the Environmental Protection Agency.) The records manager basically told senior management, "This records program will cost you $10,000, but it help you sleep at night knowing that the company is protected against superfund claims."

   For management, the issue was that the organization had a mass of boxes containing insurance contracts that protected the company against future insurance claims. However, the contracts had not been indexed or inventoried. After implementing the records program and indexing the files, the company was sued for superfund cleanup. Fortunately, because of the records project, the company was able to locate a contract from 1942 that held it harmless. Therefore, the insurance company had to pay the fines, ranging from $4 to $5 million. The records manager had the communication skill to sell the program by knowing the owner's pain point--security--and articulating it well enough.

   The Need to Win

   The need to win is also important to consider in communication. The concept is fairly simple and intuitive: Someone who makes others feel like winners will be far more persuasive. One way to accomplish this is to give colleagues and clients more than they expect. For example, if a records manager is trying to promote acceptance of a document...