Claims and persuasion - check your foundation

Every time you stand (or sit) to speak, you are making a case. It might be a case for something or a case against something. It may be a case for change, or a case against change. Even if all you are delivering is a project status update, you are making the case that the project is going well (or not), say. It is therefore unavoidable that you will make certain claims and suggestions. It is impossible to really say anything without some implicit or explicit set of claims.

What is a claim?

Simply put, a claim is a statement you present as true and that you want the audience to believe. If you are trying to persuade your audience to buy your product or invest in your company, you may make claims that the product is a good fit; or the company is profitable or promising. And those claims need to make sense to the audience.

Here's the problem: most speakers tend to dive into their speeches without first clarifying their important claims—the claims that form the foundation for their persuasion.

How do you support the claim that your product is a good fit? How do you support the claim that your company is profitable or promising enough?

These are important questions to ask yourself before ever you get up to speak. Otherwise, your speech will be seriously shaky. Before you start to build your edifice of persuasion, check your foundation.

Before you start to build your edifice of persuasion, check your foundation

Benefits of clarifying claims

Without being clear what your claims are, you will have a hard time (or completely miss) providing the supports for them to drive the success of your presentation. For example, in one of my productivity seminars, I make an important claim that when it comes to being productive, the traditional wisdom of doing more is wrong. The key, I argue, is doing less but being incredibly picky about what you do.

Now, this is a claim that challenges the listener to look at things differently. In short, it is a bold claim. And because a lot of what follows is based on the listener believing that claim to be true, I will often spend some time providing supports and evidences to establish the claim. As a result, I often have people come to me at the end of the seminar saying how they had learned the new way to approach planning. That learning demands an acceptance of the claim that the information is based on. You can use the same approach of investing effort in establishing important claims to ensure success in your persuasion.

Here's the point: clarifying your claims, especially the critical ones for your persuasion is important so that you can ensure that it is established effectively before you attempt to persuade.

Clarifying your claims is also useful for helping you understand your own content more. Let me explain. You see, I have seen speakers, in a fit of excitement, put speeches together, deliver them and then have them fall flat because their claims were weak, false, or did not really apply in the situation they were applying them to.

That is why it is important to check and test your claims. Is your product or service really a good fit? What constitutes a good fit? What assumptions have you made? What could you have missed? Is there credible evidence to the contrary of your position? How do you address that? Do you even need to address it?...

All these are questions that help you. With these clarified, you can be confident you have a firm grasp on your content and enough depth to give you confidence in your stand. It will also inform you so that you can tweak or change (or even abandon) some ideas so that your claims are strong and well-articulated to make your persuasion more potent.

Here's the point: don't go in blind! Know what claims you are basing your persuasion and use that knowledge to inform your approach to presenting your case.

The case for speech claims

Understanding the role of claims in building a strong, persuasive presentation is vital. You often need your audience to believe a bunch of things before they can be persuaded. Sometimes those things are self-evident and obvious; other times, you will need to do some work establishing them. Either way, you will benefit greatly from paying attention to this aspect of your persuasive speaking. This attention will not only help you persuade easier, it will help you master your content and boost your confidence. And that, of course, is a good thing.