Twenty-Eight: Persuasion Architecture--A Six-Step Process
Presentation architecture is a methodology for planning, designing, developing, and optimizing your interactions with prospects and customers and managing your relationships more intelligently, putting time and effort to the activities and segments that are most productive.
The Phases of Persuasion Architecture
The author reviews the six basic steps in his process:
- Discovery. Determine the needs, wants, and desires of customer segments and represent the major segments with personas.
- Wireframing. Outline the customer's buying process and the vendors selling process, identifying significant events along the way
- Storyboarding. Plot out the interaction at each of these significant events to ensure that the customer successfully passes to the next step
- Prototyping. Develop a prototype for a presentation entity (web site, print ad, radio spot, etc.)
- Development. Ensure that the essential characteristics of the prototype are accurately represented in the actual presentation entity
- Optimization. Measure the effectiveness of presentation entities with an eye toward recursive improvement
A System for Continuous Improvement
When a task is distilled to a process, it becomes possible to measure not only the aggregate success or failure, but to track that outcome to a specific action that was taken along the way, and then to consider ways to do better.
Specifically, it can be seen that defects created early in a process carry forward, impeding the success of later actions, such that improvement in one task can result in the improvement of all that follow, in addition to the ultimate results.
Of importance is that it is not about achieving perfection in execution- as that is likely an unreasonable goal - but instead, doing incrementally better each time and, by small steps, achieving a greater aggregate result. (EN: This breaks down into cheerleading for the remainder of the chapter.)