Strategic Persuasion Workshop: the art and Science of Selling Ideas

Inside organizations, soft skills are the hardest skills. Relationships and credibility are on the line in every interaction, and your power to positively influence others is one of your most important assets. Even if you have brilliant ideas, they can’t change the world unless you can sell them to others.

The Strategic Persuasion Workshop is Wharton’s premier experience for enhancing these key skills. Based on Richard Shell’s co-authored book The Art of Woo, this program teaches a structured, actionable process for selling your ideas. You will learn easy-to-remember tools to guide you each step of the way. Join us for this intensive, interactive workshop and become a master of relationship-based persuasion.

Program Experience

Highlights and Key Outcomes

In the Strategic Persuasion Workshop, you will gain:

• Self-awareness, including emotional intelligence
• Credibility, a critical personal quality that includes expertise, position, sincerity, and trustworthiness
• Organizational intelligence, including the mapping skills needed to assemble winning coalitions
• Communication skills for bringing just the right tool at just the right time to make the sale

Experience & Impact

The Strategic Persuasion Workshop is a highly customized experience. It begins before you arrive at Wharton with three personality-based assessments. This "inside-out" approach helps you recognize which persuasion styles come most naturally and better enables you to leverage your strengths. It also helps you to understand the steps you must take to gain greater influence and credibility in your organization.

Taught by G. Richard Shell and Cade Massey, the same award-winning team that leads Wharton’s Executive Negotiation Workshop: Negotiate with Confidence, this program shows you how to overcome influence barriers, improve credibility, and persuade others inside any organization, large or small. It features group work, feedback sessions, interactive lectures, and exercises to provide you with personalized feedback on your persuasion styles.

Rather than rely on lecture-based case studies, the program uses actual organizational challenges submitted by the participants, who work on them in teams. This approach means that in addition to learning new tools and techniques, you gain experience in applying them to real-world problems before you leave the program.

Session topics include:

• Using Authority to Gain Cooperation, Not Just Compliance
• Secrets of a Well-Structured Argument: Define the Problem, Discover the Causes, Present Your Preferred Answer, and Justify It as the Best Alternative
• Corporate Culture: How to Understand and Cope with It
• The Four Steps for Selling an Idea: Consider, Connect, Communicate, Commit
• How to Master Organizational Politics Without Going Over to the "Dark Side"