Chris St. Hilaire

Chris St. Hilaire is an award-winning message strategist who has developed communications programs for some of the nation’s most powerful corporations, legal teams, and politicians, including the Political Action Committee (PAC) behind Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s historic victory. The first marketer in the courtroom, Chris is the founder of Jury Impact, a national jury consulting firm, and M4 Strategies, a California-based messaging firm that specializes in influencing public policy. Chris’s persuasion advice has been featured in Investor’s Business Daily, and he has provided legal and political commentary in USA Today and on national news broadcasts, including NBC, C-SPAN, and Fox News. He lives in Long Beach, California.
St. Hilaire is one of the nation’s most respected messaging, focus group, and jury selection experts, whose clients include corporations such as AT&T and Wal-Mart, as well as nationally-recognized politicians. His forthcoming book 27 POWERS OF PERSUASION: Simple Strategies to Seduce Audiences & Win Allies, which will be published by Prentice Hall/Perigee in September 2010, offers an entirely new philosophy of communication. Distilling his decades of experience into a series of best practices for the workplace, St. Hilaire breathes new life into the concept of how to win allies and audiences.
“True persuasion is not about arm-twisting or out-maneuvering your adversary,” St. Hilaire writes. “True persuasion is the creation of consensus from conflict or indifference. It’s about taking an idea or a course of action and creating unity of purpose. These skills are crucial in business settings.” Written in a highly accessible style—and using current examples ranging from the Obama campaign to KFC, from Starbucks to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim—each chapter of the book offers clear, actionable ways to position one’s viewpoint as the winning one, while also respecting the other side. Rather than turning the situation into “us versus them,” St. Hilaire offers tactful ways to treat alternative perspectives, making the opposition feel valued, not threatened. It’s an inclusive, winning, and different message for today’s business climate.
Just some of the most unique and counterintuitive Powers in the book:
• Evaluate Egos: St. Hilaire explains how recognizing others’ fears, concerns, and self-interests, will make you better able tailor your conversation in a successful way. Making people feel included and safe is the best first step toward persuasion.
• Use Emotional Language: By using language that is very specific and detailed, you will help your listener remember your story better, and help them connect to what you’re saying in a personal way.
• Aim For the Undecideds: Often getting a few undecideds to shift in your direction is all it takes to win the day. Usually the best way to bring them around to your side is to handle your opposition with respect, demonstrating that you’re reasonable and open-minded.
• Learn How to Use Silence: Silence can be used to draw the other side into elaborating on or tempering their views, or to put you back in control of the conversation. Its value can’t be overstated in persuasion.
• Don’t Say No, Say “Let’s Try This”: Not saying ‘no’ doesn’t mean always saying ‘yes’. By taking the conversation back to the goal, and suggesting alternative ways to achieve it, you’ve made the other side feel valued, not rejected.

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