Format: Interactive CD-Rom
Price: £999
From: Video Arts
Contact: www.videoarts.com
Training and marketing budgets tend to be slashed during times of economic uncertainty, so perhaps this interactive CD-Rom could be a lifeline to cash-strapped organisations looking to pep up their marketing efforts or to encourage staff to be aware of sales opportunities.
The Yes! Project is an interactive resource based on insights from the book Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion written by Robert B Cialdini and others including Steve Martin, director of Influence at Work UK.
The aim of the CD-Rom is to demonstrate “science in action” says its distributor Video Arts. It does this via a series of modules, each based around scenarios introduced by Cialdini and analysed by Martin. Questions and topics for group or individual work round off each module.
Each module, and the whole package itself, is well organised. The user is guided through how to use the programme and taken through a number of pre-tests to advise which modules are required – in my case, all of them.
The package lives up to its promise of interactivity by giving users the opportunity to record their thoughts and also by logging their scores throughout.
Users are encouraged to create and timestamp a list of influence tips to be delivered to the user’s MS Outlook calendar or handheld device when needed.
The length of each module – from 10 to 25 minutes – is displayed and I would recommend that anyone writing a learning plan, either for themselves or others, pays attention to these times and also the intensity of the modules. I couldn’t maintain focus on more than two in a sitting.
The package certainly gets its message across – in the course of one sitting I had increased my score from 75% to 100% and I learned lessons about influence and compromise that I could apply at work and at home, particularly with teenage offspring.
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This could be a useful package for sales and marketing teams across an organisation, or for new managers.
Relevance? 5 stars (out of 5)
Interactivity? 5 stars
Value for money? 4 stars
