Sooner or later, you’ll need to persuade someone to take action they may not have taken before. To hire someone with an unusual background, buy a product they’ve never used, or embrace a new idea.

One approach is to play it safe. Outline features and benefits. Put together a PowerPoint with fancy charts and bullet points. Maybe even use a scare tactic or two.

The safe approach assumes that people make decisions logically. Here’s the problem – decisions are made emotionally and justified logically. So if you want someone to do something they haven’t done before, you need to persuade them in a way that hasn’t been done before either.

The video below was the sales pitch used to sell The Muppet Show. Note: this was done in the early 1970′s, long before the existence of the easy-to-use editing programs we have today. Which means that this 2 1/2 minute video took a lot of time and creativity to make. I doubt that it felt like the safe way to persuade CBS to pick up the show.

But I’ll bet you it surprised them. And surprise is a great lubricant to “yes.”

[Update: the video was recently removed from You Tube. Regardless, hopefully the point is clear - sometimes the safe approach is riskiest one to take.]