The Power of Concessions

In February I spoke to several dozen business coaches from the Central Ohio Chapter of the International Coach Federation. During my hour with the group at The Ohio State University I shared ways they could use specific  principles of influence to help their clients obtain better results.

Below is a short video clip where I talked about the power of concessions, sharing the results from a little experiment Dr. Robert Cialdini and his students conducted at Arizona State University. I think you'll find it very interesting how they tripled the response rate to a certain request by prefacing their request with something beforehand.

If you've viewing this by email click here for the video.


Is your organization looking for a keynote speaker, training or consulting on the application of ethical influence and persuasion in the workplace? If you are just reach out to me by email at BFA654@gmail.com. 

Brian, CMCT 
influencepeople 
Helping You Learn to Hear “Yes”.

Manipulative Email Marketing? You Decide

I received an email one Thursday a while back with “Monday’s ‘oops’” in the subject line. The opening of the email read as follows:

Dear Brian,

Monday we accidentally sent an email to you,

which was intended for our members.

Please accept my sincere apology for any

inconvenience this may have caused.

If you'd like to see the video referenced in the

announcement please click here.

It's actually a "commercial" of my daughter

telling the story of how she was struck in her car,

5 months pregnant, with her two-year-old son

in the back seat ...

... And how her insurance agent was there to

help her deal with the aftermath

I didn’t recall seeing any email from this company on Monday and wondered why the company would have sent emails like this to any non-members. I looked up the sender online and didn’t see that I was connected with him on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or anywhere else. And by his own admission I wasn’t a member of his group.

Also, if it was indeed an accident then wouldn’t a short apology have been appropriate rather than a second attempt to get people to watch the commercial?

This smacks me as manipulation pure and simple. First, I think a simple apology would have been sufficient if it really was an accident. If it wasn’t an accident but rather a ploy to get people to watch the video then we can add dishonesty as one more reason to not watch.

The principle of scarcity tells us people want things more when they can’t have them or think they’re being taken away. When I share this principle with groups I like to cite a study that’s referred to in Influence Science and Practice. The study was conducted with law students at the University of Chicago where they acted as a mock jury for a test case. They were presented facts and asked to give a judgment for the defendant. In the control group the average award was $33,000. A second group was told the same fact and one more was added – the defendant had insurance. Knowing there was more ability to pay, the average award increased to $37,000. A third group was told about the insurance but then the judge said that was inadmissible and should be struck from the record. He instructed the jury to not consider the insurance when deciding on the award. For the third group the average award was $46,000, a 39% increase!

It might seem counterintuitive that mock jurors awarded the most when told not to consider the insurance but what we clearly see is the psychology of scarcity at work. As soon as we’re told we can’t have something we tend to want it even more. When they were told they should not consider the insurance they placed even greater weight on it.  

And think about this; you can’t not think about something. In other words, if I tell you not to think about pink elephants you will think of a pink elephant, even if for just a moment. I can imagine jurors talking about the very thing they’re not supposed to consider which means somehow, some way, it will factor into the decision.

So back to the email I received. By telling people they received it by accident, that it was only supposed to go to members, the company was trying to invoke some scarcity. They were hoping people would think, “I wonder what members get to see that I don’t?” While most of you reading this might see right through the tactic I guarantee a large number of people who are unfamiliar with the influence process didn’t see it for what it was and out of sheer curiosity watched the video.

Not one to let things go I sent a short, simple reply to the sender, “If you were really sorry the apology line would have been enough rather than an attempt to get people to watch your video.” I never heard back from them.

Here’s my suggestion – when you sense people are using the psychology of persuasion in a manipulative way call them out on it. I could have gone on Twitter and done that in front of the world but I don’t think that’s right and that’s why I refrained from using the name of the person or the company. A private reply was enough and now I have more important things to move onto.

Brian, CMCT 
influencepeople 
Helping You Learn to Hear “Yes”.

Why Selling Still Matters

It’s 5:30 a.m. and I’m already fired up! No, it’s not the three cups of Starbucks or the fact that my workout is done that has me going, it’s an article I just read, To Increase Revenue Stop Selling. The article opens with, “Creating or expanding business relationships is not about selling – it’s about establishing trust, rapport, and value creation without selling.”

I don’t disagree with the need to establish trust and rapport. When I teach persuasion workshops we focus quite a bit on two principles that address these. Robert Cialdini’s principle of authority stresses the need for trust and expertise. After all, would you want to deal with an expert you can’t trust? Of course not.

When it comes to rapport, that is facilitated by the liking principle. As Jeffery Gitomer says, “All things being equal, people want to do business with their friends. All things not being so equal, people still want to do business with their friends.” Friendship and likability are huge! We’ll see how important likability is in the upcoming election because I can’t think of a time when the more likable candidate didn’t win the presidency.

So I’m onboard with the need to be a trusted and well liked advisor but that’s not nearly enough. I’ll give a perfect example. Many years ago at my company we had a large project under way working with an outside consulting firm in an effort to stimulate more sales growth. We were highly profitable but sales lagged compared to our peer group competitors. The consultants met with our agents face-to-face, conducted phone interviews and administered an online survey. Our survey participation was off the charts and one of the consultants said, “We’ve never worked with a company where the client has had so much affection for the company. Your agents love you.” Did you catch that – affection and love?

We were a trusted advisor with excellent relationships and sales stunk. I said to one consultant, “We’re like the girl everybody likes but no one asks to the dance.” Trust and likability were not translating into sales.

I’m not sure how the author missed this point but value creation is selling. He wrote, “It’s time for companies to realize that consumers have become very savvy and very demanding. Today’s consumer (B2B or B2C) does their homework, is well informed, and buys…they are not sold.” I have no disagreement with people hating to be sold but loving to buy. That said, however, today’s consumers are not as sophisticated as people think. Sure, they go online and “research” but you know what most of that amounts to? Price shopping.

Consider this; when telephones and the Yellow Pages were the norm, don’t you think there were people writing articles about how sophisticated consumers had become because they could call around and find out about products with ease? You bet there were!   What I’ve seen for more than 25 years in the insurance industry is people calling around to get the cheapest price the vast majority of the time. And so it is today when people “research” online. The majority are simply looking for the lowest price.

Value creation is about sharing why the price you’re asking is worth it. According to Brian Tracy, author of Advanced Selling Strategies, “Selling is the process of persuading a person that your product or service is of greater value to him than the price you’re asking for it.”

And here’s another interesting point that Steve Jobs showed us – sometimes people don’t know what they want or need. None of us had a clue about the iPod, iPhone or iPad until Jobs created them. Selling sometimes entails pointing out things the consumer might not have thought of. A good salesperson can fall back on the experience of other clients to point out features and benefits the prospective customer might not have considered.

The older I get the more I appreciate the basics. We don’t need grapefruit or Hollywood diets to lose weight, we just need to eat sensibly from the four food groups. We don’t need Madonna or Sylvester Stallone’s latest workouts to be fit; just get to the gym consistently and do some cardio work while you’re there. And we certainly don’t need the latest 10 step sales process that’s guaranteed to make sales skyrocket. Salespeople need to do the basics well – listen more than you talk, ask good questions to uncover needs, care about your client personally and professionally, know your products – how they differ from the competition and how they can help your client, understand how to ethically persuade, and don’t be afraid to ask for the sale.

Do people want to be sold? No. Do they want to work with people they trust and like? Absolutely. Can you get away without selling? Give it a try and soon you’ll be looking for a new career.

Brian, CMCT 
influencepeople 
Helping You Learn to Hear “Yes”.

Influencers from Around the World - Where Do You Focus: Problems or Successes?

If you’ve followed Influence PEOPLE for any length of time then Hoh Kim should be a familiar name to you because of his contributions to the Influencers from Around the World series. Like me, Hoh is a Cialdini Method Certified Trainer (CMCT). In addition to that prestigious certification, Hoh also has his masters in intercultural communication from Marquette University. You can learn more about Hoh by checking out his website, The Lab h, and his blog, Cool Communications. I encourage you reach out to Hoh on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. 

Brian, CMCT 
influencepeople 
Helping You Learn to Hear “Yes”.

Where Do You Focus: Problems or Successes?

In my last guest article I posed a question to readers about what they would do in a particular situation. This time I’d like to do a follow up of sorts, only in a slightly different context which I will elaborate on.

Many people make mistakes by highlighting negative social proof, rather than the positive ones. This is not only a phenomenon in surveys but everywhere. I am sure you are very familiar with a general business term, “problem solving.” Yes, we all want to solve problems and in order to solve “problems” we should identify and analyze in depth what the problem really is because most of us think we can solve problems once we know what the problem is.

Is that true? Not always. Maybe it is true for medical doctors when treating patients’ diseases, and perhaps for engineers when fixing a machine’s problem but what about problems in human beings and organizations?

Recently I attended the Appreciative Inquiry (AI) workshop and heard a real story. Once, an organization had a “problem” – only 79% of their customers were satisfied with their service. So the company did some research to figure out what the problems were for the 21% of non-satisfied customers. They found it and announced it to the organization. What happened? Executives and employees started to blame others for the problems and the satisfaction rate dropped even further!

The CEO was disappointed so he changed the strategy. He conducted another study to figure out why 79% of their customers were satisfied. Yes, their success cases. Next, the company tried to spread the cases within the organization. The result this time? The satisfaction rate shot up to 95% within eight months!

Chip Heath, from Stanford, and Dan Heath, from the Aspen Institute, wrote a great book called Switch. One of the secrets to switch people’s behavior, according the brothers, is to find ‘bright spots’ rather than focusing on problems. They wrote, “Don't solve problems. Copy successes.”

The Heaths quote the late Insoo Kim Berg (1934-2007) who was a globally known psychotherapist who pioneered the Solution Focused BriefTherapy method. When Kim counseled her clients, she didn’t spend time asking what their problems were or analyzing them. She simply focused on identifying solutions. If a kid has the problem of not focusing at all during class she would approach the child not to find out why she or he acted in that way, but trying to find the conditions in which they pay attention to the teacher during the class. Sometimes the child follows one specific teacher well, then, Insoo Kim Berg would analyze why that was the case. On an interview, Kim Berg said, “You don't need to know what the problems are. You just have to know what the solutions are.” It sounds like a joke but during my recent consulting work I have applied these “bright spots” concepts and it has worked well. Here's a quote from the AI workshop, “If you focus on problems, you will create more problems. If you focus on successes, then, you will create more successes.”

We work with different bosses, colleagues, staff members, clients, consultants, etc., and see that some of them focus on bright spots, while others focus on the “dark spots.” Each side has pros and cons but you will see most people say things like this, “That’s the problem” or “This is the problem,” without ever suggesting solutions. It’s true that criticizing problems is easy and offering solutions can be difficult but I think the real problem are the “people who always talk about problems only” and fail to offer solutions.

Hoh, CMCT