Influencing others’ decision making

Dr. Robert Cialdini has spent almost 35 years of exhaustive conducting scientific research on what leads people to say “Yes” to requests. This has led to 2 of his best selling-author books Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion and Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade. 

Understanding and implementing methods in an ethical manner increases your chances of others being persuaded by your words.

Impact their thoughts with your actions

1st Method: Reciprocity

The power of reciprocity is that when you offer something first as a freebie of your services or products, you can trigger feelings of indebtedness and even make the person compelled to return the favor in such a way.

There is this powerful cultural force that makes us feel obliged to repay favors.

This works even better when you recognize your target audience’s needs and tailor it for them and making it more memorable.

Surely, the majority of people wouldn’t pass the chance to try out free samples especially when it’s ice cream.

 

 

How effective is sampling?

Increases sales more effectively, such as an experiment conducted by offering a free online product trial increased sales by 41.6% more than products without samples.

2nd Method: Commitment& Consistency

Most of us know that when we want to achieve our goals in life, one of the important aspects of it is Commitment and Consistency. Therefore understanding that people highly value these things we can use it to influence them.

A restaurant owner in Chicago wanted to reduce the number of no-shows where customers will book a table and not show up.

He asked his receptionist instead of calling and asking the customers to “Please call if you have to change or cancel your reservations”,

He asked her to say “Will you please call if you have to change or cancel your reservations” and pause until you hear back from the other person.

No-shows dropped from 30% to 10%

By having people respond to the receptionist, they were on record committing themselves.

“A single question can be more influential than a thousand statements.”

~Bo Bennett

Why you shouldn’t congratulate too soon

Let’s say you’re a leader/manager of a team and have a goal that you want to achieve or make some progress on it. When seeing some improvements and the progress is going well, don’t congratulate them on it.

Instead, put emphasis on how well their commitment/consistency is towards the goal so that the people in your team will not look back on their progress but in front of them to reach and keep striving towards it.

3rd Method: Authority

Why not boast about your achievements? People are more likely to listen to experts/specialists in certain fields so why not use your credentials to your advantage?

How do you increase your authority? Get testimonials/quotes from legitimate experts about your products or ideas.

Remember to put those on the top before any message you want to send, thus allowing it to help support your claims/vision.

Having social proof from credible sources will reduce uncertainty and also help further influence people in their decision-making.

Conclusion

Now for some of you, it may seem like manipulation and immoral to be using such tactics.

Getting someone to do something for you or even worse something they don’t want to or are not even aware of.

However, reading the book we learn that it’s all in human nature and no one was being forced to do it. Instead learning these techniques can help us from needlessly being influenced easily by others.

As humans however great we are as a specie, we all still have our own nature that makes us different with flaws so therefore not perfect.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments!