Mastering the Psychology of Persuasion

April 06, 2009

Think you're so smart at selling and managing? Test your "gut instinct" skills and answer these questions.

By Russell Riendeau, Ph.D.

• Does guilt work better on men or women?

• Which of these is better at recognizing a liar: police officers, teachers, or dogs?

• Are women or teenagers more prone to fear motivation?

• Who would you trust to hold your expensive camera while you went to the bathroom at crowded sporting
event: a man or a woman?

• Is either the fear of fire or excessive water more dangerous to the average person?

• Are musicians more likely to excel in math, physics, or psychology?

• Is superstition a valid approach to decision-making when it comes to making a purchase over $3000?

• Are left-handed people more prone to some mental illnesses, accidents, or seeking positions of power?

• Would you be willing to get one painful shot in your arm from a licensed professional or 150 less painful
shots in your arm from a licensed professional?

As you read these questions, your brain started to formulate answers based on personal experience—i.e.,
your perceptions of the world. Mentally, you were looking through old picture albums, searching for familiar
faces, dialogues, memories, facts, and figures to confirm your initial internal response. Your present age,
gender, race, religion, stereotyping, prejudices, superstitions, ignorance, and bias also played a role into
forming your answers. It's all part of being human.

And while these questions may at first appear to have clear yes or no answers, in reality, there are no
definable correlations to them. All of these questions have exceptions to the rule. "It depends," is the best
practical answer. And yet, all answers you came up with in your head may have value if you're in the sales
and management profession.

Let's take a look at some of these questions more closely. With regard to left-handed people and power:
George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama are all lefties. Power hungry? Maybe. What about
women and fear motivation? Women show fear differently than men, but handle it fine—maybe even better
than men. What about sniffing out liars? Lying is about being misleading, and dogs are pretty good at
sensing when a person is friend or foe, intending to harm their master, or in trouble.
How about holding your camera while you hit the bathroom? How bad you have to go is the real
determinant. Lastly, the shot-in-the-arm issue. Young people think nothing of getting a painful tattoo from
some strange dude, yet won't get a vaccination in a sterile doctor's office to prevent the risk of getting a
sexually transmitted disease.

When it comes to selling in a recession, sales managers and sales professionals must reconfigure selling
strategies (persuasion) that will be more effective and sustainable in a fear-based and emotionally charged
recession like we have today. You are influenced and persuaded into decision-making every single day,
whether you want to admit it or not. Did you buy your wife roses because you really wanted to, or because
you feared her wrath if you didn’t bring home the flowers? Guilt, as you see, is just one powerful tool.

Here are the most recognizable persuasive elements we experience in society:

Habitual patterns. Trigger words or fixed action patterns, automatic behavior patterns, and biases help
people organize thoughts and actions.

Consistency and commitment. MacDonald's hamburgers taste the same from Russia to Denver.

Reciprocation. "I love you. Will you buy my guitar?" The person may be more influenced to buy the guitar
as a way to return the gesture of the stated love. Guilt falls under this category.

Likeability. We like people like us. First impressions, and all.

Social proof. Everybody is buying, saying, eating, reading, etc., so I must also.

Authority/power. Law is law and rules are rules.

Scarcity. The more we want something and can't get it, the more valuable it can appear.

Fear or gain. Research shows fear of loss is stronger than the desire for gain.

Now that you armed with these valuable insights into human behavior and tendencies, what can you do to
reset your sales and marketing presentations to capture the right emotion and persuasive trigger of your
customer? What can you present that will engage as many different emotional cues, as well as logical cues,
for them to buy your product or service?

Here are some suggestions:

1. Brochures and Website material. Use words and images that elicit stronger emotional appeals, in
addition to the practicality of your product or service. Value is critical, and an emotional appeal to the real
cause of the pain the customer would feel by not buying your product is the true target of your sales pitch.

2. Provide the data. Saying "We care about our customers" is weak. Everybody says that. Give facts: 85.3
percent of our customers are from referrals! Now that's compelling. Show how much people save, earn,
smile, laugh, or relax when they buy from you.

3. Dates don't matter. "We've been serving customers for 54 years!" So what? Longevity in business
doesn't carry the same weight it used to. Yahoo! and Google, for example are less than 15 years old, but are
as well-known companies as GE and Microsoft. Persuade with a compelling advantage.

4. Match marketing materials with your sales team's ability. A great-looking, emotionally charged
brochure must fit the salesperson making the presentation, or else it'll flop. If your salespeople can't say the
words that are hard to speak, then the message is lost and sales falter. Train your team to present the data,
the emotion, and the benefits in a way that is assertive, close to the heart, and rewards them to make the
sale.

5. Train your sales team to avoid the very tactics of persuasion they're being trained to embrace. The
fear of job loss and stress of customers saying "no" in a recessionary climate is both stressful and
demotivating. Contract with a proven trainer to teach your team to learn how to modify their internal and
external behaviors in order to build resilience to the negativity. A better-than-industry average commission
plan and measurable goals with benchmarks aren't bad ideas, either.
 6. Explore ways to imbed your product or service into the typical habits and behavior patterns of
your potential customers. Example: If you sell Website development, send examples/data to show how
others are updating their sites to capture new sales with new technology. Bankers love data and low risk;
focus your pitch to show less risk when buying your service.

7. Tie your sale into a common theme that month, year or decade to enhance recall, retention, and
common ground. People join and are part of associations to feel part of the tribe'—to gain access to
special knowledge. Your ability to allow them the "secrets" is a powerful tool.

Every decision you make is a result of some form of persuasion infiltrating your emotions to influence your
behaviors and thinking. The more elements of persuasion you become familiar with, the better you'll be able
to judge which approach is the right one fo
Fit is absolutely crucial, and there are ways you can calculate it. If the experience of previous recessions is
any guide, we should expect companies that had the right leaders in place at the start of the downturn to
fare better, by and large, than ones that didn't. However, a great many didn't. Turnover of chief executive
officers--a prime indicator of wrong leadership--was 50% higher coming into this recession than at the start
of the previous one, in 2001. Several statistics cited in the new book The Right Leader: Selecting Executives
Who Fit (co-written by one of the authors of this article) likewise indicate...
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An innovation conundrum

Entrepreneurs can build future prosperity. But we first need to fix capitalism's systemic cultural problems. I
met Nassim Nicholas Taleb in San Francisco's Fort Mason Center once. Taleb is now famous for The Black
Swan, a book through which he has popularized the idea that random accidents and uncertainties--he calls
them Black Swans--determine the course of history and the trajectories of people's lives. (See "The Oracle
of Doom.") I asked him, "What are you going to do about your thesis?" He answered, "I don't do. I just think
and write." For the moment, I have also been thinking and writing. My thinking has led me to conclude that
innovation is a crucial need of the hour. But we have systemic problems holding innovation back. While we
know that many innovations are accidents, I'm not sure if they are necessarily random. The Internet, for
example, came out of...
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The banker who said no

 While the nation's lenders ran amok
during the boom, Andy Beal hoarded
his money. Now he's cleaning up--with
scant help from Uncle Sam. Standing
outside the glass-domed headquarters
of his Plano, Texas, bank in March, D.
Andrew Beal presses a cellphone to
his ear. He's discussing a deal to buy
mortgage securities. In just a few
minutes, the deal's done: His Beal
Bank will buy $15 million of face value
for $5 million. A few hours earlier he
reviewed details on a $500 million
loan his bank is making to a company
heading into bankruptcy--the biggest
he's ever done. A few floors above, workers are bent over computer screens preparing bids for chunks of
$600 million in assets dumped by two imploded financial firms. In the last 15 months, Beal has purchased
$800 million of loans from failed banks, probably more than anyone else. Andy Beal, a 56-year-old, poker-
playing college dropout, is a one-man toxic-asset eater--without a shred of government assistance...
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Winning in a Downturn: Rapid cash

In Pictures: Study predicts 50% cut in free cash flow
generation
As the global downturn deepens, many
companies have seen a sharp decline in revenues and a growing cash crunch. They must find new ways to
cut costs and generate much-needed cash, without hurting future viability. The good news is that many
businesses can quickly cut overall costs by 15 percent or more without undermining their core business
strength. The key is to take action on a number of fronts in a top-down effort driven by senior
management...
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Mastering the psychology of persuasion

Think you're so smart at selling and managing? Test your "gut instinct" skills and answer these [9]
questions:

• Which of these is better at recognizing a liar: police officers, teachers, or dogs?

• Are women or teenagers more prone to fear motivation?
• Who would you trust to hold your expensive camera while you went to the bathroom at crowded
sporting event: a man or a woman?

Read the article. Back to top

Smart presentations: Don't get in the way of your message

Great content isn't enough when you're trying to influence someone. How we deliver that information is just
as important—and some would say even more so. That "how" could range from the look of your slides to
the pace at which you speak…even to the way you walk into the room. I'm not talking about technique,
however. If you make a solid connection right at the start with your audience’s needs, interests, and goals,
they won’t even notice minor mannerisms. On the other hand, if you make it harder for you audience to get
the message—if your slides are unnecessarily complex or your delivery draws attention to itself—you risk
losing them before you can win them over. And what can kill an audience's involvement? What muddles
their attention, distracts them, or just gets in the way of their focus? Here's a sampling:...
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Death of a sales meeting: Time for a change?

With a weak economy forcing businesses to cut costs, now's
the time to rethink your meeting strategy and opt for more
interactive on-demand versions. Faced with a weak economy
and organizational imperatives to drive down costs, many
companies are finding that once-robust travel budgets don’t
stand a chance. Add up airfare costs—along with hotel fees,
dining tabs and productivity lost due to travel—and the total
becomes increasingly harder to justify. In fact, according to the
National Business Travel Association, 49 percent of company
travel managers are investigating travel alternatives. This trend
to pare down isn't lost on your sales force...
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Are you abusing these 10 most irritating office phrases?
Everyone’s got their verbal pet peeves, but
odds are good you and your co-workers
have more in common than you think when
it comes to phrases that should never be
spoken in the office. After performing
extensive research, scholars at Oxford
University and author Jeremy Butterfield
have devised a list of the ten most irritating
phrases uttered by humans. This top ten list
appears in Butterfield’s latest book, "Damp
Squid," which was comprised from books,
papers, magazines, journals, broadcast
media and other sources:...
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Beware the harmful effects of goal-setting

The practice isn't a cure-all. Goals should be specific and prescribed selectively, have their limitations
spelled out, and be clearly monitored. Item: Not too long ago, GM (GM) executives wore buttons bearing the
numeral "29" as a constant reminder of the company's lofty goal of 29% U.S. market share. Today, a little
over six years later, GM's U.S. market share, according to Autodata Corp., is below 20% and sinking. Item:
As recently as the fall of 2006, a press release from the U.S. Housing & Urban Development Dept.
trumpeted the success of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in exceeding HUD's "affordable housing" goals for
the previous year, including goals for "special affordable families." What do the two items have in common,
beyond eliciting a similar sense of irony and sadness? In both instances, goal-setting was used carelessly. If
this is not the main cause of today's auto and housing crises, overly narrow goal-setting has certainly
contributed significantly to them and, therefore, to our current recession. [WARNING: Goals may cause
systemic problems in organizations due to narrowed focus, increased risk taking, unethical behavior,
inhibited learning, decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation. Here are 10 questions to ask
before setting goals, along with possible remediations:...]
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What you can learn about leadership from Jay Leno

John Baldoni isn't suggesting giving up corporate life for standup clubs, but he does suggest that leaders
don't shy away from using humor to point out absurdity and hypocrisy. Jay Leno brought his act, called the
"Comedy Stimulus Show," to the Motor City for two shows this week; tickets were free. A car enthusiast, as
well as a collector, Leno has long exhibited a kinship with this blue collar city. "This is one of the great
industrial cities," Leno told his audience. "This is a city that actually makes a product." To reporters Leno
said, "GM's not bankrupt yet, I was there today actually. I saw a lot of good product." And now that the city
and its environs are down in the dumps, Leno is doing what he does best: telling jokes and helping to take
locals' minds off the worst economic crisis to hit Detroit since the Great Depression. Leno's example is a
good one for leaders to follow...
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 Why Wagoner Had to Go
Turn your company into a shortcut
A "shortcut" is an employee or organization that's indispensable. Here are strategies for using your best
people to the utmost advantage. I recently spoke to a client who is a senior vice-president for sales at one of
the world's largest computer companies. She is in the midst of major layoffs, and she told me quite frankly
that the employees who are being let go are "the ones who are not shortcuts." She continued: "There is too
much to keep track of and too much to be done with fewer people. As tough as it might sound, if people
can't figure out how to contribute and make themselves indispensable, then there is no place for them." This
SVP embraces what I call "the shortcut culture." Let's define culture as both the behavior you're willing to
tolerate from your employees as well as a set of guidelines for the kind of people you'd like to keep and
attract. When the two intersect, they create "the way we do things around here." A shortcut is a person,
product, or organization that provides something we need, when we need it, with less aggravation and more
precision than we could do ourselves. They do it with high quality, grace, and intelligence, and they are
typically paid very well for it. It's a combination of high mastery and high emotional intelligence. This
Darwinian-like business climate is mandating...
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Why PR is the prescription

The right story told at the right time can bring valuable attention to your business, even during a downturn.
Times are tough. It can be difficult to keep your focus on driving the top line when the bottom line is bleeding
red. A lot of us can identify with John Krafcik, acting president and CEO of Hyundai Motor America, when he
says, "Flat is the new up." Still, you know you can't put your marketing program entirely on hold. You need
to do something to attract new customers (and give existing customers more reasons to stay). It may be
sacrilege for an ad guy to say so, but I recommend a healthy dose of PR. Yep, PR. There are a couple of
trends that, while causing headaches for journalists, can work in your favor: Properly understood, they can
help you generate attention for your business...
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Business intelligence software's time is now

The recession is fostering interest in BI software, which helps companies
analyze the data they collect for new cost-cutting or sales opportunities.
With restaurants stretching from Seattle to the Osan Air Base in South
Korea, the Chili's Grill & Bar chain gets a lot of visitors. For parent
company Brinker International, that makes for a lot of Triple Dippers to
keep track of. Also the owner of such chains as On The Border Mexican
Grill & Cantina, Brinker has to gather information on sales, inventory, and
other operations at 1,700 restaurants in 27 countries that receive more
than 1 million customers a day. An even bigger challenge, though, is
Slide Show: Smart Software
sifting through all that data, organizing it, and then using it to make the
business run more profitably. Making smart use of that information is all
the more urgent as customers dine in more often and spend less even
when they eat out. Amid falling revenue...
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Tips for CMOs: Five ways to keep your team off the [CEOs] chopping block

When times are tough and heads are on the chopping block or deadwood is being removed, marketing is
among first (after HR) to be decapitated, axed, or trimmed. Why is that? It's hard for Marketing to measure
its value, especially compared with Sales or Engineering. We are also always in front of the rest of the
company—thinking about broad-based, longer-term strategies—and not necessarily in touch with the twists
and turns of the current economy. Sometimes it can be good, in fact essential, to be thinking ahead, but it
has got to be frustrating for the CEO to be struggling with making payroll or hitting the numbers for this
quarter, and then get a presentation from Marketing about a great long-term opportunity or the latest
milestone on a far-reaching (and expensive) ad campaign. As a result, a lot of marketing jobs are being cut
right now. And yet, right after marketing is laid off, I know that the CEO is likely to pick up the phone and
hire a marketing consultant. When I ask CEOs why they have set aside budget for outside consulting at the
same time they are laying off marketing team members, they usually say two things:...
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The dark side of Twitter: What businesses need to know

Right now, Twitter is the talk of the Web among marketers. Use of the elegantly simple social-media site
has rocketed unlike anything in recent memory—and it's businesses that are leaping onto the Twitter
bandwagon. The New York Times calls Twitter "one of the fastest growing phenomena on the Internet." A
recent study (pdf) determined that at least five million people are using the service and new members are
signing up at a clip of 10,000 per day. And unlike other "here today, gone tomorrow" services, Twitter seems
to have staying power. As companies tighten their ad spending, inexpensive social media is clearly the next
marketing frontier. As with any new craze, there are enormous opportunities—and large pitfalls that must be
avoided. For this article, I spoke to some marketing professionals who've been exploring the Twitter terrain
for a while. My quest was to identify the Twitter landmines so you can fast-track your adventure into this
vast new frontier. But, first, a short story to convey the power of Twitter...
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Free BlackBerry apps: Five can't-miss choices

 Looking for the best free BlackBerry
apps on the Web? Our latest set of
no-cost downloads includes a mobile
search option that gives new
meaning to the term "hands-free" and
an awesome Internet radio app that
saves your stations and settings
across multiple devices: PC, iPhone,
BlackBerry, whatever. Time for more
free BlackBerry software downloads.
For more than a year now, I've
combed the Web for the best free
BlackBerry apps and delivered them
directly to you via CIO.com along with
my weekly BlackBerry tips and tricks.
[This time around, I'm offering up
an]...
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Apple's explosive iPhone update

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r the selling situation.