Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade with Robert Cialdini - Genius Network Episode #5

Welcome to the Genius Network show. In this episode you'll hear from Robert Cialdini and Joe Polish about pre suasion, a revolutionary way to influence and persuade. The one word that makes you more persuasive. A two step process that makes anything you do much more persuasive and much, much more. Robert Cialdini has frequently been called the Godfather of Influence. He's the CEO and President of Influence at Work, focusing on ethical influence training, corporate keynote programs and the CMCT Cialdini Method Certified Trainer. He's also Regents Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University. If you would like access to the full interview, the full feature video presentation and the special resources for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 5 that's geniusnetwork.com 5.

Hello everyone. I'm here at my office in Tempe, Arizona which is where my guest, Dr. Robert Cialdini has lived for a long time. How are you doing, Robert?

I'm well. Good to see you.

Yeah, you too. You know we've known each other for almost three decades, right? And the first time I interviewed you was at your office at ASU when you were the Regent professor of Psychology I guess was the title. And that was many years ago and that was always one of the highest rated interviews I've ever done. Dr. Robert Cialdini has spent his entire career researching the science of influence, earning him an international reputation as an expert in the fields of persuasion, compliance and negotiation. He is the CEO and President of Influence at Work, focusing on ethical influence training, corporate keynote programs in the CMCT Cialdini Method Certified Trainer program. His books, including Science and Practice, are the results of decades of peer reviewed research on why people comply with requests. Influence has sold over 3 million copies, is a New York Times best seller and has been published in over 30 languages. His newest book, A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade, published by Simon and Schuster, has been met with immediate critical acclaim. Because of the worldwide recognition of Dr. Cialdini's cutting edge scientific research and his ethical, business and policy applications, he is frequently regarded as the Godfather of Influence. Well, that is definitely for sure. I'm here with the Godfather right now. So here's your new book. I love this because I got the pre release copy of this. It's a revolutionary way to Influence and Persuade. It is a big book and it is an amazing book. And this is a book that anyone that's in business would probably save themselves a decade of unnecessary nonsense just by knowing and identifying what you have discovered. So before I get into asking you some questions. What do people really need to know about you that I haven't said in the bio? I mean, who is Robert Cialdini?

You know, I am primarily a scholar and a researcher. I love finding the answers to things that I'm curious about. But the other thing that I strive to do is to link those answers to actionable advice that we can give to people to improve their outcomes in life. That way we not only get to scratch our curiosity itch, we get to make a contribution at the same time.

Yeah, well, you talk about this in pre suasion, that you actually at one point in time were a palm reader.

Yes.

Right. And how did you go about. I mean, at what point did you say, I'm going to start studying like you, an influence? I mean, you studied everyone who was in the compliance field, I guess, from televangelists to con artists to sales people to ethical markers, like all across the board. Where did this curiosity come from? And how did it become this life work and this life passion to just figure out things that no one has figured out and then present it to everybody in usable ways, which is what you do, starting with influence and now with pre suasion.

Yeah, for me, it involved in making contact with an idea or some experience that I had that wouldn't leave me alone. It just wouldn't leave me alone. How did that happen? How do I account for that? How did that guy get me to say yes to this thing? I didn't really want, and yet I did want the money that I gave him, but he was walking away with my money and I was standing there with his. How did that just happen? And so when things won't leave me alone, that's my tell, that's my key. This is worth spending time on. Because if it's not leaving you alone, it's probably not leaving other people alone. They're scratching their heads and wondering the same thing. So if we can provide that answer, you don't again, just scratch your own curiosity itch. You get to make a contribution by informing people of how the world works.

Right. That's a fascinating way to. I mean, I could go off on a million different tangents on just things not leaving you alone in terms of just interest, in terms of passion, in terms of where you spend your time. And it's great that this occurred for you in such a way to where you have then taken your skills as a researcher, as a scientist, however you would describe yourself and literally uncover all of these things that many people would never even know. So why did you write Pre Suasion?

I had written influence 30 years ago and people have often asked me, why did it take you so long to write another soul authored book? And the best way I can explain it is that I didn't want to just plant a bunch of shrubs around the tree that Influence had become. I wanted to wait until I had the seed for another tree. And that didn't come along until the idea for Pre Suasion hit me and wouldn't leave me alone.

I would like to think that all of the stuff you talk about with ethical persuasion, I have always followed the line, be nice to the people you meet on the way up. They're the same people that you meet on the way down. And one of the things, it took me 20 years to realize this. Whenever I would say to people I'm a marketer, there would be some people that are like, oh, one of these marketers, because they had sort of a bad experience. And so what I've told people now is think of selling as influence and think of marketing is storytelling. And if you're more effective at influence, you're going to persuade more people and you have to be able to persuade. And if you tell a better story, you're going to get more buy in, you're going to get more enrollment. I would love to ask you because I think accidentally so many people that are marketers and salespeople have gotten your book and then they utilize it. However they're going to utilize it. And you put the content and the information out there and you've always spoken about doing this to help people to be of service. How would you define selling? How would you define marketing? I'd be fascinated by Robert Cialdini's answer to how you view those two.

You've been listening to the interview with Robert Cialdini and Joe Polish. We will return to the conversation shortly. If you would like access to the full interview, the full feature video presentation, and the special resources for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 5 that's geniusnetwork.com 5. Let's get back to the conversation.

How would you define selling? How would you define marketing? I'd be fascinated by Robert Cialdini's answer to how you view those two things.

Yeah, the most legitimate form of marketing is a form of education. We inform people into assent. We don't trick them. We don't coerce them. We educate them into the factors, the features of what we have to offer that will better their lives. And if we've done that well, storytelling is one way to do that properly, then they will resonate with that information. They will make themselves available for our offers and our products and services, and they will benefit in the bargain. Not just will our bottom line benefit, their outcomes will benefit. That's the most legitimate form of marketing that I can define it as.

Yeah, and I totally agree. One of the things I learned about marketing, starting being a Deborah carpet cleaner and everyone was advertising price. There was no Internet back then, so I was using direct mail and coupons and phone calls and referrals and word of mouth and that sort of stuff. And what I learned is it's all the things that people don't know that they don't know, that if you provide them with that information, they can make an informed, intelligent decision. And that all consumers are walking around with this question, who can I trust? If you show up and build rapport, which I would look at as trust with comfort, where you just build rapport with people and you educate them on how to make an informed, intelligent buying decision, they will want to do business with you. In the spirit of what you teach and with the objective and outcome that I want for you, the person either watching this interview or listening is, I want to provide them with education and I want the outcome to be that you go out and get this book. And the reason I wanted to do this, there's no affiliate thing. I'm not getting paid anything to do this. I'm wanting to provide useful education to all our friends, most of them that live in the results economy, where their income is based on their ability to produce a result. And in some cases that means selling people what it is that they're selling, offering things. I really want people to get the book because there's no way in a short period of time we could do justice to the amount of gold coins that are contained within the pages of these books. This is not just a book for entertainment. This book will give you specific strategies, wisdom, methodologies and processes that you have spent literally decades of your life studying and learning. And for a few dollars, you can get all of that as a roadmap to help you become more successful. And so what we're doing right now is we're providing you with education about this for free so that you can learn about this and using reciprocity. If we provide on that, you're going to go out and buy his book and tell other people to go buy his book. And if you're in a business that has many people that are in the persuasion and influence business. You want to give a copy of this to all of the people that work in your organizations, because it will just simply make things better. So that's sort of my setup.

I think we're on the same page.

Good. So I've written some questions down, because you know me, I'm super add and I could go all over the place. So I want to start with this one. So your book Influence is a classic, and you are the most cited social psychologist of our time. So what has changed and what has stayed the same since you wrote Influence?

Well, you know, I wrote Influence and described six universal principles of influence. If you include one or another of those principles into a communication, you significantly increase the likelihood that people will say yes to you. So there's reciprocity, there's liking, there's authority, there's scarcity, there's commitment and consistency, and then there's social proof. Here's what stayed the same. Those six principles remain important determinants of when people say yes to a request. If one or another of those is in the message, it spurs the likelihood of yes. Here's what's changed. One of those principles is dramatically more available to us. Social proof. Because of the technology of the Internet, we now have access to information about what many others like us are doing or have been doing with respect to any given choice. A product, a service, an idea, an initiative, a cause to support. Now, like never before, we can see in user groups from reviews from various kinds of collections of people that we are members of or just have access to what a lot of others just like us are doing or have been doing, which steers us to go in that direction. I saw an article a while ago that said 97% of all online buyers check product reviews before they make a purchase. Now 97%. We can't get 97% of the people to believe that the earth is round, but we get 97% to go to this place of social proof. So if we can master how that occurs, how we can channel people into that dimension, that principle, and we've got it going for us.

Wow. You know what? That is fascinating. And not that there's even a correlation, but maybe there is. As soon as you said that, I thought, you know, I think it was maybe 20 years ago, the stats in the United States was less than 3% of Americans owned a library card. And I would always say for people that are readers, for people that actually study, you think that, you know, you're reading all the books and like, everyone is like this but most people aren't. And then 97% of people checking product reviews. That's fascinating. I think of my own behavior. I mean, when I'm not working a lot, one of the things that allows my brain to escape is go to Costco or something and just look at stuff. Although I always go there thinking you're going to save money on stuff and you can't walk out of there without spending less than $6,000 to try to let us sell. But I'll look at every product. I have an Amazon app and I'll just snap the barcode and I'll look at product reviews. That behavior didn't exist for me three years ago and now it's just how I do things. And it's all about what you just said, it's all about that. So that's social proof. And I am one of those people.

You know, and we don't need to go to the Internet if we're marketers of information. I saw this study from Beijing, shows you the cross cultural reach of this. If a restaurant owner wants to significantly increase the percent of people who choose an item from the menu, a simple thing they can do, they put an asterisk next to those items that says one of our most popular items, one of our most popular dishes, and each one immediately becomes 13 to 20% more popular for pointing to something. We all have most popular models. We have.

Did you hear that?

Did you hear popular options? If we don't bring it to consciousness, nobody is going to be moved in the direction of a good choice before they even process the information associated with it.

You know, what was it? All humans are secretly wanting to be led. Just what you just said, I mean the whole asterisk idea there, that alone, that little persuasion and influence are filled with like hundreds of those sort of pieces of useful wisdom that are applicable and usable. And that one piece of information there for anyone that is a business owner, that alone could be worth thousands, tens of thousands, just that. But what you just said, directing their consciousness towards a certain thing and that's really what it's all about. My favorite definition of selling came from Dan Sullivan where he said selling is getting someone intellectually engaged in a future result that's good for them and then getting them to emotionally commit to take action to achieve that result. And when I heard that saying, I thought about that a lot. I was like, okay, the key word is good for them. Because you can get someone intellectually and emotionally engaged in a future result that kills them. Eat this crappy food Watch this pornography, guzzle this booze, smoke this cigarette. I mean, there's all kinds of ways to utilize influence and persuasion in ways that are destructive, and there's all kinds of ways to do it and in ways that are beneficial and help humanity. As a matter of fact, you know, the greatest people in the world that have advanced the world were powerful persuaders. They got people into that sort of position. And I really think what your knowledge does is it raises people's consciousness. I think it really does.

You know, I love that quote that you just stated. And I would just say that newest behavioral science offers an addendum to getting people engaged to a future result that will improve their lives. Getting people engaged to a future piece of information that will lead to a future result that will engage. That's what pre suasion is.

That's what pre suasion is. Well, yeah, let's talk about that, because my next question is what is the premise of pre suasion? So let's go into how does persuasion differ from or enhance persuasion? I guess.

Yeah. In the book Influence, I talked about what you should put into a message to increase the likelihood that people would want it, would try to acquire it. That thing that you're talking about, your offer, pre suasion about what you should say or do in the moment before you deliver that message, to make people attuned to the strengths of that message, to make them inclined toward, open, to receptive to the thing about your message that is its strongest element, the thing that will make it wise for them to say yes, because that's the essence of what it is that you are offering.

Well, that is such an important concept that if someone was able to do that 5%, 10% more effectively, not just twice as good, but just little incremental things that would make a huge shift. But if you did it five or ten times more effectively, that would change your life, that would change the entire game. And so this is a way, like Joel Weldon, who is one of my friends, we had been speaking about him previously, before the cameras started rolling, he made this comment about how to introduce a speaker as an example. And if you're going to go up on stage, if you have a beautiful piece of art and you duct tape it to the wall, it's going to look a certain way. But if you put it in a nice frame, it's different. And ever since I heard that, I've always thought about how you frame anything has a lot to do with how it occurs to people, how they like it. How they buy into. And then here you come out with presuasion, which is an entire study of how you frame things. I want to do it justice because it's way beyond just framing things. There's a whole lot more into it. So what I'd love to have you do is talk about the scientific research around pre suasion so that people realize this is not just a really bright professor's opinion about how to set up the sale, setting up the request. This is like you have done some serious research on it. So I think people would really appreciate this at a much deeper level if they knew how hard you have worked on this. So if you could talk about that.

Well, there are some literatures in academic behavioral science about priming, about framing, about positioning, about anchoring. That all came together for me in terms of what they were implying about how you amplify the effect of your message. It's by what you do before you send that message. And it involves creating engagement, creating a focus in your audience on some aspect that they're yet to experience. They haven't encountered it yet. You just make them open and receptive to it before they ever encounter it. That's the idea. Let me give you an example. Suppose you want to sell somebody something that's new, or you want to bring them in. And you know that people hang back when they've got something that's new. They haven't yet tried it, they're unfamiliar, they don't like getting out of their comfort zone. But you've got this thing and it's really great. How do you. Here's a study. Researchers went up to people on the street, said, we have a new soft drink. It's untried, nobody's ever encountered it before. Would you be willing to give us your email address right now and we'll send you the information that will allow you to get this new product. Now that's a risky thing to do. Somebody comes up to you unbidden, unsolicited, unknown, ask for your email address. That's a risky thing. Only 30% of the people were willing to do that. Under those circumstances, even that sounds to me like a lot.

Right?

But there are risk takers among us, right? For another sample of people, the researcher walked up and said, excuse me, do you consider yourself an adventurous person? People thought for a minute and they went on a particular memory track for times that they were adventurous because adventure was the question that they were now engaged in. And we've all experienced. Almost Everybody said yes, 98% of the.

People said yes just by planting that seed of getting them to focus on where their brain goes.

And now instead of 30% giving them their email address when they were later told about this new product, 75.6% provide that risky, chancy thing.

That's fascinating. It's almost like the study you did with Hare Krishna's in influence where someone would go up and put the flower on their collar in airports. And it was more difficult for someone to step away than reach in their pocket and pull out a dollar and give them donation, walk away and then throw the.

What do you do first?

Yeah, so I mean, like the way that I look at that piece of information, which is again so incredibly valuable by how you direct the brain to think about something before you then ask them for what you really want. So if a single person, if a guy was afraid of going up to a woman and asking for her email or asking for a phone number, if they said, are you adventurous? And just plant that and say, oh, by the way, would you like to go on a date? You've just probably, in this case tripled your chances of getting a yes.

Here's a piece of research that shows how you can increase that even more. A study done in France. Researchers had an attractive young man walk up to young women who were by themselves strolling through a shopping mall. And he stopped them and said, I wonder if you could give me your phone number so I can call you for a date later. Another risky thing to do. And indeed, only 13.5% of the time did he get a phone number. If he did that. This is an attractive guy, though. They got an actor, a matinee idol kind of looking guy.

That's part of persuasion also. Right.

But even that only 13.5, unless he asked in front of a particular kind of shop. And it doubled to almost doubled to 24% success. A flower shop. In the environment of flowers, women are put in mind of romance. And now romance is more important than risk.

Wow.

Where do you put people first?

So the environment has everything to do with.

It can be a word that you use like adventurous. It can be a setting that you arrange, or it can be an image that you provide on your website.

Right. Wow.

Let me give you an example of the image.

You can talk about these examples for the next week and I would love them all because they're fantastic.

A study done with an online furniture store, sofas. They sent half of the visitors to their site to a landing page that had as its background wallpaper fluffy clouds. The other Half they sent to a landing page that had as its background wallpaper, coins, pennies. Now they then track what happens to those visitors who were randomly sent to one or the other place with different images. The first thing they can counter is an image of clouds or an image of coins. Those who experienced the clouds rated comfort as the most important feature for them to decide on a sofa. They then searched the site for information about comfort and they preferred to buy more comfortable sofas. Those who got pennies rated cost as the most important feature for determining their choice. They searched for price related information and they preferred to buy inexpensive furniture and not one of them recognized they were asked afterwards. So do you think the clouds made a difference? Not one of them believed that the clouds or the coins made any difference. This stuff flies under the radar totally.

Well, you know, it almost makes you question all of the things. Not almost. It does. I mean, for me, the things of find a need and fill it, Find a want and fill it. Where you literally direct people to where you want them to go. In some cases by just the setup, I mean, it's almost like people are thinking they know what they're looking for. But what you're showing here is no, you're helping them to look.

This is a great insight, Joe, because there's an old saying, tell me what you're paying attention to and I'll tell you who you are. In other words, if you're always watching espn, you're probably a sports fan. If you're always getting gourmet magazines, you're probably a foodie. That sort of thing. Here's what the newest behavioral science says. What you're paying attention to doesn't just reveal who you are, it makes you who you are in that moment.

Right?

Thanks for listening to the highlights from a recent interview with Robert Cialdini and Joe Polish. If you would like access to the full interview, the full feature video presentation and the special resources for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 5 that's geniusnetwork.com 5. Don't miss out on more insights, strategies and wisdom like this on Genius Network. Subscribe to Genius Network today by visiting geniusnetwork.com subscribe. That's geniusnetwork.com subscribe.