HOW TO GET WHAT YOU WANT (6 Proven Methods)

You can get anything you want in life if you can get other people to get it for you. Which makes persuasion among the highest leverage skills in the world. Tons of research has been done on how to become more persuasive, and I have to give my nod to Robert Cialdini, the goat who made most research accessible to the masses in his book Influence. What I want to do is show you the most effective ways I applied his methods in my own business that now do over $200 million a year in combined revenue. Tool number one is reciprocity. I tried to get in contact with Arnold Schwarzenegger when I was running Jim lynch because I thought it would make a lot of sense. I wanted him to endorse my book. That was like, my whole goal. Turns out, not worked. It also turns out Arnold doesn't really care. But in order to get his attention, what Layla and I did was he donated a million dollars to his charity. And then we ended up sitting down with Arnold multiple times. When you show kindness and generosity towards others, they're more likely to return the favor and like you as a result, the gifts you have to do is proportional to the person you're trying to give to. So, for example, if you pay for your friend's lunch, that person now feels obligated to return the favor. They're like, hey, I'll get the next one, right? And it's the same reason that outside of a retail store, as soon as you come in, they offer you cold water is not because they're nice people. It's because they know that you'll feel indebted to them and be more likely to stay longer. B, listen to them and see. Ultimately, buy. Imagine how much it costs a store owner to give everybody who walks in the door a water. I don't know, $5 a day. And if they get one person to buy extra a week off of that, which they probably get a lot more, is that worth the investment? It's probably the highest return on investment thing in his entire business. Now, Cialdini gives a really beautiful example of how to leverage this in business. He shows an example for a waiter. So if a waiter puts a mint on the bill, they get 3% more tips, right? People get something, and they're more likely to tip them a little bit more. The waiter gives the person two mints. All of a sudden the tips increase by 14%. And the third way they did the waiter example was that the person put a mint down, walked away, turn around, and put another mint on the table, and that created a 23% increase in tips. It's worth paying $5 a month for a big bag of mints just to make sure you get paid. But the thing is, is that in business, there are tons of these $5 mint bags that are laying around that you can immediately implement into your own business. Years ago, I actually had this done to me and I saw the effect and all right, so there was this guy that I thought was a complete weirdo. Whenever I saw him, he would try and ask me like 100 questions. So he was local to where I was. He was in like some entrepreneur networks, and he would just like, try and corner me. And I was like, dude, just get away from me. Eventually I had to confront him, be like, stop talking to me. Like, go away. And so what happened is he was so ashamed of the whole experience, whatever. He started sending me gifts every single month. So I'm Talking about like $500,000 gifts every month, like Cutco knives and like clothing, which is kind of weird, but it was expensive Lululemon stuff. Anyways, for nine months, he sent me birthday cakes that were custom made and ice cream. Like, it was wild. After a while, I just started feeling bad because he just kept sending them and saying, like, so sorry, I hope everything's awesome, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, you know what, Maybe I just saw him the wrong way. And I was just like, got him off on the wrong foot. Even though I knew what he was doing, it still worked. And I ended up going out to meet him again. Turns out, still a weirdo. And so that's to show you how powerful this stuff is. You can just start by giving people free gum when you're in class, which is the first time I learned it when I was in middle school. People weren't as mean to me when I gave them gum earlier that day. And so it's tiny little thing that cost me almost nothing that made my life in middle school a little bit easier. Tool number two is consistency. We judge people based on their actions. All right? Consistency can be used in persuasion by asking someone to publicly commit to an idea or action. Now, publicly can be just in front of you, but it can also be widely to the world. If I said, hey, are you the type person who, like, takes action and is willing to invest in themselves? If someone says yes, then later on if I say, hey, since you're the type of person who's really willing to take action and really likes to invest in themselves, then I think this would be perfect for you. Boom. And then I can make the ask because I just reminded them twice of the commitments they made earlier and I'm asking them to be consistent with those later during the close. So there's a famous research study they did where they asked people in a neighborhood to put up a little sign that said please drive slowly. When they asked people to put a massive sign on their front yard that said please drive slowly, most people didn't comply with that request. But when they asked people to put a tiny little sign in their window the size of a note card that said please drive slowly, and then two weeks later, they sent them a letter that said, hey, since you are a type of person who's so pro safety for the neighborhood, would you be willing to put a much bigger sign to save more lives? Guess what? Way more people said yes after saying the first yes because they voluntarily identified as a certain type of person and the researchers got them to remain consistent with the commitment that they had made. And so if you want to get the big yes, sometimes you get the small yes first. This is why lead magnets and front end offers tend to work well to get people to ultimately buy a much bigger thing later. Tool number three is social proof. People look to other people for cues about how to behave or what to believe. And this is how we learn to be human. Right? When we're little kids, we just look at other people and we say, oh, I'll do what they do, because that's what humans do. And then you start to become a human. If you see something on Amazon, it has 5,000 five star reviews, you're way more likely to buy it. Amazon does this stuff because it knows it gets people to take action. And so if you've ever heard a laugh track on a show where it's like hahaha in the background, people then laugh more than if there is no laugh track, which is wild. We are so conditioned to behave in accordance with how everyone else does that that laugh track persuades us, gets us to do something they want us to do, which is laugh better than anything else. And so here's how I used it in my own businesses. I printed out every single five star review guy got online. If you have a brick and mortar location, this is where kills is that you look at all your Yelp reviews and you screenshot every single one of them. So I screenshotted all of them and I framed every one of them. So that floor to ceiling my lobby was five star reviews. And then the other half was before and after pictures. Because imagine a world where Someone says like, hey, Alex, I don't think you can help me lose weight. And I would just like look around the room, be like, really? And then I would say, how much proof would you need to believe? And at what point is your requirement for proof more unreasonable than the amount of proof I have? And that crushes their belief of whether or not they could do it, or at least that I was good enough to do it. Tool number four, liking, or what people like to call rapport. People like people who like them or they perceive as friends. And the more you like someone, the more likely they are to say yes to you. And so the liking principle states that people are more likely to be persuaded by those that they like and want to be like. And the second part's important. And they even did a research study to test this. They told people that they paid strangers to compliment them. They then got complimented by a stranger who they knew were getting paid to compliment them. And guess what? They still liked them more than strangers. They didn't. And so even if you know what someone's doing, it still works. And they also found out that there's actually no cap to how much flattery someone will take, provided it's genuine. And here's how I've tried to use this in persuasion. So I always use the ACA framework. Acknowledge what they say, compliment what they did about what they said, and then ask another question. You can get basically anybody to like you in a sales conversation or in a social situation. Acknowledge what they just said because it shows that you're listening and paying attention to them. Because the thing that people like more than anything, that they pay people hundreds of dollars an hour or two, is just to listen to them talk. See, you compliment them on what they just said and how it ties to them being a great person in some positive attribute. And then you ask them the next question to move them down the conversation. And so the way that I actually was able to keep my spirits high, because if you are ever front facing in a role, whether it's customer service or it's sales or anything, you get tired. And so what I did was that I actually bought a mini trampoline and I put it next to my desk. And so I would meet with people and I was doing 20 plus consults a day in person, and I would be bouncing on this trampoline and they would look at me like a psychopath. People would close more because they're like, this guy's such a goof. You cannot be in a bad mood. And on a Trampoline. And when I didn't have the trampoline before that, I actually used to do a cartwheel every single time before I shook someone's hand when they walk in my gym. So imagine you walk in the gym, some guy does a cartwheel, and it's like, hey, welcome to United Fitness. Nice to meet you. My name's Alex. You would crack up, be like, who is this guy? But you know what you did after that? You give me money because you liked me automatically. Even if someone was a sourpuss, I could still turn the mood around because what they ultimately wanted to buy was the feeling that I was giving them during the conversation. Persuasion tool number five is authority. Think about a man who can tell the President of the United States to drop his trousers and stick his finger up his ass. Well, proctologist can do that whenever they want because they're a doctor and in the doctor's office, they are the authority. If Warren Buffett gives you investment advice, you can move on it faster because you just trust that he's right, even if his advice is the same as a high school teacher. The reason it's so powerful is not because what an authority says is actually more persuasive in terms of the actual words they say, but because people put up fewer filters and accept more things as truth, which means it has more persuasive ability independent of the message. As soon as you find a trusted source, what do you do? You just listen to it. Right? Which is why mentors are so valuable, because it actually decreases our speed to decision making and getting action done, which is why we seek out mentors to begin with, which is maybe why you watch stuff on YouTube. What do you have to do to do this? You show diplomas, credentials, awards, etc. And your track record, which is if you followed my channel at all. All I talk about is building your life resume and having a track record to stand on, rather than puffing your chest and having lots of charisma. Instead you're saying, you can believe me because of what I've done, not what I'm telling you I'm going to do. But on top of that, if you want a third party accreditation, I printed out certifications for myself and every one of my trainers because people would come in and be like, well, are your trainers certified? I would say, like, one, which ones do you want? They would never have any idea. And two, I would say all of my trainers are double or triple certified. Mind you, certifications are not accredited in the United States. Meaning I could have 10 certifications that I certified them myself. No one knows. I did pay for my trainers to get certified through actual ones, but I also internally certified them so they had more authority. Persuasive tool number six, scarcity and urgency. Urgency is a function of time. So promotion ends tomorrow. Scarcity is a function of units. I only have 100 of them left. People value what is scarce. The reason gold is inherently valuable versus a rock is that there's just less of it. The reason De Beers has become this diamond conglomerate, even though rubies and sapphires are actually rarer than diamonds, is they own all the diamonds. They keep them in vaults just so that they can keep the scarcity high enough on the diamonds to fetch a premium price. And so the way that you implement this in persuasion is that you use limits, limited time limit supply. One time offers to create the perception of scarcity. The other way of doing is talking loss language. So instead of like, don't you want to get. It's. You don't want to miss out on different way of framing the same concept. People have more loss aversion than they have desire to gain. So if you've seen Chanel or Gucci or Prada or whatever, they actually don't tell the stores how much of any item they'll send. They'll have a new spring line and they'll send one or two or three purses, and they won't tell the store how many they're going to send in a real way. The salespeople have the same concept of urgency. They probably figured it out at corporate that even if they said, hey, say that we don't have that many purses, the sales people like, actually, we got more in the back. And so they just actually control the whole thing centrally. They only send them and they're like, I don't know when I'm going to get the next one in or if I'm going to get another one in at all. But then they took it even further. And during COVID if you saw it, there were lines out the door because there's like one person in one person now. You know what stores kept that while everyone else let it go? The fancy stores, because they want to hold a scarce resource, they want to show that there's tons of demand. That's a little bit of social proof. You have to be special, it's exclusive in order to get in. The key to doing this is not being fake. I don't know how to say this to you differently. Besides, trust me, if you actually put true scarcity on something, you will sell more. So if you can handle 20 people a week in your business, or you have X amount of product, tell people your limits. The reason Amazon still says 23 left in stock is because they know that more people will buy it if they see that there's limits. So if I said, hey, I can send you 1000 customers, smart, you probably couldn't take them. So just be explicit about how many you have left and you'll actually sell more.