SOCIAL INFLUENCE-8

Last - but not least influence rule - Promise and Consistency

Thou must stay consistent with what you have already done.

If you want to lose weight, write a letter to all your family and friends with a promise that you will lose 20 pounds by Christmas. Sign it. If you have the strength to do this, the promise and consistency influence rule will kick in and make sure you will comply. Internal persuasion - why not?

Our need to maintain consistency is a powerful influence tool.

Many people are not very consistent. They change their minds all the time, and never seem to make up their minds. In spite of this, they respond to the need to stay consistent. You just have to find the things they really want to stay consistent with.

Another automatic reaction here. If our minds can draw on this rule to justify a decision, no thinking required. It just has to stay consistent with a previous decision or action. Sharp salespeople know this. They simply get you to agree with them on a few simple no-brainers and before you know it you have agreed to buy. Consistency at work.

It goes deeper than that. If we have made up our minds about something, we don't have to re-think the justifications for the decision. It's already there.

Our fundraiser now has another weapon in his arsenal. All he has to do is to figure out if you have ever given money to any fund-raising attempts. Yes?, you are toast. Cooked.

Your whole being screams 'TILT' if you now decline to give. You have given before, and now you must stay consistent with that decision. It's an easy decision to make. No thinking required. Automatic justification.

All the persuader did was to establish previous beliefs or actions. Then ask the question. This is important to know, because if the persuader had NOT determined previous action, the target would have little external reason to be consistent with it. But, he did bring it up, and now that previous action is out in the open.

As you can see from all of this, this is not about so called 'hard closes' that sales people used to learn and exert on you. No, done effectively, using these methods YOU are the one making the decisions. It all comes from INSIDE. It's there all along, the persuader just triggers these mental short-cuts and asks for a decision, being the persuadee is now easy. No thinking required.

Another fascinating aspect about this is the need to act fast. Before logic takes over. We want to stay mindlessly consistent so bad that if logic tells us to wait and analyze this, our mind goes right on ahead and makes the decision for us.

How about combining this with the rule of scarcity?? What a concept.

Dr. Cialdini calls this "our consistency tapes". Good persuaders will just have us turn on our tapes, and voila, mindless, logic void compliance is forthcoming.

This forms the basis for some pretty clever and devious compliance tactics. Imagine if you can start from scratch, and create the very foundation of agreement on which to base future decisions on? If you were a real estate sales person, you would begin by having the prospect agree with simple things such as "owning a house has to be better than renting, wouldn't you agree?" She would then escalate the line of agreements, dealing with the neighborhood, the schools and so on. Finally, she will ask for the sale, and since you have agreed to everything she has pointed out, you are trapped by the consistency rule.

This is also how they got GI's to 'turn against their country' during the Korean and Vietnam wars. The interrogators did very seldom threatened the prisoners. The merely had them agree to seemingly innocent and obvious statements such as: "You agree that the US has more money than China?" Statements the GI's thought innocent enough. Perhaps there was a minor reward in agreeing. In any case, the questioning escalated, and lo and behold soon the big questions came. The consistency force is very difficult to resist.

It's the principle the classic "FOOT IN THE DOOR" sales strategy is based on.

Let's get the prospect to agree on a whole bunch of things leading up to the big close.

It's an important strategy that can be used in any type of negotiating or selling. It works even better if you can get the target to write it down. Then you have proof that the previous agreement was made. For instance, I have used this in past selling efforts. I have asked prospects to send me a fax outlining their needs. Based on those documents, I started to escalate the commitments until there was nothing left to do but to ask for the order. There were no objections left.

Another strategy I have used quite a bit is the 'free survey of your present system' approach. Basically I get approval to perform a free site-evaluation and offer the prospect a free consultant's evaluation of the situation. Once they agree to the contents of the report, I can start building the prospect's commitments into a sale. In reality, there is nothing underhanded with this, the site evaluation is of value. The analysis was made in earnest, the goal is to provide the client with a better solution. The challenge we face as salespeople is to get to YES without duress or hard pressure sales tactics.

These Social Influence rules will help you do exactly that. Because they all bring out a non-thinking compliance.

The principles discussed can not only bring compliance, but feed other persuasion methods as well. Examples are pity and fear.

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