Cialdini’s 7 Principles of Influence: A Deep Dive with Dr Chris Phelps

0:00Dr Chris Phelps:We make our strategies around the excuses our customers were giving us after we got a no. When you make your strategies around the things people are actually using to make their decisions, magical things tend to happen. People tend to mix those two words up, right? They think persuasion is the same as coercion, manipulation, intimidation. It shows that we need to differentiate a true gift versus a reward. If there are strings attached, if you do this, then you get this, that's a reward. So in a popular study here in the States with a popular restaurant in Chicago, they had a 30 % no-show rates on reservations to this restaurant.

0:35Dr Chris Phelps:Well, they changed that by turning it into a commitment question from please call us if you can't make it to, hey, Zach, will you please call us if you can't make your reservation? Just that one simple act of commitment question, drop no-show rates from 30 % to 10%. Why do I trust the 4.3 review more than the 5 review? Lead early on in the conversation with the weakness in your case first and study show that's a credibility shortcut. That builds trust faster with that person in that moment than anything else possible.

1:08Dr. Chris Phelps, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Jack. Thanks for having me. It's amazing to have you. I've been really, really looking forward to this one. I'm going to hit you with a big open question, Chris. Who are you? What problem do you solve?

1:24Dr Chris Phelps:Wow, great question. So I am the U.S. CEO of the Cialdini Institute, named after and founded by a proclaimed and world-renowned behavioral psychologist, Dr. Robert Cialdini. Wrote a book, Influence the Psychology of Persuasion, written over 40 years ago, yet not only still present today, more relevant than it's ever been in what his research found. So what problem do we solve is this, right? I find oftentimes we tend to make strategies around, and from the business standpoint, sales, marketing, whatever. We make our strategies around the excuses our customers were giving us after we got a no to our request, buy this product, move this direction, et cetera.

2:09Dr Chris Phelps:What we do at the Child Dini Institute is actually teach, educate, consult on what people are actually using to make the majority of their decisions. Why do they really say no to you? And what factors are they using that tend to lead to a yes? Because when you make your strategies around the things people are actually using to make their decisions, magical things tend to happen. That's a beautiful answer, Chris. I want to use today as a real masterclass. So for anybody listening that's maybe read the book or they've listened to it on Audible, I want this to be a real in-depth, something that they can take away and we'll probably go through all the steps.

2:46But before we dive in, in your words, what's the difference between influence and manipulation?

2:53Dr Chris Phelps:Oh, great question. And I get that one asked a lot. In fact, oftentimes people tend to mix those two words up, right? They think persuasion is the same as coercion, manipulation, intimidation, forcing people to do stuff, you know, putting a gun to their head or sometimes just telling people to do stuff. We call that hierarchical authority. So somebody in charge of you, a boss, a police officer, what have you, somebody telling you to do stuff. Right. When in fact, the only thing that really unites them is persuasion, coercion, manipulation, intimidation. They're all under the same category. Right.

3:30Dr Chris Phelps:They're all under the heading of influence. OK. But if you think about it under this main category of influence, they're all subcategories. So we've got actually a spectrum, if you will, two different sides. On one end of the spectrum is persuasion. On the very far opposite end of that spectrum is coercion, intimidation, manipulation. Some other things in the middle, money, right? Incentives, bonuses. Okay, well, yeah, you put some money in front of somebody that might influence them to take an action, okay? So what separates these guys if they're on opposite ends of the spectrum? Well, with intimidation, coercion, manipulation, telling people to do stuff, picture putting a gun to somebody's head.

4:13Dr Chris Phelps:They don't feel like they have a viable choice. Not really. I mean, I guess they kind of do. It's do it or die. But in their world, they don't really feel like it's a viable choice. And in essence, they don't really feel like they're in control. That's really what it's about. Choice and no control in this scenario. it. Versus persuasion, the opposite end of the spectrum, is completely about giving them choices. They're totally in control. Nobody's forcing them to do anything. And they have a choice. So they're in control and they have a choice. So persuasion by definition is you as a recipient receive a message.

4:47Dr Chris Phelps:You hear it, you see it, you read it in some format. And something about that message changes your perspective about that thing. It changes your mindset and your thinking about that thing. And that's why you choose to change your behavior. Nobody told you to do it. Nobody forced you to do it. You chose it every step of the way. So persuasion is all about choice and you're in control. Manipulation, force, intimidation, telling people to do stuff. You don't feel like you're in control and don't have a choice. What a great answer. I'm excited already for this one. Let's get into it. So let's start off with reciprocity.

5:24So the idea of giving first to get later, hopefully, where do you see people using this the best?

5:33Dr Chris Phelps:Well, you know, truthfully, let's think about why do we do that, right, by definition. So when you give someone a gift of significance and value, an obligation is created inside of you where you feel like you have to give back in kind, right? So where does this obligation come from? It's actually this social external influence on us, right? So think of it this way. What do we call people as a society who don't routinely give back when given to? What do we call those to just take, take, take, right? There's no positive word in the English language to describe those people. Moochers, ingrates, parasites, teenagers.

6:13Okay. So we don't

6:15Dr Chris Phelps:want others to perceive us in that light, right? As being one of those kinds of people. So that's where the obligation comes from. So if given to, we feel the need to give back in that obligation. So where I find some of the most powerful gifts you can give people, on the surface, you think of a gift as a physical, tangible thing you can hand to somebody. Here's a present, here's a gift card, whatever. Actually, some of the more powerful gifts you can give people are those intangible gifts, things you can't quite put your hands on and your fingers on, like doing someone a favor. Somebody does you a favor.

6:51Dr Chris Phelps:Hey, mate, will you help me move this weekend? Yeah, well, guess what? When it's time for them to move, who are they going to call? You, right? So favors are big time intangible gifts we give someone. You'd be shocked to know that sometimes a praise and compliment from someone is perceived as a gift by them, right? Spending your time, active listening, there's a million and one different intangible gifts we can give folks. How do you know that you've given someone a gift of value, even if it may have not meant anything to you? Let's say it's a customer, you're just doing your job, even if they just paid you for it, right?

7:29Dr Chris Phelps:But yet there's still something there, that obligation still there. Well, when that person says two magic words, you know, you've got it. You're in that situation. And the two words are when they genuinely say, thank you. Thank you for whatever, for doing that for me, for taking it off my plate for this thing. So if they're going out of their way to genuinely thank you or praise you for some action or effort you've done, you've already given the gift. And they're still bringing it up because they want to scratch this obligation off their to-do list. We don't like to-do lists. We got enough on them already.

8:04Dr Chris Phelps:So when these things come on our list, we want to get them off our plate as fast as possible. So if in those situations you find yourself in a moment and you've already given a gift because we give away more of these than we realize each day, see it for what it is. They want to do something to give back in kind. So if you generally had something to ask that person, request, whatever, now's the time to do it. And you're now more likely than ever to get a yes. may i just to make the podcast interesting may i give a devil's advocate and see what the rebuttal is yeah sure um so me and jack run a business and as business owners we accept that we will be sold to and i quite like the different creative messages that we get and the ones that have a gift card type thing attached to them like if you sit this meeting with us you'll get this thing in return, no obligation, I'll give you this, are typically the ones where my guard goes up a little bit.

9:02And I think, ah, there's going to be like a big ask coming from this one. Am I a skeptical person or is that a universal experience? Do you think that when you see that the guard goes up a little bit?

9:13Dr Chris Phelps:No, it's a big time guard goes up, but I'm glad you mentioned that because it helps us. We need, it shows that we need to differentiate a true gift versus a reward. A reward and incentive is exactly what you're describing. Now, they may call it a gift, but it's not a gift by definition. If there are strings attached, if you do this, then you get this, that's a reward. Again, it's a spectrum. That is completely different and opposite of true reciprocity. So gifts are given on the front end first with no expectation of a return. OK, rewards always have an expectation of a return. So think of it this way.

9:55Dr Chris Phelps:You know, while gifts are unconditional. Rewards are very conditional. If you do this, then you get this. Rewards tend to end relationships. Well, I did what you said and I got what you said, so I'm done. Satisfied. Contract satisfied. Whereas gifts, true gifts, tend to open relationships instead. So while some people, it's a misnomer, they call it a gift. If their strings attach, it's a reward. And most studies show that when compared to gifts, most gifts, if it's a true gift, have twice as much influence power to getting people to say yes than a reward. In fact, one big study we cite, a$5 gift card had twice as much influence to get people to say yes versus getting a$50 reward or incentive if they did the thing.

10:43Dr Chris Phelps:So small gifts have a lot more influence than even large rewards. I love it. Commitment and consistency, Chris. Where are businesses going wrong with this? Yes, great question. This was actually one of the root causes behind the majority of problems in my early businesses, right? The principle of consistency simply states that if people make a commitment, they tend to follow through and do with the commitment that they said, right? So if you get a commitment, they do what they say. Well, I realized, well, why aren't my customers coming back and saying yes for our services? Why my team? Why do I have to keep micromanaging them?

11:27Dr Chris Phelps:Why do I have to keep telling them to do stuff and do their job? Right. Why, when the cat's away, the mice will play versus why don't they just do their job? Right. My associate doctors, why am I paying for them to go get education that those docs that work for me? And then why are they not coming back and using the education with their patients? Right. So to speak. So all of these kind of issues and fires going on in my businesses and I couldn't figure out the root cause until I heard child eating talk about consistency. and that's really it. So if you get a commitment, they do. If they're not doing, what was I missing?

12:01Dr Chris Phelps:Nobody, I wasn't getting a commitment out of anyone to do anything. So I realized I had to go back and take a hard look and say, all right, I got to figure out what kind of commitments do I need to get out of people to change their behavior, right? And so I did. And so the type of commitments, we need to get out of people early on in our situation with them is, number one is you got to get an active commitment. Okay. Active commitment. One example of that is just simply telling folks that you're going to do something. That's an active commitment. So in a popular study here in the States with a popular restaurant in Chicago, they had a 30 % no-show rates on reservations to this restaurant.

12:38Dr Chris Phelps:So it was very popular, had a great authority, won a lot of awards, and they still had a hard time getting people to show up for these reservations for dinner. Well, they would normally make a reservation and end the call with a statement. Hey, please call us if you can't make your appointment. Okay, great. Right? Statements. Well, they changed that by turning it into a commitment question from please call us if you can't make it to, hey, Zach, will you please call us if you can't make your reservation? And they waited for them to say, yeah, of course I will. Okay, great. We We look forward to seeing you on this night and this time.

13:16Dr Chris Phelps:Just that one simple active commitment question. Drop no-show rates from 30 % to 10%. Okay. So the idea is if you leave it up here, you're not really committed to it. So you got to tell people you're going to do these things or get them to tell you they're going to do these things to get an active commitment. We got to get public commitments out of people. Right. The more people that know you said you were going to do something, the more influence there is on you to do it. Okay. So that's that social pressure again. And last but not least, we got to give people voluntary commitments. If you just give them one option, you're basically backing them into a corner.

13:55Dr Chris Phelps:You're telling them, do this. Versus simply backing that up and presenting it as a choice. hey this or that which would you prefer automatically you're creating more of a voluntary commitment there they have a choice now they don't feel like they're being told and backed into a corner anymore and every time you present things to this or that scenario they're making more and more of a commitment to that thing and to do it so the key with consistency is about understanding that number one you need to get better commitments out of people and what type of commitments you need to get voluntary public and active Nice, really nice.

14:33And then my head was going, so I don't know if this is wrong, but my head, when I was reading this and thinking about it today, I was thinking when it comes to like commitments, I would think of a marketing agency that would say, we're going to charge you£10 ,000 for an SEO audit. And then from there, that's a mini commitment. And also moving forward, we're going to charge you£50 ,000 a month. Does that fall into that category or is that something completely different?

15:04Dr Chris Phelps:Well, if you as the customer of that sign an agreement and it spells out what they're going to do for you, then you as the customer just made a commitment to not only paying them, but to getting those services. They have made a commitment to provide those services now for that price. So, yeah, in that case, if the person has either verbally agreed to it, oh, yeah, yes, I'll move forward with this or signed a contract. Those are both commitments. nice let's um let's talk about social proof so the idea that we uh we follow what we're seeing other people that we're following the crowd so there's there's an interesting piece here that i'd love to get your opinion on we're obviously tribal beings so we like to see what the rest of the tribe is doing but something unique seems to happen in amazon culture why do i trust the 4.3 review more than the five review?

16:02Dr Chris Phelps:Yeah, very interesting. Because I think part of it is this, most of the time when these principles are present, they kind of trigger us at a subconscious level, right? Rational thought doesn't really come into play. We've learned because we're so distracted by all the things going on in our world, what's on our phone, social media, everything on our to-do list, we don't have time to make a rational decision about everything. It takes too much mental energy and effort. So when these principles are present, we've learned to lean on them to trigger us to respond. For instance, if you're walking up to a cafe for the first time, right, this morning, and 50 people run out of that place screaming in terror in the other direction, the social proof of that is going to kick in without much thought, right?

16:51Dr Chris Phelps:Are you going to run into the cafe to see what they're running from? No, you're going to turntail and run with them. And then when you finally get someplace kind of safe, you're going to go, all right, what do we got? What are we running from? Okay. That's the pull of social proof. Okay. So in that case, normally we would be triggered by evidence that others have said something positive about this. In this kind of scenario, sometimes things do break through the surface and get to the rational level of thinking. And our rational level of thinking is this, what are the odds of any business you've ever been into that a hundred percent of the people said, perfect reviews.

17:27Dr Chris Phelps:Is there even such a thing? So automatically we don't believe in perfection. There's no such thing. So if somebody presents it as perfection, automatically that's going to jump right to our experience, right to the rational thought and say, I don't know, something's not right with that. But this one that's not perfect, it's still the majority. Okay. I'll trust that more that's interesting that that's a dialogue that's happening at almost unconscious level um interesting okay what do you think is a good example for listeners of maybe a brand that you think of straight away when you think of that's a brand that really demonstrates social proof that other people follow just because they're used by the majority yeah um well i tell you like history wise, you guys have heard of Amazon, right?

18:17Dr Chris Phelps:Okay. You know, Amazon didn't start their company by selling stuff. Amazon built their business off social proof. Okay. It was one of the first places you could go to. It was a review site. Okay. That's what it was. Okay. It was the first place you could go to that if I want to buy a vacuum cleaner and I wasn't unsure about which one to buy, I could go to Amazon and see, well, geez, 5 ,000 people said something positive about this vacuum. No one said anything positive about that one. I don't know anything about vacuums, but which one am I more likely to buy now? Right. And so they leveraged that power of basically reviewing and letting the community define their opinions about these things, putting that social proof information out there.

19:00Dr Chris Phelps:And it was so popular. It got so many eyeballs. Then of course, Amazon got smart and decided, well, you know what, instead of just reviewing this stuff. Why don't we sell it? So, and they continue to leverage that today, right? I see all kinds of companies leveraging social proof in appropriate ways. You know, if I'm going to order an Uber or Lyft, okay, and I look at my app, you know, there's some inherent uncertainty about using those kinds of things. Look, I'm going to get into a random stranger's car. What verification has anybody done to this person to let me know that I'm going to be safe and make it to my destination, right?

19:39Dr Chris Phelps:I remember the first time I put my mom into an Uber. You know, she's retired, she's older, and in her generation, you didn't get in strangers' cars, right? And next thing I know, she's driving away and looking at me at the backseat like I'm never going to see her again, like that kind of look. Like she thinks that's it. She's just going to disappear. So they understood that there's this uncertainty that's holding back their business. So what do you see now? You see driver review ratings. This driver has, you know, same thing, 4.9 out of five stars. They actually have over successfully 3 ,000 successful trips.

20:16Dr Chris Phelps:Okay, so if they've driven with 3 ,000 people and they've all said something positive overall, all right, maybe I'll be safe taking this Uber or Lyft, right? So I thought that was a powerful way that they've leveraged social proof information to not only get people to use their service, but to get them to use it more often than they would otherwise. Because it totally reduced their uncertainty, which is what social proof does. Beautiful. And then I always think for the next one, the analogy I think of is if you went up to somebody in a bar, Chris, and started talking at them, and then at the end of it, you just say, I'm a great listener.

20:55they're probably going to look at you baffled so when I think about like authority and trusting the expert when we when we're sat on sales calls I want to be the expert I want to be the trusted advisor in the room I can't tell them I can't tell them that I'm an expert because they'd look at me and go you're not an expert you're a schmuck who are you so I guess how how do you how do you build that authority and how do you maybe do that in a short amount of time?

21:24Dr Chris Phelps:Yeah, great question. I mean, the authority principle by definition is that you really want to let other people, other items, other things present you as an authority versus you telling people you're the authority, as you said, right? So one simple way, if you're going to be in a group of people is ideally somebody should introduce you and endorse you to that group, right? At a minimum, introduce you. Just the simple act of an introduction, most studies show that after being introduced, those people now will now take your advice more to heart, right? So you'll get more compliance. You'll be seen more as an expert just from a simple introduction.

22:06Dr Chris Phelps:Why? Because who normally do we introduce? Important people, successful people. So if you're being introduced to me, you must be smart. You must be important and successful. Adding that endorsement just amplifies the effect to another level. Okay. So have somebody else introduce you and your credentials. If you don't have anybody else directly to do that, then send them that information. Let's say it's a prospect or a potential customer you're going to meet with. Send them your information and all you, we call your authority triggers, right? Your credentials, your experience, your rewards, whatever you want to brag about yourself, send that to them in written form before you get there.

22:43Dr Chris Phelps:That item can present you as an expert. Yeah, you wrote it, but it's not you telling them directly. It's this piece of paper now presenting you as the expert. So try to get some kind of introduction with them. So authority is about letting other people, other items, other things present you as the expert. So in essence, you got to show them some expertise. You have to have evidence and get that evidence in front of them without you doing it directly. The other half of the authority principle is really about trust. We need trustworthy experts to tell us what we should do. That's who we look to for real advice.

23:18Dr Chris Phelps:You could be an expert about this topic all day long, but if I don't trust you, I'm not going to say yes to you. So what can you do to build trust? And Dr. Cialdini's talked about this in numerous podcasts, but a trust shortcut that's available is if you really had, let's say you're going to present them something, you're going to try to do a sales presentation or whatever. If there really is a negative or a weakness in your case, an elephant in the room, like something you normally might not want to talk about, don't hide it. Start with it. lead early on the conversation with the weakness in your case first and study show that's a credibility shortcut that builds trust faster with that person in that moment than anything else possible.