Tommy Schaff: 05:35
Well and you know, it shows. So there you go. There you go. My topic is “Influence in Action” and it’s talking about sales and marketing challenges. And the question we’ll start with today so that it has some applicability is we can talk in generic terms. But I got this as a gift years ago and it was a piece of metal engraved. It said, what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail? I invite you to go to the chat room. I’d like you to go to the chat box and tell me what would you do that required more influence. If you knew you would not fail, what would be big enough? What would be great enough? What are you up to? What would you do if you knew you could not fail? And I’ll tell you, look at all the energy. There’s no answers. So this sounds like my love life with my wife. Awaken humanity. All right, let’s go with small things. No. Move the room of a thousand people. Excellent. Anybody else? What would you do? Do a webinar. What else would you do? Close an offer at 500,000. Great. I like that song. Anybody else? What would you do? Give me some action. So we have a place. I do a TEDtalk. Ban single use plastics worldwide. Great. So I have a vision on something I care about, ecology. Anybody else? What would you do? Run for office again. Learn public speaking as a shy person. Get two more. Go sail the Caribbean. Anything else? Stop human trafficking. Anything else? Finish my book. To create a movement and change marketing for mindful, purpose driven entrepreneurs. Great. Skydive. Good. Anything else? Get more people to serve, help and love unconditionally. So a lot of things that we would do influence. So I think our friend Brian said, hey Tom, have a thesis. Why does Cialdini matter? Well, when I first came across the book in 1984. And that’s the actual copy. Nobody really heard of this thing. I was a reader. I studied a lot. I was in college and I read it and I thought, boy, if I understood these principles, I could win elections, I could sell things, I could get things done. I quit the college I was at, I went to the state tax commissioner’s office. I sold him a consulting project at 20 years to redesign the North Dakota Tax Commissioners computer system. I got the job. I finished it in three months. IBM saw my work. They said, come work for us at IBM, be in sales. I went back to college at Minnesota. I was there for two months, and became the president of the Greek system. And I said, you know what? These Influence ideas matter. Why are they relevant? I was a college debater. I beat the crap out of somebody with my mind while somebody else watched and laughed and said, wow, they crushed that guy. Selling, unfortunately, isn’t a debate. I used to think that if I could prove my point, if I could fight with you with facts and logic, I would win. It never occurred to me that the people I was trying to influence are the damn judges. Never beat the judge. I didn’t know that in 1984. So I’ve studied that for years. And if you could see, your shelf probably looks like that. But you’ve got Pre-suasion and you’ve got, you know, there’s been like five editions, so you got that one and then you got the science one. You probably have the comic book, you probably have the latest edition. You probably had his work with Steve Martin from England. And if you haven’t read this yet, this might be even the most helpful one. Nancy Harhurt, who’s a lovely person using behavioral science and marketing. You want to get on her LinkedIn. And the reason is she posts science about marketing 3 or 4 times a week, and they’re little factoids take you five minutes to watch and they’re perfect. I got the itch after I had found out I was chronically unemployable. I just didn’t want to work for anyone. About 30 years ago, I started my own business and I thought I did strategic planning for 62 fortune 500 CEOs. I designed toys for Happy Meals. I fixed things out with a friend of ours, Brian and mine named Brian Mattimore. I do these things with them. And then I accidentally got into sales training in ‘97 when I bought a Sandler franchise for a friend, and then he didn’t fulfill it. And my wife said, you spend all that money, you need to be a sales trainer. So in ‘97, I became a sales trainer. Over the years, what I found are these, what were then “6 Principles of Persuasion” mattered. Cialdini said in his original work, there were six ideas. In his most recent work, he said, there are now seven. He said, you know what? When it comes to persuasion, universal. And why does Cialdini matter? There are three reasons. The first one is it’s powerful, it’s powerful. It works. Why it’s universal? It’s been since the beginning of time and every culture. The second one is, it’s based on science. This is not made up. It’s not a culture of personality. It’s science. It takes the best science of 70 years, takes the best things out of it, applies it into cubes, sees if it’s real and then takes it and evangelizes it. So it’s scientific. And why that matters is because it’s scientific and can be learned. Well, it can be taught. If it’s science, it can be taught. And if it can be taught, it can be learned. Here’s the third reason. There’s a whole lot of things that need to change and somebody needs to do it. Maybe it’s you. Now, one of the things I’ll tell you is all of these six principles that we’re going to look at today, they will work, but they’re like guns. Guns don’t kill people. People do. These things persuade for good. They persuade people for bad. And whenever you compromise your ethics, and a big part of whenever we do this kind of training is there is this part that says the better you are at these concepts, the more you say no to things. Because when you compromise and do something that’s good for you and not for other people, it becomes part of your character. And then you get to a point where you can’t come back when you know how to get people to do things, and you take advantage of that, you can’t come back and then you can’t be trusted because the world knows. Social media is a bugger. I live in Saint Louis. Down the road from me is Andy Frisella. Some of you might have read 75 hard or read, you know, or get products for first form. He shamed female cops this week. He is not going to come back from that. That’s going to be a bad thing. Our world punishes you for making a mistake. So one of the things as we look for this is maybe think about how can I do this for good? And not just how do I get paid for it? I’ll tell you the thing about doctor Bob, I’ve studied with doctor Bob for five years, so I spent a lot of time with him. The guy cares nothing about money. What he cares about is making a difference and doing well. The six principles he talked about is reciprocity. We give and then we get. In every culture in the world we are cautioned to give, to get and then to repay. You get something, you give it back and then you get something again and you give it back. Reciprocation creates a potential open loop forever to give and get. Commitment and consistency is the idea that we do what we have previously done in our life, our choices, our public, active and voluntary commitments. They matter. Social proof. Go on to Amazon. If you don’t know how to buy Himalayan sea salt, you say, who’s got the most reviews that are the best? And you say there’s 3000 Himalayan sea salts and you pick one to buy in a millisecond. Authority. When in doubt, we look to others that are smarter than us. But here’s the thing with all of these you don’t research this. You don’t think about this. You do all this automatically in a millisecond. You make decisions in an instant. As a person that’s kind of bright and that studied a lot. I knew a lot, and I would try to make things complicated. I wanted to show people how smart I was. Then I asked myself, If I’m so smart, why am I not rich? Too smart for your own good. Sometimes we need to dumb down and understand it’s not all of your being right that matters. Perhaps it’s that we understand where people are in their head. Now, two last principles that I’m going to talk about and then I’m going to drill down deep are liking and scarcity. Liking is this idea that we like people and often they’re like us. But there’s a specific art to liking. We like people that are similar to us. We like people that complement us. We like people that want to help us and people that aren’t like us and that don’t praise us and that don’t want to help us, we don’t like. But at the end of the day, we like people that like us first. I had a list of 17 qualities I wanted in a life partner. I met my wife. I talked to her. I danced with her. I asked her 17 questions. She’s like, you ask a lot of questions. First woman I ever met that was 17 for 17, I married her. I said to my younger son, Son, when I met your mom, I had a list of 17 things. What’s your list? He looked at me and said, I just want somebody who likes me. Not on my list. My son was smarter than I am. You know who we like the most? People that like us. Instead of figuring out how to get people to like you, the magic elixir of the realm is like people tell people you like them. show people how you’re like them. But it starts with liking somebody. You watch the political races that are coming down. National, state, local. I don’t want to get political with you. The people that don’t like you, you don’t like. The people that like you, you go, they respect me, you’ll vote for. Scarcity is this idea that we don’t value what we get. We value what we will lose. Now I have a presentation I built out. I moved it around while people are talking to first deal with these breakout rooms to create some value for our group, and help sell the idea of why an accountability group would be great. So I’d like to show you two principles that deal with that. Now in this session that we’re having, we’re going to go fast because I got a lot of content. I spent five years with doctor Bob. I’m one of six people in America that can teach the class on Cialdini. I won’t be doing any selling. Some of you will maybe want more information. I’ll give you my credential. For 30 years I’ve been studying language and one of the six trainers most of you would be more known for Chet Holmes Ultimate sales machine. When Chet was dying, he asked me to take over for him and I became the chief strategy officer for BBI working with Chet and Tony, speaking after Tony on four continents. In the time of studying with Tony and Chet, and Sandler and Robert Cialdini come up with a couple ideas. We have a seminar. I put a discount price. I didn’t do all the drops and the value loads. For those of you that ever care about that, we have some coming up. There’s a QR code you can take a picture of and a phone. That’s probably not right for most of you. I’m not going to pitch. Let’s go on, but I wanted to give it to you. The idea is you start somewhere, you make a commitment and it’s connected to the foot in the door technique. You make a request of someone and then you build on it. What’s your goal? Then people defend their goal. Why did it change? People had an identity that said, I’m going to raise my goal and they had to live up to it. Research was done in Palo Alto, Stanford area. They went to neighborhoods gated and said, people are driving like crazy through our neighborhoods. Would you put a four foot by eight foot sign in your yard? Weirdly enough, 17% of the people said sure. They went to similar homes in the same neighborhoods and said, people are driving through our neighborhoods and they’re going really fast. And little Billy can hear an old guy, and this person’s in a wheelchair, and there are dogs and puppies and babies. This has got to stop. Would you sign a petition that you won’t drive fast? Everybody signed the petition. They said, would you put a little three inch by five inch card in your window? Everyone said, sure. I don’t know how many did it. They came back to the same houses 30 days later, people are still driving fast through our neighborhood. Would you put a four foot by eight foot hand-painted sign in your yard? The number, 76% of the people put the signs in their yard. Now, what I want you to get from that is decisions we commit to, we make and live up to that. Research was one of the big reasons that Obama won the swing states in his elections. They had on the floor canvassers asking people to sign petitions, and then they came back to say, this is how this administration is going to help you with what you believe in. Whenever we make a decision, we live up to it and we continue to make decisions for that. When I help my clients sell life insurance, for example, we ask them, are you responsible? Yes. See, when a person tells you they’re responsible, they love somebody. They have a family. They care about philanthropic areas. They don’t want to pay taxes. When they say those five things, all of them buy life insurance because they pre-suaded, they pre-framed all of their decisions. Consistency is a powerful idea. It increases the percentage of consistent behavior in saving 78%, exercise to 65%, energy consumption 72%, people give away money 83% when they say they will do it. It’s the reason why people send you a bunch of labels, and then you give them $15, and then five years later you give them a couple thousand. My wife can’t say no to anyone except for me. Okay, now here’s the deal. Every time somebody sends her like, mailing label, she sends them $15. I say, do you like this group? She goes, yeah, I’m going to give them several thousand dollars. She says no. I say, quit doing it. You have 25 people. You give $15. They’re going to pay $300 to try to get you to pay $2,000. And I have to throw this shit in the recycling. Like, quit it. Pick a lane. I don’t care if you want to give to all, but don’t cost them money because you believe and feel guilty. Power of commitments. Whenever people make commitments in their Identity. You’ll get 400% more participation. What am I? Scarcity is interesting. And I was watching the chat box and Angela Sutton said, you know, this is like Tony Robbins, who I spent a lot of time with, too. It’s like his Dickens effect. You visualize what you want and then what happens if you don’t get it? Scarcity is the idea of what do I lose? You will do more to protect what you have than you will to get more. If you have a choice, protect $50 or make $50. You’ll protect 50. Doesn’t make sense to me, but people do it. So it’s not what you make. They did a study and they looked and said, okay, let’s take a look at energy. We’re going to audit your house and you could save this much money. You could save this much money every day, or it costs you this much money every day. The frame loss of what it cost 150%. Now, direct marketers and marketing people, here’s the lesson: don’t talk about what you get. Talk about what it costs not to do the deal. What will it cost you if you don’t do this? Now there’s another idea that’ll come up in a moment. It’s called reciprocal concessions. And it’s reciprocity has a baby with a scarcity. Let me share with you. Reciprocity says I do something for you, you do something for me. I give you a gift, you give me a gift back. I invite you to my house, you invite me to your house. I take you to a game, you take me to the game. I send you a book, you send me a book. When you ask someone to buy something, always have a second offer. The power, the secret power is when somebody says no to you, immediately give them a second choice. Reciprocal. Reciprocal concession says when somebody says no to a good offer in the moment, they’re more likely to say yes to the second offer. What a great marketer does is they make 2 or 3 offers. They are always prepared for the secondary offer. You give them the offer that they should buy. You give them a second offer that’s smaller. That’s reciprocity. But you must make it in the moment. When you sell your services, your copywriting, your consulting, you make at least two offers at one time. Here’s big, here’s small. But here’s where scarcity comes: when you show them the second offer, that’s less, tell them what they don’t get and what it’s going to cost them. I want to repeat that again. You show big offer and small offer, but you get what you pay for. When you spend less money, you have less cash drain in the immediate, you get less, you give up these things and this is the financial impact of going with the smaller offer. What will happen is people will slingshot back into the first offer, and more people overall will take at least the second offer and your average will be bigger. Always make two offers. Always start with the big offer, not the little offer. It’s not good to tell people what your benefits are. What you want to look is here’s what’s unique about this, and here’s what it costs you if you don’t buy it. Now, when you do that, several things will happen whenever there’s something not available. I’m going to the Oakland A’s game to see the last Oakland A’s game ever next Thursday. Well, no one wanted to go to an Oakland A’s game. That’s why they’re leaving. But it’s the last one. And so it’s sold out. So you know what, the last game bunch of people like me are flying in to get it in so we can check it off our list. Sense of urgency. I paid a premium. They were all sold out. I had to buy them from scalpers. You’re going to the game? Oh, it’s exclusive. And you know what? Now it’s desirable to go to an A’s game. It won’t change the experience of the A’s game. Scarcity doesn’t make food taste better. It doesn’t make concerts better. It does make you want the ticket before you go faster. It doesn’t change the experience of the product, it changes the desire for the product. In the last two weeks, I’ve advised my financial clients to talk to those clients that need annuities to help them understand that the Fed is going to lower their rates quarter to a half a percent. I told them that the impact will be annuities will not have the yield shortly after that. And if they are serious, this is their time to buy. We don’t know when it’s going to change, but it’s going to change. Yesterday the Fed dropped a half a point. I don’t know which day, but yields for annuity are going to drop and they are going to pay less money. We don’t talk about what you get. Here’s what it potentially is going to cost you because of a future drop in the interest rate. We do things faster for that which we cannot have. Reciprocity is this idea of, we do things we give to people. In every culture. I give you something, you give something back. I open the door for you, you open the door for me. That’s how the game works. I help your kid, you help my kid. I pick up a round of drinks for you, you pick up a round of drinks for me. If you don’t do that, we call you Alligator Arms. We call you nasty names. You’re cheap. Nothing good happens. Nobody invites you to parties when you don’t reciprocate. That is in every culture of the world. Now, they did some studies, Doctor Cialdini, and they tested it at scale. What happens when you give a mentee your tip? If I’m a server and I say, hey, thanks Brian, thanks for coming here today. I appreciate you so much. I want to give you a mint. If I give you a mint, you make 3% more. It’s a mint that costs a cent. $50, $100 meal. I make three more bucks. If I’m a $50,000 server,I made $1,500 and that’s a trip to Vegas. Yeah, but what happens if I give you two mints? The second I give you two mints, that goes to 14% increase. It’s one x, you know what? You’re a great customer. I want to thank you. Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Brian? Brian, we’re role playing. Brian, is there anything else we can do? The answer is no. I’m very happy.
Brian Kurtz: 30:12
Yeah, I am, I’m more. Well, when you gave me the second mint, that was unexpected.
Tommy Schaff: 30:17
So we haven’t given it yet, so. Oh, you.
Brian Kurtz: 30:19
Haven’t given yet. Okay, okay. So you.
Tommy Schaff: 30:21
Say no. That’s it, I say great, here’s your check. I’ll take care of that when you’re ready. And you’ve been such a great customer. Here’s two mints for both of you right now. My 50,000 goes up. 7000 and a kid can go to a charter school. But what happens if we alter this? What happens if I give you two mints? But I give you a mint first. Brian, it’s been an honor to serve you. I’ll take care of the check at your convenience. Here’s a mint for you. And here’s a mint for you. I walk five steps away. I turn around and I go, you know what? We really love you. Here’s an extra one. And I give you the second mint. Does the tip stay at 14%? And the answer is it goes to 23%. And now a server makes $10,500 extra because of two mints. Now, this research was then taken into the real world with my clients. We have decided that whenever you give a gift, a good way to do reciprocity is to give. And the understanding under here is give when it’s not expected. That’s why my friend who passed away, John Rowland, he said, don’t give gifts on birthdays, Christmas and Thanksgiving. We expect that that’s an entitlement. It’s an awful time to give a gift
Brian Kurtz: 31:55
Yeah, Christmas in July.
Tommy Schaff: 31:57
– when it’s not expected. Unexpected gifts are magic. Gifts that are on dates that are special aren’t.
Brian Kurtz: 32:06
And the advantage, too, because I think Cialdini says be the first to give. So if you’re giving a gift on an anniversary or a birthday, they’re getting a lot of other gifts then, too. But at the unexpected times, you’re also the first.
Tommy Schaff: 32:21
So we’re going to look at that in a second. You’re exactly right. We want to give unexpected gifts. We want to give meaningful. And in this particular case, the meaning, it could be size. There’s one mint, and then it went to two. And when it went to two, it didn’t double. It went up four. It went from 3 to 14%. A bigger gift matters more. A gift that’s hard to get, matters more. An experience that someone can have matters more. An opportunity to meet somebody they couldn’t meet on their own matters more. Meaningful is not oh, I liked it, meaning is you couldn’t do this yourself. The third one is this idea that we give a gift and this gift is personalized. It was for me. What makes this go to 23 is I walk away and I come back and I go, you know what? You matter to me. Now, a note that you might want to write is, if you want more relationship. If you want relationships to open a door to keep a client or friend, or to fix one, you screwed up. We give. We give meaningful, we give unexpected, and we give personalized gifts. I’ll give you an example. I’m the largest baseball bobblehead collector in the world. I know that means I have a lot of issues. Get off my case. But here’s this thing. I have 6884 baseball bobbleheads. I spent some time with Bob. And what does he do? He gives me a bobblehead. Like, it’s funny getting a bobblehead. He gives me a bobblehead. He opens this box, he says nice things to me, I open it, I see it’s a bobblehead. I don’t expect it. It’s weird for him to do that, but inside of it you can’t see, but in the face of that bobblehead is my face. It’s customized for my face. Do I look like I’m happy? I didn’t have the heart to tell him, football isn’t a sport, only baseball is. So that’s one of my favorite bobbleheads. Brian already said it. Always be the first person to give. We give first, and it opens the loop. Whenever we give, if I give unexpected, if I give something that’s meaning, something bigger. Don’t give 10,000 people something. Give 20 something bigger. We talked about ruling just for a brief sense. Brian talked about giftology. In the other room, I have a $2,000 set of knives the guy sent me back in the day. Over in the other room, I got a video in a walnut box that when you open it, it talks to me and says beautiful things about me. And then there’s a cup that’s a coffee cup that is made with like what my life is and what they respect about me. You get a gift that’s personal, meaningful and unexpected, and you do it first. Then you do whatever you can for the other person.
Outro: 35:48
Thanks for listening to the Timeless Marketing Podcast with Brian Kurtz. Visit BrianKurtz.net and click Podcast at the top of the page for a full transcript and show notes. If you are interested in working with Brian personally inside of Titans Xcelerator, go to briankurtz.net/help to see how Titans can help you grow and scale your business. That’s B-R-I-A-N-K-U-R-T-Z [dot] net [forward slash] help.