Influence and Persuasion: New Insights From Robert Cialdini

Do you want to persuade more people to become customers?

Wondering what the latest science on influence and persuasion has to say?

To discover new ways to prepare people for a sale, I interview Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of Influence and Pre-Suasion.
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The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Robert Cialdini, author of Influence and CEO of Influence at Work, a company that provides speakers and training on behavioral psychology and influence in business. Having sold more than 3 million books, he helped coin marketing phrases such as "social proof" and "scarcity." His latest book is called Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade.

Robert explores the science behind influence and persuasion.

You'll discover how to put these concepts into action to benefit your business.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Influence and Persuasion
Robert's First Book

Influence, written in the mid-1980s, shares the most successful strategies that professional influencers use to get people to say yes. It was written for consumers so they could recognize and resist these strategies when used in an unwelcome way.

The initial response to the book was so mild that the publisher called back the promotional and publicity funds for promoting the book, Robert recalls. They told him it would be like "throwing money down a pit."

What happened to change things?

Robert explains that times changed. The idea of evidence-based decision-making began to dominate the business world, and Influence provided a compendium of evidence on what factors influence people. About three or four years after publication, the book skyrocketed to bestseller levels, where it's stayed ever since.

There were two sources of information for the book. To see what was especially successful in moving people toward a sale, he looked at research literature from the behavioral sciences, marketing, psychology, communication, management, and other fields.

He also looked beyond the research literature and began infiltrating all of the training programs he could get access to in the areas of sales, marketing, recruiting, fundraising, etc. This let him see what the professionals were using to train and he gleaned information from those experiences.

While he expected consumers to be the audience for Influence, it was actually embraced by the business community first. They wanted to know, scientifically, which factors incline people toward yes, and how to include those factors in messages, marketing campaigns, and more.

The interest in harnessing the most powerful practices and procedures for creating change led Robert to write his new book, Pre-Suasion. It's designed for people who want to become more influential.

Listen to the show to discover how I was introduced to Robert's work.

Pre-Suasion

Robert thinks the ideal audience for Pre-Suasion is people who want to increase the extent to which their messages successfully move people in their direction. While this includes salespeople and marketers, it's also for people who want to be more influential inside their families, network of friends, charity boards, etc.

Robert says that while Influence covers what to build into a message to get agreement, Pre-Suasion describes the process of gaining agreement with a message before it's sent. The process may seem like some sort of magic, but it's not. It's established science.

The key is to create a state of mind in the recipient's head that's consistent with the forthcoming message.