Before I recommend this book to anyone, I ask them to promise me something. That they won’t use it for evil.
I’ve said as much on LinkedIn. If you aren’t going to use it for good, please don’t read it. I meant it then and I mean it now, because Influence by Robert Cialdini works.
People file it under sales and marketing, but it’s really a book about human behaviour. And if you want to be good at sales and marketing, you need to understand human behaviour: what motivates people, and why people buy from people.
Cialdini spent decades researching persuasion. He even went undercover, taking jobs in sales and fundraising to watch the professionals at work. What he found were a handful of principles that trigger a yes almost automatically.
He opens the book with mother turkeys. A mother turkey looks after any chick that makes the right cheep cheep sound, and ignores her own chick if it doesn’t. Researchers found she’d even mother a stuffed polecat, a turkey’s natural enemy, as long as it played that sound. Cialdini calls it click, whirr. One trigger, one automatic response. His point is that we humans have plenty of our own, and most of the time they save us a lot of thinking.
There’s reciprocity: give someone something and they feel they owe you, which is why free samples work so well. Commitment and consistency: get a small yes, and a bigger one becomes easier, because people like to act in line with what they’ve already said. Social proof: we look at what other people are doing, which is why a queue outside a restaurant makes you want to eat there. Liking: we say yes to people we like. Authority: we listen to people who look like they know what they’re talking about. And scarcity: tell us there are only two left and suddenly we want one.
Every one of those can help someone make a decision that’s good for them. Every one of them can push someone into something that isn’t. Hence the promise.
For me, liking is the one people underestimate. We’d all rather buy from someone we know, like and trust. People buy from people. It’s one reason the businesses that show who they are tend to do better than the ones hiding behind a logo.
The photocopier queue
The story from this book I’ve told the most is the one about the photocopier queue. Although it’s really about the power of the word because.
Cialdini describes an experiment by the psychologist Ellen Langer. Someone walks up to a queue of people waiting to use a photocopier and asks to go first. With no reason given, about 60% of people let them jump in.
Add a reason, that they’re in a rush, and it goes up to 94%. No great surprise. A reason is a reason.
Here’s the clever bit. They tried it with a reason that wasn’t really a reason at all: could I go first, because I need to make some copies? Well, yes. Everyone in that queue needed to make copies. It still worked almost as well, 93%.
The word because was doing the heavy lifting. Our brains hear it and assume a good reason must be on the way.
“A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason.”
I love that story because it’s so small. You don’t need a new website or a bigger ad budget. You need to tell people why you’re asking, and why it matters to them.
Think about how often we skip that. We send the proposal without saying why we’ve recommended that option. We ask the team to change how they do something without explaining what’s behind it. And then we wonder why people push back.
Give people the reason. Often it’s the thing that turns a no into a yes, and it costs nothing.
Influence sits in the second chapter of my free guide, 50 Books That Shaped Me, the one on how people really decide.
And yes, I’ve just given you a reason to read it. Old habits.
