Robert B. Cialdini - Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

PRE-SUASION: An Introduction

As a kind of secret agent, I once infiltrated the training programs of a broad range of professions dedicated to getting us to say yes. For almost three years, I recorded the lessons taught to aspiring automobile salespeople, direct marketers, TV advertisers, frontline managers, charity fund-raisers, public relations specialists, and corporate recruiters. My intent was to find out which practices worked time after time. So I answered the organizations ads for trainees or otherwise arranged to be present in their classrooms, notebook in hand, ready to absorb the wisdom born of long-standing experience in the business of persuasion.

In these programs, advanced trainees were often allowed to accompany and observe an old pro who was conducting business. I always jumped at those opportunities because I wanted to see if I could register not just what practitioners in general did to succeed but also what the best of them did. One such practice quickly surfaced that shook my assumptions. Id expected that the aces of their professions would spend more time than the inferior performers developing the specifics of their requests for change: the clarity, logic, and desirable features of them. Thats not what I found.

The highest achievers spent more time crafting what they did and said before making a request. They set about their mission as skilled gardeners who know that even the finest seeds will not take root in stony soil or bear fullest fruit in poorly prepared ground. They spent much of their time toiling in the fields of influence thinking about and engaging in cultivationin ensuring that the situations they were facing had been pretreated and readied for growth. Of course, the best performers also considered and cared about what, specifically, they would be offering in those situations. But much more than their less effective colleagues, they didnt rely on the legitimate merits of an offer to get it accepted; they recognized that the psychological frame in which an appeal is first placed can carry equal or even greater weight.

Besides, they were frequently in no position to tinker with the merits of what they had to offer; someone else in the organization had created the product, program, or plan they were recommending, often in fixed form. Their responsibility was to present it most productively. To accomplish that, they did something that gave them a singular kind of persuasive traction: before introducing their message, they arranged to make their audience sympathetic to it.

Theres a critical insight in all this for those of us who want to learn to be more influential. The best persuaders become the best through pre-suasionthe process of arranging for recipients to be receptive to a message before they encounter it. To persuade optimally, then, its necessary to pre-suade optimally. But how?

In part, the answer involves an essential but poorly appreciated tenet of all communication: what we present first changes the way people experience what we present to them next. Consider how a small procedural difference has improved the bottom line of the consulting business of a Toronto-based colleague of mine. For years, when bidding on a big project, it wasnt unusual to get price resistance from the client, who might propose a 10 percent or 15 percent reduction. That was frustrating, he says, because he never felt comfortable padding the budget to cover this kind of potential pushback on costs. If he did agree to the cut, his profit margin became so thin it barely paid to take the business. If he didnt acquiesce, he either lost the job or produced partners who were initially disgruntled because he wasnt willing to work with them on price.

Then, during one proposal meeting, he accidentally hit upon a maneuver that rid him of the problem forever. It wasnt a step-by-step attempt to specify or justify each of the expenses involved in his services; hed long since given up on that approach, which only brought scrutiny to the bill. Instead, after his standard presentation and just before declaring his ($75,000) fee, he joked, As you can tell, Im not going to be able to charge you a million dollars for this. The client looked up from the written proposal hed been studying and said, Well, I can agree to that! The meeting proceeded without a single subsequent reference to compensation and ended with a signed contract. My colleague claims that this tactic of mentioning an admittedly unrealistic price tag for a job doesnt always win the businesstoo many other factors are involved for thatbut it almost always eliminates challenges to the charges.

Although he stumbled onto it, my friend is not alone in experiencing the remarkable effects of merely launching a large number into the air and, consequently, into the minds of others. Researchers have found that the amount of money people said theyd be willing to spend on dinner went up when the restaurant was named Studio 97, as opposed to Studio 17; that the price individuals would pay for a box of Belgian chocolates grew after theyd been asked to write down a pair of high (versus low) digits from their Social Security numbers; that participants in a study of work performance predicted their effort and output would be better when the study happened to be labeled experiment twenty-seven (versus experiment nine); and that observers estimates of an athletes performance increased if he wore a high (versus low) number on his jersey.

Whats more, the potent impact of what goes first isnt limited to big initial numbers. Other researchers have shown that just after drawing a set of long lines on a sheet of paper, college students estimated the length of the Mississippi River as much greater than those who had just drawn a set of short lines. In fact, the impact of what goes first isnt limited to numerics at all: customers in a wine shop were more likely to purchase a German vintage if, before their choice, theyd heard a German song playing on the shops sound system; similarly, they were more likely to purchase a French vintage if theyd heard a French song playing.

So its not one particular experience that guides whats done later. It can be exposure to a number, the length of a line, or a piece of music; and, as we will see in later chapters, it can be a brief burst of attention to any of a variety of selected psychological concepts. But, because this book is mainly about the things that enhance persuasion, those chapters give special treatment to the concepts that most elevate the likelihood of assent. Its important here to take note of my choice of the word likelihood, which reflects an inescapable reality of operating in the realm of human behaviorclaims of certainties in that province are laughable. No persuasive practice is going to work for sure whenever it is applied. Yet there are approaches that can consistently heighten the probability of agreement. And that is enough. A meaningful increase in those odds is enough to gain a decisive advantage.

In the home, its enough to give us the means to get greater compliance with our wisheseven from that most resistant of all audiences: our children. In business, its enough to give organizations that implement these approaches the means to outpace their rivalseven rivals with equally good cases to make. Its also enough to give those who know how to employ these approaches the means to become better, even best, performers within an organization.

Take, for instance, one such best performer (we can call him Jim because, what the heck, that was his name) who worked for a firm whose training program I had entered to study. The company made expensive, heat-activated fire alarm systems for the home, and Jim was its top salesperson. He didnt win every sale, of course, but the likelihood that he would emerge from a sales call with a signed contract was, month after month, better than his counterparts. After an initial period of classroom instruction, I was assigned to spend the next several days accompanying various salespeople, to learn how they approached the selling process. This always involved an in-home visit to a family that had scheduled an appointment for a presentation.