You can’t achieve greatness alone. Every great man was once a great persuader, including prolific figures such as Da Vinci, Machiavelli, Lincoln, Washington, and Napoleon. Even Newton had to persuade people that his laws of motion and theory of gravitation actually held up.
These great thinkers saw what no one else saw, believed what no one else believed. They had to tell people what the world wasn’t ready to hear.
In order to be great, you need to be persuasive. You don’t just need to tell—you need to sell.
How To Be Persuasive
Persuasion is the process of getting others to think, believe, or do what you want them to.
Naturally, as every process goes, the art of persuasion follows a series of logical steps. Understanding this process is the key to becoming a more persuasive person.
1. Start Within: Master Your Self-Presentation
The first step is to work on your self-presentation, because persuasion happens even before you speak. The moment you enter a room, the game has already begun. People are judging you. But for what?
When people meet you for the first time, they judge you for your warmth and competence by assessing two things:
- Can I trust this person? (warmth)
- Can I respect this person? (competence)
People answer these questions within one tenth of a second of meeting you, and unless these are answered with a resounding ‘yes’, you will have trouble persuading others.
Would you do business with someone you don’t trust? Would you follow the advice of a fool? I rest my case.
So how can you demonstrate these two traits?
Dress for the occasion.
“Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak.” —Rachel Zoe
Act like your appearance matters, because it does.
The effort you put into your appearance shows the amount of importance you give the occasion. It also shows that you care about yourself and how you appear to others. Just by dressing appropriately, you are showing the people you meet how important they are to you.
Imagine a job applicant wearing pajamas to their interview. They need not say anything to be insulting.
Style is a must. Use the best clothes you have in your closet that are appropriate for the occasion. If you don’t have any, make it your priority to shop for these clothes immediately.
Look clean.
Get a haircut or style your hair appropriately. Clean your nails. Shine your shoes. Make sure you look as clean as possible.
If you can’t take care of yourself, how can others trust you to take care of them?
Work on your body language.
Body language is not strictly limited to nonverbal signals—it’s also about how your body looks. Sound mind in a sound body, aye?
Stay active and exercise often. Having a fit body shows discipline and care. It also makes you more attractive, and physically attractive people are more persuasive.
While working on your body, work on your nonverbal signals, as well. Learn the positive and negative ways you can communicate with your body so you can make them work for you.
When speaking, avoid stuttering. Do not use “uhms,” and avoid fidgeting. Fidgeting while you talk shows agitation and unease. Unless you’re trying to communicate a great deal of excitement, avoid bouncing left and right and moving your hands as if you’re in a karate fight. Show you’re comfortable in your own space by being relaxed and in control.
Speak slowly. Confident people speak slowly because they do not fear being interrupted. This is a typical alpha male behavior, but it also applies to women. Speaking slowly shows power. Focus on communicating your message in the clearest manner possible. Do not rush to finish your sentence.
Practice a proper handshake. People who give firm handshakes are more positively evaluated than those who don’t. A handshake is a way to communicate who you are. A weak handshake reflects a weak person, and an overly strong handshake demonstrates a highly dominant person.
Find the sweet spot. You don’t want to totally dominate others and make them afraid and uncomfortable, but you don’t want to appear weak and passive either.
Learn eye contact, proper body posture, and other ways you can communicate your message that align with what you wish to communicate. A discussion of every aspect of body language would take too long, so here’s a book I recommend as a starting point for learning more about the subject.
Only sell what you are passionate and enthusiastic about.
Zig Ziglar once said, “Selling is transference of feeling.” If you are not enthusiastic about your subject, how can you expect your audience to be?
If you’re not passionate about it, don’t sell it.
It is easy to lie with words, but not with actions. Your feelings can’t help but reveal themselves.
Instead of lying and pretending to be excited about something you’re not, find something you are passionate about.
Communicate your message enthusiastically. An enthusiastic communicator is heard more than the dispassionate bore.
Master your niche.
“Promise yourself that you will read the books until your skills change.” —Jim Rohn
Enthusiasm shows your warmth; education shows your competence. Enthusiasm is best backed by solid education.
Education isn’t necessarily limited to schooling; rather, being educated means being able to apply even knowledge that extends beyond the classroom, and mastering something that adds value to your life and the lives of others. Just as someone who can recite the Bible is not necessarily wise, a person who has memorized a book is not necessarily educated.
The best way to show your competence is to own it. Pretending you know something you do not is the difference between Max Planck and his Chauffeur. The Chauffeur memorized Max Planck’s talk on Quantum Mechanics to the point that he can recite it to an audience, but when asked an elementary question, he couldn’t even answer it. He knew the talk, but he didn’t understand Quantum Mechanics.
Understand the fundamentals of your subject and its relationship to the more advanced concepts. Go beyond just memorizing. Understand. Nothing harms your credibility more than the incapacity to answer the most elementary questions you should know the answers to.
In fact, promise yourself that you will study the subject to the point that you can teach it to someone else. If you can’t teach it to a novice, you don’t understand it well enough yet.
Learning to teach is a must. There will come a time when you need to communicate your message to people who don’t know what you know.
Communicate simply.
It’s not about what you said, it’s about what they heard.
Do not mistake big words for big thoughts, and do not assume that simplicity is the mark of a simple mind. It is usually the reverse: Simplicity is the result of intense thinking. The true experts can explain complex ideas as simply as possible.
If you find it difficult to simplify your ideas, try learning the Feynman Technique. It’s a simple method used by the Nobel-Prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman, that allows you to understand any concept deeply and intuitively. Here’s how it goes:
1) Choose a concept you want to better understand.
2) Write everything you already know about it, as if you were teaching it to a child.
3) Soon enough, you’ll notice that you’re having trouble with the explanation. That means you reached a gap in your knowledge.
4) Go back to the source material and read the concept again, and then go back to step 1 until you can satisfactorily explain it to someone else.
You might think that such a method is inefficient, but it’s better than reading your way through a book and forgetting it an hour after.
In fact, when Feynman was to take an exam at Princeton, this was the method he used to study for the exam in Physics, which got him a perfect score. You can learn more about Richard Feynman in Mr. Gleick’s book, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman.
2. Clarify Your Goals
If you have mastered your self-presentation, you’ve succeeded in building rapport with your audience. They are now receptive to your message.
The second step is to find a way to communicate what you want in the best possible way and in the most persuasive manner. Unless you figure out what you want, you won’t get it.
Make the effort to clarify what you want. An ounce of clarity is better than a pound of obscurity.
How to Clarify Your Goals
When you encounter a vague objective, turn it into something concrete. Make it quantifiable or narrow it down to something more specific.
Don’t say: “I want to write about Science.”
Say: “I want to write about the fundamentals of classical mechanics and how to apply it in everyday life.”
Don’t say: “Maybe, I want more money.”
Say: “I want to generate $1,000,000 in profit with my business this year.”
Don’t say: “I want to sell more books.”
Say: “I want to sell 100,000 copies by the end of September.”
You may still find it difficult to clarify your objectives despite this technique. Give it an hour or two of focused attention and try to come up with various ways of defining your goals. You’ll notice that with each unique definition of a goal, a lot of different approaches will come to you.
Take chess, for example. The main object is to win by checkmating your opponent, but there are other ways you can win the game. You can gain material advantage; aim to control the center; or study your opponent and use something he or she is not familiar with.
None of these leads to a checkmate, but they could open up more possibilities when you are looking at a chess position.
You’ll notice that if you try to come up with strategies to accomplish each of these objectives, you’ll end up with a lot of strategies in your arsenal, rather than going straight for a checkmate right from the beginning.
Good players think about their plans. Great players think about their opponents.
What exactly does the other person want?
The key here is value. Unless you know what the other person values, you won’t know how to persuade them in the direction you want.
Your promise must always align with what they value; knowing the problem that they’re trying to solve is key to communicating your message. You don’t want to offer a beautiful shoe when size is the main problem. What’s the point of a better shoe if it cannot be worn?
3. Tell Them “Why”
“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe.” —Simon Sinek
A study by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer shows that when you tell people your reason for a request, 93% will comply, compared with just 60% if you didn’t give a justification.
This could be as simple as saying, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies?” That added “because” makes all the difference.
Ask yourself, “what is my why?” Figure it out and tell the world about it.
Then…
4. Make It Easy to Comply
Think about that book you just bought on Amazon. Click… Done.
Imagine if Amazon asked you to give them your full name, full address, social security number, the name of your spouse, the name of your children, your credit card billing statement, and a printed copy of your birth certificate to be sent to the post office. Would you still purchase the book from Amazon?
Not surprisingly, research has shown that the fewer steps needed to purchase a product, the more people complete the purchase.
Convenience sells. The easiest way to get someone to buy a book is to make it as easy as a click of a button. More people will click than will get out of their seat, go to the bookstore, wait in a long line, pay, wait for their receipt, get out, and go home and read it.
Whether you’re pitching a sale in person or online, do whatever you can to make compliance simple and easy.
5. Be the First to Give
As humans, we are hard-wired for cooperation. We have a natural tendency to give, and to return other people’s favors. This is the feeling of “I owe you one” when someone helps us out.
People naturally return favors. If you give them something for free, it is more likely that they will share your work with their friends, or help you when you’re in need.
People will also like you more. Reciprocity lies at the heart of good will and friendship. Think about the family member you like the most, or your best friend. You’ll probably see that the people you like most are those who give you the most of their time and resources without expecting anything in return. I bet if they ask for your help, you will be happy to give it.
Practice giving now. You might not get the returns immediately, but you will get them one way or another. It’s human nature.
And of course, the more, the merrier.
6. Use Social Proof
“For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.” —Matthew 25:29
In times of uncertainty, people use the behaviors of others as the yardstick for what is true and correct.
Have you ever bought anything because someone told you it’s great? Have you ever decided NOT to buy anything because someone hated it? That’s social proof in action.
You might say you don’t care about what other people think, but you definitely care about what other people think of other things. This is why you usually see testimonials or great product reviews on the landing pages of most products on the internet. They utilize social proof to mitigate the uncertainty of potential buyers by giving information from other people’s reactions.
The more you give, the more people will like you. The more people like you, the more people WILL like you. It’s a positive feedback loop worth using.
7. Let Them Take Charge
“The person you’re dealing with must always feel like they’re in charge, even if they’re not.” —Joe Girard
Joe Girard, the number one salesman in the automobile industry (1,425 cars sold in 1973), makes his customers believe that he didn’t sell them anything—they bought something. It was his customers’ idea to get the car, and he was just there to recommend the best one for their current resources and capacity.
When you restrict someone’s freedom, their desire to exercise it only grows more. Have you ever done the opposite of what your parents told you to do? Before doing so, you probably felt like you were not in charge and your freedom was restricted. So in turn, you acted on your desire exercise freedom. This is what we call psychological reactance.
Romeo and Juliet offers an example of psychological reactance in its most tragic sense. I doubt their love would ever be as strong had the Montagues and the Capulets been friends. If there were psychologists in Shakespeare’s time, they would’ve claimed that it wasn’t a story of love, but of psychological reactance.
Be the friend who guides people in making the best decision, not the dictator who tells them what to do. Learn from the Montagues and the Capulets by steering clear of psychological reactance.
Use the contrast principle.
If you are drinking regular coke, and then you drink a diet coke immediately afterward, the diet coke would seem tasteless. However, if you are drinking diet coke, you would feel like regular coke is too sweet. This is the contrast principle in action. The initial impression affects the impression that follows by making it appear more or less.
This is why when you’re shopping for clothes, you usually see prices that are slashed-through ($10) with the discount price next to it. It’s intended to make the actual selling price look cheaper.
You can also apply this if you are negotiating for a certain amount of money. If you wish to ask for $10, begin by asking for $50. This will make it more likely that the other person complies with your target value of $10. This is called the Door in Face technique. You begin by asking for a bigger favor and then tone it down later to make it seem smaller than it really is.
Scarcity
We hate losing what we have. We are more motivated by pain avoidance than the prospect of a reward. In fact, this is the reason why you don’t see healthy lungs and healthy bodies when you buy a pack of cigarettes. You see destroyed bodies, sickly pictures of long-time smokers who suffered the consequences of their vice. These advertisers are preying on the human tendency to avoid losing something, which we call loss aversion.
Robert Cialdini explores this principle in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. He explains that when homeowners are told the amount of money they could lose due to inadequate insulation, they’re much more likely to insulate their houses compared with those who are told the amount of money they’ll save.
If you want to frame your sentences in a persuasive way, try to demonstrate how your audience will lose something if they don’t do what you suggest, rather than what they’ll gain if they do. For instance, instead of saying, “Sign up now for a chance to win a car,” you can say, “Sign up now or lose the opportunity to win a car!”
These types of techniques are often seen in advertising today. You’ll often see promotions like “limited time only,” “stocks are running out,” or “slots are limited.”
This is also why musical concerts often sell out 5 minutes after ticket sales open. Everybody knows that there’s only a limited space for the stadium, and everybody acts on this knowledge, including ticket scalpers who sell them at a much more inflated price to fans who didn’t make it in time.
Consistency
Remember that feeling when you did something against your will? Or you said something you didn’t mean? That uncomfortable feeling you experienced is called cognitive dissonance.
We prefer to be consistent in our beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. When we encounter something that threatens this consistency or we do something that goes against it, we feel uncomfortable. In fact, this desire to be consistent is so pervasive that we refuse to see anything that disagrees with our beliefs. Changing our minds is a difficult endeavor, indeed.
How do we utilize this desire to be consistent in our persuasive pursuits? It all has to do with the way you set up or frame the situation. If you’re offering something different than usual, start by asking your audience if they are open-minded or not. This preps their mind to be open to your message later on.
Try to ask 3–4 questions regarding mindset that your audience will likely answer “yes” to. The more they say “yes” before your final close, the more likely they will say “yes” to the big question. This is what we call getting your prospect to the yes-ladder. Guide them to the top!
8. Ask for Referrals
We established earlier that people are more likely to buy from those they like. If you’ve satisfied your customers to the best of your ability, then you should ask for a referral.
Don’t be embarrassed to ask your happy customers if they know someone who might be interested in your services as well. In fact, the odds of closing another deal with a referral are exponentially higher than without referrals.
Like we said, persuasion starts before you even speak. What better way to introduce yourself than by saying a friend of your customer referred you? Better yet, if you can ask your satisfied customer to introduce you to their acquaintance, you’ll be starting your persuasion journey at a major advantage.
9. Build Your Reputation
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” —Chinese Proverb
Your expertise is what you know; your reputation is what you’re known for. This is the unspoken magic of becoming a more persuasive person. The better your reputation is, the easier it becomes for you to persuade others. Protect your reputation with all your might.
Your reputation is all about what you consistently do, so think about what you can do consistently to build it. For instance; in your company, if you want to get the reputation of being the hardest worker, resolve to work 2 hours longer every day until it becomes second nature.
You can also make a habit of going beyond expectations, letting everybody know that you are a natural high-performer. In sales, if you’re expected to make 50 calls, why not try doubling that and see what happens?
There are other ways to build your reputation, but it’s all about what you consistently do. Pause and reflect for a moment on what you want to be known for, then acquire the habits necessary to show it consistently.
10. Burn Your Ship
In the year 1519, the Spanish explorer Hernan Cortes landed in Mexico to conquer the Aztec Empire. Before beginning his conquest, he ordered his crew to burn all their ships so they had no choice but to succeed or die trying. (Spoiler alert: they succeeded.)
Therefore, you should find ways to show that you are committed to a decision already.
For example, get the tickets first before inviting your partner to a concert. This saves them the trouble of purchasing it, and it shows how strong your desire is to go to the concert. Another way is to show your commitment by making the reservation before inviting them for dinner… even better, pay for it already. This shows that you will definitely show up, no excuses whatsoever.
It’s not guaranteed that such techniques would work all the time. Your partner might have other commitments, or she might have a meeting at the time of your invitation. However, it will increase the odds that your partner will agree to it if she has the time.
Consistent with our discussion of making it easy to comply, showing your commitment also reduces the effort needed for the other person to comply with your request. It saves them the time to think about where to eat, or whether they have the budget to go to the concert since you paid for it already.
Finally…
If You Want Something, Ask
“Asking is the beginning of receiving.” —Jim Rohn
How committed are you to becoming a more persuasive person?
You’ve built rapport, you’ve used the techniques, they have heard your message. Do not leave them guessing about what you want them to do. Ask clearly.
If you’re asking for money, specify how much you need. If you’re asking for a box, specify the length, the width, the height, when you want it, and where you want them to get it or what kind of brand you want. Be as precise and specific as you can to ensure you get exactly what you want.
No amount of rapport or persuasion technique will get you what you want unless you ask for it. Be committed enough to have the courage to ask; you’ve done your best job to get to the end of the journey, so finish it.
Did you find this post helpful? Let us know in the comments below!
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Rutherford Rigodon is a psychometrician-turned-marketer who loves reading and writing about human psychology and all its implications in human life. As the Digital Marketer for TCK Publishing, he creates and executes the marketing campaigns to ensure that TCK’s books get to the hands of our beloved audience at the right place and at the right time.
