If you’ve ever wondered what The Bridge on the River Kwai, psychotic strangers, Abraham Maslow, concrete rebar and flaky surgeons have to do with persuasion and sales skills then you’ll want to read this…
The Surprise Hero of the Story
In the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai Alec Guinness plays the part of the British officer who is tortured by the Japanese to force his men to build a bridge that has military value to the Japanese.
Guinness finally consents when he thinks that perhaps allowing his men to build the bridge would be good therapy for them.
His men on the other hand think its some kind of trick. They think they are supposed to sabotage the bridge. What they don’t understand is the mindset of this British officer.
Guinness plays a character who takes pride in his country, his army, his work. Delivering anything less than the best is not in his thoughts. In fact, he wants to prove to the Japanese that the British build the finest bridges in the world.
The interesting turn in the story occurs when an American solider arrives trying to destroy the bridge. Alec Guinness fights to keep the solider from blowing up the bridge, a bridge that is helping the Japanese fight the Americans.
Now let me ask you: who’s the hero of the story?
It’s not William Holden. It’s Alec Guinness. Why is that?
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Abraham Maslow years ago presented an idea known as the “heirarchy of needs.” In his representation of this hierarchy of needs, he’s set up a pyramid:
1. Survival
2. Security
3. Social
4. Self-Esteem
5. Self-Actualization
The idea is that through life you gradually work your way up that pyramid.
As a baby, your only concern is food, water, sleep. As you get older, you realize that your parents and the house you live in protects you. About age 3 you understand that the world does not revolve around you. About 13 you kind of return back to yourself, craving to feel important, to be independent.
And finally, you want to have purpose. Not only that, but you want to achieve all of your dreams. You want to burn up, not burn out.
Later in his life, though, Maslow added to more needs: the need for consistency and the need for order.
This is the answer to why Alec Guinness is the hero of the Bridge Over River Kwai.
He’s a person that is consistent and predictable. He has a set of values that he does not waver from.
In fact, if you remember, in the early part of the movie you see this as he endures enormous torture from heat and isolation, but never backs down from his original statement. It’s not until he’s relieved and allowed to determine their fate.
This means he’s a person who can be trusted.
How This Applies to Real Estate
Imagine if this happened to you:
A surgeon says, “Sorry to say this, but you are going to need a quadruple bypass surgery.”
And you say, “Can’t we just do a double bypass?”
He then replies, “Alright, we’ll do a double and see how you do after that.”
How secure would you feel after that?
The same applies in business and persuasion. In fact, a huge part of persuasion deals with consistency.
The rule of thumb is this: we tend to trust the people who are reliable, consistent and predictable.
Say you live in house on a street with just one other house. You’re not going to trust the total stranger who moves in there until he demonstrates he’s stable, consistent or predictable.
If he proves himself to be off his rocker or strange or unpredictable, do you think you are going to trust him if he comes over and says, “Hey, can I borrow your car? I need to run to the store.”
I hope not.
Neither should your clients trust you if you blow off phone calls or cave in at every suggestion. Don’t be surprised if you can’t get them to agree with anything you suggest.
I find it impossible to respect, let alone trust, someone who is flaky, shallow or weak. What about you?
On the flip side of it, demonstrate that you are a person of consistency and you will have people eating out of your hand [okay, maybe that's a little dramatic, but you get my point].
Consistency in behavior, especially in difficult or tense times, is the biggest part to influencing people.
That’s why it’s so imporatnt to figure out what you stand for, what your values are, what makes you tick, what ticks you off.
Create that marketing plan, dust off that personal mission statement.
Then it’s important to get a backbone as rigid as rebar. If you want to be a person of influence then you need to have what it takes to stand the heat.
If you don’t, then you are making a big mistake.
Expect people to walk over you. More importantly, expect to feel like your life is out of control, that you are a victim.
The Curious Secret to Getting People to Believe You
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Ever wonder how you could get more people to believe you?
It’s easy, actually. And quite odd the way it works.
What’s the secret? Never tell a man more than he’ll believe.
Sounds like a moron statement, right?
Let me explain why it’s not.
The Law of Diminishing Credibility
There’s a law of diminishing returns directly tied to the law of diminishing credibility.
Even if you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that a home will triple in price in the next 5 years, if you have any concern that the buyer might find what you say hard to believe, it’s best to leave that information out.
See, the moment your claim passes the point of believability, credibility drops off like a rock.
In the 60′s some brilliant ad men took advantage of this.
Selling the Ugliest Car in the World
Remember the old Volkswagen sedan with the rag top that hadn’t changed in 20 years, the round top one?
One of the ugliest cars ever made.
In addition, it didn’t have any extra features that any ad man could talk about. Only later years did it have a gas gauge.
You could get so many miles on a tank of gas that you simply drove it until you ran out of gas and then switched to a small reserve tank that held more than enough fuel to get you to the closest gas station.
When the Doyle, Dane + Bernbach agency was given this account, they must have groaned.
What could you say about the car?
It only had two features: it was cheap to run and it was reliable. But everyone already knew that.
What more could they say about it?
Then they hit on a brilliant flash of inspiration: they decided to tell the truth.
I can imagine every ad man in America coming off their chairs and saying, “You are going to do what?”
Doyle, Dane + Bernbach ran a whole series of ads that said, “This car is ugly. It looks like a bug. A beetle.”
“This car is slow. You’ll be lucky if you ever get a ticket.”
The results of the campaign?
Phenomenal. People loved the campaign and sales shot up.
The truth. Simple, pristine truth is an astounding force. And these ad men had touched on a very important key of persuasion: if you point out the disadvantages, it makes everything else you say more believable.
How This Works in Real Estate
In real estate this might mean being frank with others about a house with some real issues, like its small, only has two bedrooms or one bathroom. The roof hasn’t been shingled in 25 years. It’s so old there isn’t central air and heating.
But once you have the disadvantages out of the way, then you can share the advantages.
“Quaint cottage with a historical background. Nice for one, maybe one-and-a-half, with ambition and muscle and a tad bit of cash.”
Isn’t that curious how that works?
By positioning the disadvantages first, you view the advantages in a whole different light. And it is a whole lot easier to swallow.
Besides, when we see an ad for a home that says “great home, lots of potential” don’t we immediately think, “Money pit.”
This rule of persuasion says this: never tell a person more than you think they’ll believe.
In fact, tell them the truth, share with them the disadvantages first, then move onto the advantages and you’ll have a captive audience.
Obsession: A Painful Lesson in Options
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When it comes to personal freedom among the citizens of the world’s countries, Americans tend to stand apart.
Germans, for example, are willing to obey strict building codes to preserve the historic beauty of their cities.
Canadians are willing to accept stricter gun control laws for personal safety.
Americans, on the other hand, have an incredible desire for personal freedom, no matter how destructive it may be.
We have a tremendous desire to feel free; we don’t want to feel like we’ve been outmaneuvered and only have one choice
left open to us.
The Lesson
That’s why when you are in a closing situation you should always give the other side two options from which to choose.
The key to the Two-Options technique, however, is that both options must be acceptable to you.
You say, “Well, Jack and Jill, I don’t think that there is any question that you should buy this home…the question becomes, how do we work it out so that you can live comfortably with the investment?”
“Let’s take a look at these two different financing plans and tell me which would be best for you. One is a…”
The takeaway lesson here: never back anyone into a corner by saying, “Take it or leave it, they won’t reduce the price.”
Chances are they will probably leave it.
The Pain
Then again, I’ve been in positions myself where I got it into my head that I had to have something. And I wouldn’t budge. Later I regretted the decision.
Have you ever done that?
And have you ever been in a situation where you saw a client who was hooked and it was obvious no amount of reason could persuade them differently?
At that point, are they truly free?
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9 Coercive Selling Techniques
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In the first season of 24, Jack Bauer was coerced into assisting a political assassination, by threat of harm to his wife and daughter.
By threat of blackmail, the five main characters in The Usual Suspectsare coerced into paying back a debt to Keyser Soze.
And in The Empire Strikes Back, Lando Calrissian is coerced by Darth Vader into double crossing Han Solo, as bait to trap Luke Skywalker.
As you might have guessed, these are all examples of coercion.
If you’ve been following our blog or subscribing to our newsletter for any length of time, it should be clear to you that I don’t believe marketing or sales should be coercive. I think you’ll know that I think it should be the opposite, meaning it should allow someone to choose freely and willfully.
The fact that some people use influence or persuasion to get money a lot of times puts the idea of selling, marketing and persuasion as evil. Puts a bad taste in their mouth. And yes, of course, persuasion has been abused throughout history. And will continue to be abused.
At some point in time, however, we all use influence to get things in life—time, love, friendship, fame, power, loyalty, and yes . . . money too.
But here’s the irony—persuasion works best when it’s invisible. The most effective influence leaves people with the impression that they have made a completely independent decision based only on the facts.
With that in mind, here are nine tried and true selling techniques that fly under a prospect’s radar, disarm cynicism, and yet still powerfully persuade. You can come to you own conclusions about their level of evil.
- Reciprocation: People tend to return a favor. Thus, the pervasiveness of free samples in marketing and selling. In his conferences, Robert Cialdini often uses the example of Ethiopia providing thousands of dollars in humanitarian aid to Mexico just after the 1985 earthquake, despite Ethiopia suffering from a crippling famine and civil war at the time. Ethopia had been reciprocating for the diplomatic support Mexico provided when Italy invaded Ethopia in 1937.
- Commitment and Consistency: If people commit, verbally or in writing, to an idea or goal, they are more likely to honor that commitment.
- Social Proof: People will do things that they see other people are doing. For example, in a late 70′s experiment, one or more confederates would look up into the sky. Bystanders would then look up into the sky to see what they were seeing. Living in the same neighborhood or subdivision where you are selling homes and sharing that fact with your clients is an example of social proof. This information will immediately make your client feel comfortable with buying a home in that area because they already “know” someone else doing it.
- Authority: People will tend to obey authority and celebrity figures.
- Liking: People are easily persuaded by other people that they like. People were more likely to buy if they liked the person selling it to them. The Guinness Book of World Records listed Joe Girard as the “World’s Greatest Retail Salesman” for 12 consecutive years. What was his secret? He built and maintained relationships.
- Scarcity: Perceived scarcity will generate demand. For example, saying there are only three homes with a particular floor plan available in a new subdivision works. If it is true, of course.
- Honesty: Try pointing out the flaws of a home upfront, and being brutally frank. In this day and age of exaggeration and fine print, people are so disarmed by simple and intentional honesty that they will pay closer attention to the rest of what you have to say. You’ll have more credibility in the prospect’s eyes when it’s time for a purchase decision.
- Storytelling: Stories engage a person’s mind and emotions in a way that dry sales text can never accomplish. It’s also something they will never forget. In addition to the literal story that you tell, every good story provides a connotation that allows the reader to draw their own conclusions. And since people rarely argue with their own conclusions…
- Teaching: When we learn new things, we grow new neural connections in our brains as we expand our knowledge. And brain research confirms that emotional engagement is linked to learning because it helps us recall relevant memories stored in our central nervous system. Teach someone about a homes history, architecture or unique materials–and don’t forget why the material was used–is simply smart selling.
The Art of Persuasion: 10 Essential Tricks Every Agent Should Know
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Amazing, isn’t it?
How when you listen to one of the selling masters you say to yourself “Why didn’t I think of that? It seems so obvious…so easy.”
The masters always seem to come up with the perfect phrase…a few
words…sometimes even just one word…that grabs you by the lapels and drags you into their presentation.
The perfect words make you want to buy whatever they’re selling before they’ve even mentioned a product.
It’s the Art of Persuasion. Right?
But let me assure you right now that it’s less of an art and more of a
science.
The Art of Persuasion is something you can learn. And the good news is the fundamental building block to any good persuasive presentation is simply building rapport.
As the motivational trainer Peter Lowe says, “The three keys to
persuasion are: Establish rapport, Establish rapport, Establish rapport.”
And to build that rapport, you need to cultivate behaviors that will make people trust you and make them feel it’s in their best interest to
follow your lead.
Here, are some ideas, big and small, for making yourself more persuasive:
1. Before a presentation, ask yourself “What do I really want?” Ask
soul-searching questions to understand your true motivation: family,
money, fame, power. You’re looking for what makes you tick, what
drives you.
2. Develop the knack for making the other person feel like the center of the universe.
3. Be quick to compliment.
4. Train yourself to remember other people’s names. One of the best ways: when you shake hands with a new person, note the color of his or her eyes. That forces you to make eye contact and, after a while, will also send a signal to your brain to store that person’s name in your long-term memory. Also use the name soon afterwards, and you’ll have a lock on it.
5. Empower others. Follow the maxims of legendary 3M leader William McKnight: “Listen to anybody with an idea. Encourage experimental doodling. If you put fences around people, you get sheep; give people the room they need.”
6. Try to arouse positive emotion.
7. Take a clue from your audience–whether it’s a single seller or a family of buyers. Really make an effort to communicate in a manner that matches your message to the receiver.
8. Hone your sense of humor.
9. Practice being a better questioner. Follow up by asking, “How does that make you feel?” or “Have you ever experienced anything else like that?” or “How could that be handled differently in the future?” or “I wonder what lessons we can take from that?”
And finally…
10. Keep your perspective. Remember: Even though you’re passionate about your point of view, lighten up. Tomorrow’s another day-and another opportunity to persuade.