Power of "Pre-suasion"!

Here’s how you could use “pre-suasion” to arm your market-fronted teams with an impeccable approach to not only land more conversions but to foster a great relationship with your users.

Jul 27, 2023

Art of Influencing

It’s pretty evident how influencing is an integral part of most of our professional lives today given the touchpoints of people that we do deal with over our workflows. Not only is it just limited to that, it transcends into our personal lives as well when we try and use a variety of methods to influence people in onboarding them onto our thought processes by getting them to understand the logic / rationale behind why we think (x) is the best.

One very common method that stands widely adopted and used in most cases is of course “incentivization”, which is the use of positive incentives (rewards) for a given behavior or penalizing / just not rewarding in case of the opposite.

Given how sales / marketing teams work whatever be the setup, the adherence to incentivization could be so commonplace. Although there is nothing majorly wrong with that method, is there a better way to influence people?

Pitches fall flat

Here’s a scenario:

It is so often said that “a small addition to the family often brings with it some humungous responsibilities”. Now, supposing you have just decided to go the family way and are now looking to secure the future of your loved ones via an insurance policy. You would obviously get down to some bout of research over the most suitable one, given you requirements per se you may choose to talk to a few people around so as to get a hang of the space and the orgs. operating right now. You know, what’s hot and not types…

So, you arrive at an understanding that a TERM PLAN would be the best given your requirements and you get online to browse a few relevant websites and fill out a tiny application that’s limited to a few personal particulars.

What’s next?

Well! You’d obviously face an exodus of phone calls / receive tons of cold e-mails from all corners of the country offering you what they would claim to be the best and most suited to your case. Initially you may attend some calls as you’d be inclined or even open a few of those e-mails to check what’s in store, but it would eventually overshoot your bandwidth and you’d begin cursing the day you went and filled out that application online.

Sounds pretty familiar does it?

Now, take a step back and imagine this.

What if someone who called you had a clear understanding of your needs, your motivation behind looking out for a policy and then factored that information in so as to filter out and pick the best of policies targeted at your well-being optimizing for the exact set of parameters that suited your goals, the motive behind the policy!?

That’d be wonderful isn’t it?

No doubt, it would also improve the chances of you opting for and buying that policy intern improving their chances of a sales closure just as much.

All of a sudden, the world seems like a much better place as everything magically works out well. That may have been possible via PRE-suasion.

Pre-suasion & correlation to influence?

Coined by Robert Cialdini who is also known as the father of influence, “PRE-SUASION” is about doing enough research / groundwork about the target audience in general and also extending it to an individual user level such that the messaging your market-fronted teams like marketing / sales use over each of those pitches transform into being super-effective to the target audience, resonate very well with it pretty instantly and are able to connect with it at a personal level improving the probability of success… manifold.

Cialdini uses a set of “7 points of reference” to describe the factors that tend to guide user behavior & may as well act as triggers largely influencing decision making.

1) Scarcity

“The Heart wants what it wants” and the intensity of that want would be inversely proportional to the probability of achieving it, as the joy of achievement would then jump manifold given how the mind is convinced that there could perhaps be a scarcity of the article given a market.

So, when it comes to incorporating scarcity as a parameter to influence it may not be enough to just talk about or highlight the benefits the users stand to gain once they adopt to a product, it becomes absolutely crucial to highlight the USP (unique selling proposition) abundantly clearly and drive the point home by describing what they stand to lose if they don’t adopt thus creating FOMO / a sense of urgency.

2) Authority

“Follow the best if you want to be the best” is a saying that’s been around for ages now and seemingly true for an eternity. It’s only but natural that the users want and desire ONLY the best over a product and they’d obviously pick and choose the ones that they feel are pretty credible.

So, it ought to be a given how one effectively fronts the market with something that could largely be considered credible and uses that to wield a spell of authority if one Is looking to emerge as someone possessing expert knowledge of a given domain where the product seems to fit in.

3) Reciprocity

“You scratch my back and I scratch yours” simply means to payback someone / repaying a favor that one received. Who doesn’t like favors? It’s only human that one expects a favor in return to one that was done unto someone else and that joy could go leaps and bounds beyond expectations if it were to be something of total use or befitting the wants of the receiver.

There’s no reason why that can’t apply here as well. It could also be a totally subconscious decision by the users of a product to expect something in return for something like say: the loyalty that they have showered on the organization, in spite of reaping the benefits of the product / features that solves their problems. Just remember to use an element of surprise in there when you give away those rewards or loyalty additions to propel that goodness quotient.

4) Commitment

“Commitment is not a word, it’s an action” because if someone is committed to something it simply ought to mean that it would transpire into an act that is pretty evident and tangible. To be committed to something over a longer term, consistently, would just be an icing on the cake. Be it plain and simple statement or a stand or something of enormous weightage like a legal document, commitment would work superbly if it’s a two-way affair.

As to its application over influencing, an organization can’t expect the users to be / stay committed to the product’s usage if they themselves aren’t standing by those promises they made all through that pertain to the quantity and quality, not just for the first time they onboard the users but consistently over every strategic initiative undertaken and delivered over a really long period of time.

5) Liking

“Saying a hello does not have any ROI attached” but it so often lays the foundation to a great relationship. Yes, the purpose is something that everyone knows although taking a split second of time to connect with the humans and explore the human side of the relationship can’t be deemed harmful anyway whatsoever, when the benefits could outweigh mammoth efforts at times.

In principle being able to use this does boil down to knowing the likes and dislikes of the users pretty well and the only way to get there is to connect with them even before one utters a single word out of that sales pitch or gets down to business with them. When starting out with compliments is commonly used as a precursor here, it becomes important to use that wisely post building an understanding of the user as a passive “Hi” or a “Hello” may not have any great takers given the exodus of sales interfaces intertwined into most of our daily lives. Gauge the user first and thoroughly before proceeding any further.

6) Social Proof

“When you say - it becomes marketing, when they say - it is social proof” sounds like a perfect example of an irony but that’s nothing but the truth. Most times, marketing pitches go all out talking greatly about the product, highlighting all those features and their wonderful capabilities that’s supposed to amaze the target audience. When it’s possible that some may still accept that, the larger section of the market may not pay too much of a heed to it.

To convince the market about the product by employing social proof, one could think of employing the voice of the customer (used deliberately to differentiate from VOM – voice of the market), the whole bunch of feedback received over the product, the countless testimonials received, the AVs depicting the UX in case one has access to them and not to mention the effective use of social media channels to lay it out on the line, make it all more transparent.

7) Unity

“I will tell you what I would tell my family today if any of them happened to ask me about Berkshire Hathaway’s future” is how Sir Warren Buffet started the letter addressing his shareholders. Undeniably, people get influenced by the others whom they closely associate with, although the source of that association / the common chord could largely vary based on the things that could be viewed objectively so as to awaken the sentiment.

To effectively employ the principle of unity into influencing the users one ought to be able to build an acute understanding of the preferences of the users by grouping them via a parameter that is rather a closer representative of the real world and they could really boil down to an eclectic mixture of choices like say, the ones pertaining to an ethnic group, people following a certain sport or sharing the same musical influences. The only way to go about getting one’s hands on information of that level / depth is down to the immersion of research.

You could read more about immersion here:

https://mgmtinc.substack.com/p/effective-ideation-and-immersion