A Chicago restaurant had a no-show problem.
Three of ten reservations never showed.
Then they changed one question on the phone and no-shows dropped to one in ten.
That came straight out of Robert Cialdini's Influence, one of the most-cited books ever written on persuasion.
Cialdini says it saved the restaurant over $500,000 a year.
I read the whole thing and pulled the seven principles and broke it down into actions you can implement right away.
Here they are:
1/ Commitment: Get them to say yes out loud.
Customers from that restaurants used to hear "please call if your plans change," nod, and forget it by dinner.
So the restaurant turned it into a question: "Will you call if your plans change?"
Now they had to answer out loud. "Yes, I will."
That small spoken yes is a promise, and people keep promises they make out loud.
Telling someone gets a nod.
Asking, then waiting, gets a yes they have to keep.
So stop telling people what you need and start asking.
Not "I'll send the agreement and we'll start Monday."
But instead, "Can you get the signed agreement back to me by Thursday?"
Then stop talking and let them say yes.
The yes is what they live up to.
2/ Reciprocation: Give first, with no strings.
In 1985, Ethiopia was starving.
The famine killed hundreds of thousands that year.
And in the middle of it, the Ethiopian Red Cross sent $5,000 to Mexico for earthquake relief.
Why would a starving country give away money it desperately needed?
Because in 1935, when Italy invaded Ethiopia, Mexico stood up for them.
Fifty years later, broke and hungry, Ethiopia paid it back.
The pull to repay a favor is that strong.
A starving country repaid a debt it couldn't afford, fifty years later.
Reciprocity beat survival.
Give first.
Something specific and useful, this week, with no strings.
When the ask comes later, you’ve built a solid base of relationship capital.
3/ Liking: Tell people what you genuinely like about them.
For twelve years, Joe Girard sold more cars than anyone alive (more than five a day).
His secret was a greeting card.
Every month, all 13,000 of his past customers got one.
With a different holiday on the front.
The same three words inside was: "I like you."
That was the whole card.
It worked even though people knew it was a sales move, even though it went to 13,000 others…
We like people who like us, and we buy from people we like.
Find one real thing you like about someone and say it once, specifically.
Something you actually noticed about them (not flattery).
People feel the difference, and they lean toward the person who saw them.
Arizona's Petrified Forest was losing 14 tons of petrified wood a year.
It's a 200-million-year-old stone (a fossilized tree) and visitors kept pocketing it as souvenirs.
So researchers tested two signs.
One asked visitors not to take any.
And the other named the problem: "Many past visitors have removed petrified wood from the park."
The results were opposite.
The sign that mentioned how many people steal nearly tripled the theft. It pulled more wood out of the park than no sign at all.
The sign that asked people not to take any had the lowest theft of the three.
Tell people a bad thing is common, and you hand them permission to do it.
Show the behavior you want as the standard instead.
"Most of our clients are profitable within 90 days" tells a new client what people like them already do.
Researchers studied millions of online reviews and found something backwards.
Products with a perfect 5.0 rating sell worse than products rated 4.2 to 4.7.
A few negative reviews actually lift sales.
Perfect looks fake. A visible flaw makes everything else believable. The bad review is what proves the good ones are real.
We trust experts, but we trust an honest expert most. The fastest way to be believed is to admit what you're not good at first.
Lead with a limitation. "We're not the cheapest, and we're not right for everyone."
Say the flaw out loud before the pitch, and the pitch lands as the truth instead of a sales job.
6/ Scarcity: Frame the yes as something they'd lose.
Sandy is a divorce mediator in Arizona.
For years she closed the same way: "Agree to this and you'll have a deal." The two sides kept fighting over the last point.
Cialdini told her to flip it. Same offer, but new words: "You have a deal. You just have to agree to this one last thing." It started working almost every time.
Nothing changed but the framing.
Once the deal was theirs walking away felt like losing it and people fight harder to keep what they have than to win something equal.
When you're close, stop selling what they'll gain.
Name what's already on the table and what it costs them to walk away.
The fear of losing it closes more deals than the promise of getting it.
7/ Unity: Write to one person, like family.
Warren Buffett writes his Berkshire shareholder letters as if he's writing to his two sisters, Doris and Bertie.
Smart women he says but not finance experts.
So he makes sure there’s no jargon, no posturing, just what he'd want them to know.
In his 50th-anniversary letter he laid out the company's future as "what I would say to my family today if they asked me."
Robert Cialdini owned Berkshire shares and read that letter.
His reaction: "I have never since thought of selling any shares."
The numbers didn't do it. Buffett had spoken to him like family and you don't walk away from family.
Cialdini calls this Unity, the deepest of the seven.
When someone feels like one of your own they stop weighing you against other options.
They trust you by default.
So write to one person. Not "business owners." One specific person you'd want to call after they read it.
Write to everyone and it lands on no one.
Every one of these seven does its work before you ask.
By the time you make the request you’ve already built a lot of relationship capital with them.
If you want to go deeper:
You should know exactly what your business should be paying you. Click below and let's bring it to the surface.
PS: Not ready to book? Reply GROW and I'll send you the 5-minute playbook I run with my clients to pull more profit out of their business.