The sim­ple fact of the mat­ter is that peo­ple, you and me included, are often just com­put­ers that have been pro­grammed to think and act a cer­tain way. We have our trig­gers and more often than not they can be exploited by mar­ket­ing and sales people.

I want to bring up this point because as an entre­pre­neur you need to know when you are being sold. And you also need to know how to sell peo­ple. What are these trig­gers, you may ask. If you haven’t already I rec­om­mend read­ing Influ­ence: The Psy­chol­ogy of Per­sua­sion by Robert Cial­dini. It’s an insight­ful read that reveals what trig­gers peo­ple to do cer­tain things. He also calls these trig­gers “weapons of influ­ence” and for good rea­son too.

This is very impor­tant for sales. If you can hit on these trig­gers, you will have already gen­er­ated auto­mated sales. It’s like a but­ton. You press it and peo­ple do what you want them to do. And know­ing these trig­gers makes your life eas­ier. You don’t have to think of a new way each time you are doing a launch or pro­mo­tion. Peo­ple are slaves to habit and if you can work these trig­gers and influ­ences into your prod­uct or busi­ness, your resid­ual income stream is already set.

And on the per­sonal devel­op­ment front, I find that know­ing your trig­gers and real rea­sons for your actions can help you grow and reshape your con­scious­ness for a health­ier atti­tude and bet­ter liv­ing. A lot has been ingrained in us since birth and in order to change bad habits and neg­a­tive think­ing, you must under­stand where it all began.

If you haven’t the time to read Cialdini’s book, then read this quick arti­cle on one of the major trig­gers found in pretty much every­one. I bet you’ve fallen prey to this once or twice.

(source)

“Money money money money money

Like any­one with any faith in humankind, you rail against the pro­fes­sion­al­i­sa­tion of com­mon­sense: because how­ever much the seed­ier tar­gets of this col­umn might enjoy spend­ing their cus­tomers’ money, baubles are imper­ma­nent. We’re not inter­ested in con­sumer issues. The greater crime, by far, is that quacks and mir­a­cle cure mer­chants dis­em­power us; and, more­over, that we love it when they do.

A paper cur­rently in press for the jour­nal Orga­ni­za­tional Behav­ior and Human Deci­sion Processes addresses this issue explic­itly. Par­tic­i­pants were given a quiz on Amer­i­can his­tory, with the oppor­tu­nity to win cash rewards for cor­rect answers (since we’re all sim­ple exper­i­men­tal ani­mals deep down), and the option to get advice for each ques­tion. The ‘advice’ was sim­ply another student’s answers, per­fectly likely to be wrong, and a rea­son­able model for self-appointed experts: it was from no great author­ity, and the exper­i­menters were quite clear about this.

The par­tic­i­pants were either offered the advice for free, or they were offered the oppor­tu­nity to buy it. They were offered either option at var­i­ous times, and it was made absolutely clear that the advice was of exactly the same qual­ity, whether it was free or not. Par­tic­i­pants were sig­nif­i­cantly more likely to fol­low advice they had paid for – and change their answers in line with it – com­pared with advice they received for free. We are suckers.

In fact, it’s already been a very good year for pay­ing for things which should come free.

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