photo credit: Diana Lili M
photo credit: Diana Lili M

Easily grow your business, your sales results and your happiness with the Reciprocity Trigger - it Works!  And it has worked flawlessly since man stumbled out of the cave.  Scientists now believe the reciprocity trigger was embedded in our brain to insure the growth of our species.  Only by reciprocal sharing of food, lodging and protection could our species survive.

Does the reciprocity trigger still work?  Fast forward to today.  In 2008  AIG gave  the soon to be announced chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Christopher Dodd, $103,100 dollars.  Dodd’s reciprocity?  Quite simple.  He removed a senate amendment to the stimulus bill that would have capped bonuses of AIG execs at $100,000.  After denying on CNN that he was the culprit, he was fond out, admitted the deletion and told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Dana Bash  “looking back, I apologize.”  He then blamed  the Administration for his action.  Hey!  Guess What?  The second largest gift from AIG , $101,332 went to Obama!

So some $200,000 in gifts turned into $165 million in bonuses  of our tax money to AIG executives - a return of 825% on their gift money!  Not a bad ROI.

Of course the public outrage killed that golden goose, but this is a very simple example of how powerful the reciprocity trigger is.

Apply the reciprocity trigger wisely, honestly, and achieve huge profit, growth and success .
photo credit: woody1778a

photo credit: cliff1066

Which emotional trigger is Obama activating to persuade the public to have confidence in his effort to soften the blows of our economic meltdown?  Against all promises for his “Change”  mantra, he is activating the Authority trigger by appointing authority figure names.  And every one of these names is a throwback to former authority.  To former governments. Robert Rubin was the well known well publicized Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration.  Rubin is a Washington insider.  Most recently he headed up the advisory committee at Citigroup. Larry Sumnmers was appointed Secretary of the Treasury in 1999 - another authority figure with a long past as a Washington insider.  Tim Gaithner, newly appointed head of the Treasury is currrently President of the Federal Reserve bank of New York.  Obvious ties to The Fed in Washington. Can you see “Change” in any of these appointments?  I don’t think so. Change?  Fuggedaboudit!

Yet  to instill confidence, to avoid a complete emotional breakdown for the public, Obama must persuade us that better times are coming.  He has activated the Authority Trigger to persuade us that he is putting top people in place.  The stock market is persuaded.  The public feels better.  The Authority trigger is working - as it always does for persuasion.

photo credit: liberalmind1012The big 3 auto presidents from Ford, GM and Chrysler violated a critical emotional trigger and blew a $25 billion windfall.  No, one violation alone didn’t kill the deal - they made several persuasion mistakes.  The biggie however was really outrageous.

Remember what we have been saying about the persuasive power of building trust through sameness - similarity, honesty and mirroring those you want to persuade - elements of the friendship trigger?

Each of these clowns, Wagoner, Mulally and Nardelli flew into the hearings on his own private luxury jet.  Can you imagine the trust generated by a guy walking off a 46 million dollar luxurious Gulfstream jet with his tin cup in hand pleading poverty and begging for a handout?  This is the antithesis of smart persuasion - not one soul in the room could relate positively to these guys.  They blew every emotion of trust and similarity.

House leader Harry Reid put it very simply stating “They did themselves no favors each flying in on their private jets.”

These guys have to learn the basics of emotional triggers!

photo credit: joiseyshowaa

Can today’s big three auto execs Wagoner, Mullaly and Nardelli match the persuasion skills of Lee Iacocca?  Will GM, Ford and Chrysler survive?

In 1979, against staggering odds,  Iacocca personally applied his infectious brand of persuasion and secured a congressional loan of 3.5 billion dollars to keep Chrysler afloat. With the odds stacked high against him, Iacocca persuaded 241 house members to vote Yes, with only 124 nays.  In the Senate, he persuaded 43 yes votes against 34 no’s. Continue reading »

China has the fastest growing economy on the planet - they certainly don’t need persuasion skills to grow and prosper– or do they? Our McGraw-Hill book, The 7 Triggers to Yes Chinese language version has just hit the streets in Hong Kong, Singapore, Beijing, Taiwan and throughout Chinese speaking Asia. The Chinese want it, love it, because they understand the value of persuasion.

Whatever your location in the world, to succeed, to grow and prosper everyone needs persuasion skills. Whether in sales, management, or leadership of an entrepreneurial business, persuasion is the key to success. The Chinese have a legacy of generating great wisdom – They now have The 7 Triggers to Yes to add to that wisdom.

"A prudent question is one half of wisdom." - Francis Bacon

How much easier would selling be if you could really see things through your customer’s eyes? Here’s how the pros do exactly that. It’s a process called Value Profiling and like many effective techniques, it is not complicated (most salespeople just don’t know it or don’t do it).

SKILL TARGET: Find out what your prospect wants, and emphasize those features and benefits which meet their criteria.

It sounds simple, but the steps in the process are critical:

PRIORITY ONE: Develop in advance the questions you intend to ask.

PRIORITY TWO: Include the following:

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Think about it – is politics based on facts, realities or emotional persuasion? It’s a no-brainer. Politicians do their best to activate our emotional triggers. Fact and reason do not persuade. Try your own logic and reason to persuade a friend or relative who strongly believes in one party to change their affiliation. Won’t happen. Can’t happen. A study in futility.

When the ancient Greeks came up with their crazy new form of government more than 2,500 years ago, they quickly realized that to govern successfully in a democracy, one needed great persuasion skills. Persuasion became so important that Aristotle wrote 3 volumes about the persuasion process in the fourth century BCE. He correctly determined that there are three main elements to persuade successfully. He called these elements Logos, the appeal to logic, Pathos, the appeal to the emotions and Ethos, the credibility and authority of the speaker. Aristotle wrote that the best route to persuasion should be logic and reason.

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One of the 7 key emotional triggers is consistency. We are emotionally forced to be consistent with our past beliefs and actions. And we are hard wired to be consistent with our respected peers. This powerful trigger governs much of our decision process. The databank we build from birth serves us well for future easy, automatic emotional decisions.

How, perhaps even unknowingly, do the politicians activate our emotional consistency trigger? Overall we tend to go with whatever party we aligned with before. Yet politicians do their best to activate the consistency trigger. And they try hard to activate the consistency we have with respected peers.

The first presidential debate was a study in the consistency trigger. Each participant tried to tie the other into a consistent pattern with negative overtones. Obama, referring to the financial meltdown stated “This is a final verdict on the failed economic policies promoted by George Bush,” constantly implying McCain would be consistent with Bush. No fact, no logic, no rationality explained, just a hope to activate peer consistency trigger.

McCain attempted to show that Obama would be consistent with his failure to back American military interests. By emphasizing Obama’s failure to vote for the Iraq surge, his criticism of the surge, and by not admitting he was wrong about the surge’s effectiveness, Mc Cain connected these issues with future probabilities for Obama’s poor military judgment.

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A front page article in Saturday’s Washington Post starts very simply: “Paulson’s Powers of Persuasion Persuasion Tested.” As Secretary of the Treasury, a former executive at Goldman Sachs, Henry M Paulson Jr. has the credibility, the power, the authority to trigger the requisite emotional response from congress to his request for a $700 billion bailout package. Or does he?

Since credibility and authority are excellent emotional triggers, where did Paulson go wrong? Well, he blew his credibility. How? Two weeks ago he told congressional lawmakers he had no intention of bailing out Freddy Mac and Fannie Mae. A week later he did what he said he would not do. Credibility lost – Authority trigger questionable. The financial bailout delayed.

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Every business, every entrepreneur benefits from better persuasion skills. Currently, one group needs these skills even more than the rest. Those in real estate sales face troubling times in a troubled industry. Yet some, including the woman who sold us our house, are doing great. Why? Because they learned and apply super emotion based persuasion skills. Today “Mr. Internet,” Michael Russer wrote an article for his Real Estate site covering an article I wrote for Agent and Broker Magazine.

Michael does a super job explaining application of the 7 triggers to real estate sales, and brings along the simplicity of our own trigger applications asking: “Why did you listen to that particular cd? Or hit the snooze button again? Or buy Cheerios instead of Wheaties?” He adds, “because you felt like it!” Michael goes on to say “As long as you have previous experience with a situation you have a “feeling,” a “hunch,” an “intuition” that triggers your decision”

To succeed – to grow your business, simply learn to activate other’s internal triggers. Check out Michael’s article at:

http://www.mrinternetnews.com/blog/decision-triggers-get-what-you-want/

photo credit: Olivier Bareau

Here’s a quick, easy way to learn a bit more about how The 7 Triggers to YES can increase your business and personal success. Tune in to Small Business Trends Radio at 1:30 Eastern time Tuesday 9-16-08 for an interview with Russell Granger, Author of the McGraw-Hill Book, The 7 Triggers to Yes.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/smallbiztrends

photo credit: Duchamp

Welcome to readers of the Managing for Success section of Investor’s Business Daily for Monday 9-15-08. I hope you enjoyed the article “Sound Emotional Chords To Help Persuade People.” Lots of good management advice given. The content is from an interview on my latest McGraw-Hill book, The 7 Triggers to YES.

Investor Business Daily (161,000 daily circulation) writer Morey Stettner provides condensed information on three emotional triggers we all employ – Authority, Hope and Reciprocity. Expanded information about these critical triggers, along with a description of The 7 Triggers to YES can be found on this site. Information on The 7 Triggers to YES downloadable training program can also be found here. Pretty informative – check it out! For those who haven’t read the IBD article, here’s the link:

http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=24&artnum=1&issue=20080912

Who needs persuasion skills? Why? Melissa Thompson, who wrote a great review of The 7 Triggers to Yes for Training Magazine, put it very simply saying, “I can’t think of anyone who couldn’t benefit from better persuasion skills.”

How about you? How could the ability to persuade others impact your life? The answer is surprisingly easy. You can have anything you want – yes, literally anything provided you can persuade the other person to do what you want or give you what you want.

So why do we need persuasion skills? Why not give others good reasons, logical requests for them to do what you want. Give them good arguments, lots of rational information and they’ll comply right? Wrong! For 2500 years – since Aristotle wrote 3 volumes on persuasion in the 4^th century BCE- we thought reason and logic were the best routes to persuasion. Only today can we watch the brain live in real time. What have we learned? That reason and logic do not persuade. Reason and logic do not impact the decision making emotion based elements of the brain. Emotion based requests activate internal decision triggers. Amazing! We had it backward thinking that emotions were an impediment to decision making. They are the key!

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Why is persuasion the world’s most researched skill? That’s easy—as history shows, it’s the world’s most important skill!

Take a trip back to the Fifth Century B.C., when Athenians were experimenting with a new form of government. The Athenians quickly discovered that to succeed in a democracy, they had to be persuasive. Leaders used persuasion (then called rhetoric) to gain agreement and win support. Everyday citizens used persuasion before a new legal body—the jury.

Recognizing its importance, Athenian scholars, including Plato and Aristotle, began to study the powerful process of persuasion. Circa 435 B.C., they defined three elements of the process of persuasion: Logos, the appeal to logic, reason, and facts; Pathos, the appeal to emotions; and Ethos, the appeal of the speaker’s character and credibility. These scholars found that one or more of these appeals characterize any instance of persuasion.

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Several large surveys show that most people believe a logical discussion, with good data and the right logical supporting facts, is the best way to persuade. Often, they break the persuasion process down to three main steps:

1. Present your proposition clearly, with conviction.
2. Present your supporting data, with the right facts, logic and information.
3. Structure your "deals" and move on to closure.

But according to Dr. Jay Conger, Director of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California Business School, "Following this process is one surefire way to fail at persuasion."

Why?

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