From the course: Practical Influencing Techniques

Start with a small commitment

From the course: Practical Influencing Techniques

Start my 1-month free trial

Start with a small commitment

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- The final influencing process that works really well with blue people, with analyticals, is to get a small commitment from them to start with and then get bigger after that. Because blue people are quite cautious. They won't just wade in and do the whole thing. What they want to do is try it first and if it works well, then they can move up from there. So it's safer for them. You can propose a pilot study or a test, so that they can prove it and they can see that it works well. And this has the extra advantage that once somebody has agreed to a small bit and they've seen that it works, they're much more likely to extend it out because otherwise they would be admitting that they were wrong and no one likes to do that. So there's a fantastic book called Influence by Robert Cialdini. And I'll put a link so that you can have a look at that, because I'd really recommend his book Influence. And one of the experiments that he did was he said to people "could we put a great big sign on your front lawn saying please drive safely through our neighborhood." And most people said, "no I don't want a great big sign on my lawn." So then what he did was he said to people, different people "could we put a small sign on your front lawn, just like two inches by three inches on your front lawn to say please drive safely through the neighborhood?" And everybody said, "yeah, no problem, little sign, I don't mind that." So they all pretty much 90% of people agreed to having this little sign put on their front lawn. And then he went back to the same people later and he said the signs have been really successful. Could we put a larger sign now, please? And he found that nearly all of them were fine about going up to the big sign because they had now committed to this project of trying to make people drive more safely. So if you go straight for the big one, people will say no but if you start with a small one and then you go to the bigger one after that they're much more likely to say yes. And I think this particularly works well with blue people who are a bit cautious and they want to just try the small one first. So if you're trying to persuade a blue person to do something, what would be a small first step that you could take just to get them into the idea and then you can expand it up later?

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