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Dennis Collins: Hello, everybody. Leah and Dennis are here again with another episode of Connect & Convert. Insider tips for small business owners to help grow your sales faster than ever. Leah, today we have a really interesting topic. As you know, I’m a devotee of Robert Cialdini, the godfather of influence.

Today we’re going to look at the liking principle. How do you use the liking principle to grow your business? So it’s a deep dive into liking. How does it impact sales and marketing? Today we want to share with our listeners not only the theory and science but maybe most importantly, some practical applications of how and where the liking principle can be used.

So, Cialdini is not a name that’s unfamiliar to most of us. You know, I first encountered him back in the early 90s when he wrote his first book. I got a chance to study with him personally in the early 2000s. And I’m honored to be a founding member of what is called the Cialdini Institute, which is a group of us who are certified Cialdini coaches and practitioners of influence.

His seven principles are used every day in sales and marketing because they appeal directly to the System One brain, our fast brain, our automatic brain, and our intuitive brain using heuristic shortcuts to get to decisions.

Leah Bumphrey: What I love when you’re talking about him, Dennis, you have such an obvious respect and love, but also a knowledge of how to take that information and share it with people who are familiar with the name.

Because if you’re involved in sales or training in any way, Cialdini, is a name that has come up and no doubt, most of our listeners have read. But with your depth of understanding, I, love hearing you pick out the little important parts and how it applies to real-life sales.

Dennis Collins: Yeah, it’s a passion as you can tell. I love it.

Okay, let’s jump into a case study. I like case studies. I like to talk about the science behind what we’re going to talk about because it’s not just you and me talking, Leah. Although you’re pretty smart, we have science to back up what we’re talking about.

How about a story about KPMG, a financial services company? A few years ago, they decided to examine the relationships between their account managers, basically sales guys, and their clients. So they develop some kind of complex algorithm, right? And they categorize the relationships in three ways.

Weak, average, strong. What do they want to find out? Well, if the strength of the relationship had any impact on the acceptance of proposals, basically on closing sales. Well, guess what? What do you think they found, Leah? You can probably guess. What did they find?

Leah Bumphrey: It has to have a positive reflection. It just has to. I’m sure the science will back this up because when you think of even the words relationship and friendship, these are in-depth connections that people make. I’m actually pretty impressed that they even did this because years and years ago there was a fear that if you were too close to a customer, that meant you weren’t representing what you’re supposed to be selling properly.

It’s like, “Oh, you don’t want to be too close. You’re working 49 percent for the customer and 51 percent for us.” The reality is, that it should always be win-win. And when do we want people to win? It’s when we have relationships with them.

It’s our spouses, our family, our friends. our customers, the ones that we’re the closest to. So my guess, is my money is on this having a positive connection.

Dennis Collins: A good choice. And the survey says weak relationships have only 30 percent acceptance. Average relationships bumped up 15 percentage points to 45.

But fasten your seatbelt, Leah. 70 percent conversions on strong relationships. So you are absolutely right. I think intuitively, we kind of all know this, but you know what? It’s nice to have science prove this. Here are the key findings of this research project. You don’t need to spend months and years developing a relationship.

It’s nice if you do, if you can, but guess what? Due to System 1 automatic intuitive thinking, you can develop a strong perception of a relationship within about 10 to 15 minutes. System 1 brain acts fast, and System 1 brain reacts to liking. We are more likely to be influenced by people that we like, maybe kind of intuitive, but scientifically proven.

Leah Bumphrey: But this is quite interesting because it doesn’t mean that you have to be going for lunch or going for a beer with your clients all the time in order to have this connection. It doesn’t mean you even have to be the same. You know, I’m a mom of three boys. Does that mean that I can’t have a strong relationship with, — I can think of a client of mine who’s a farmer and has a huge family? But they’re all grown up. So, the how of it, that’s what comes into play. That’s what makes the difference.

Dennis Collins: And it’s not as difficult as some would lead you to believe it is. And we’ll get into this in another episode we’ll talk about that. How we can develop that liking very quickly.

We have some other tips here in this one, so stay tuned. But that’s a great subject — that it doesn’t have to be a lifelong best-buddy relationship to work.

I want to jump to something now called the halo effect. Now as I look at you on this podcast, I can see your face and I can see your head and I see that light surrounding the top of your head. We know that you have that halo effect.

Well, guess what? That tendency, it’s a bias, it’s a cognitive bias. It allows one specific good trait of a person a company a product or a service to positively influence our judgment about all other traits. Isn’t that amazing? The halo effect.

If you consider a person, for instance, to be a warm and friendly person, you will also attribute other attributes to that person without any knowledge of their veracity. Now again, it’s a cognitive bias. It’s sometimes called a blind spot, but it’s part of System 1 thinking. Have you ever found yourself in a situation like that? Where one positive thing has given you a positive brush on the entire situation?

Leah Bumphrey: Oh, absolutely. I mean, we can take it into our real life, everyday life. If someone you respect tells you this is a movie you’re going to love. Yes. Guess what? I just need that one thing. I go in and I’m predisposed to enjoy this movie.

Same thing with reading a book. And entertainment, that’s where our emotion is. And really, we’re talking about emotion in sales. So anytime somebody influences us with something positive, you just have that natural bias towards it. Now the same thing with calling on a new client, for example, and you hear in the sales pit where you’re working that, “Oh, that guy is not very nice. You know, he’s not apt to buy,” whatever the specific situation was. You go into that meeting a little bit nervous, and you’ve just heard one little negative thing. It affects you negatively.

Dennis Collins: Well, you just hit on the reverse of the halo effect, which is the horns or the devil effect. That one bad thing that is portrayed about a product, a person, or a situation can color the whole thing in a negative. So this is a very powerful heuristic. This is a shortcut that the human brain takes and it works. Let me talk about some research. Again, I like to present the science. This was done in classrooms in the late 1960s.

Rosenthal and Jacobson. They were the authors of this and they provided some elementary school teachers with some information about some children’s academic records. And then along with that information, they attached a random photo, not necessarily of that person. A random photo that was judged either attractive or unattractive by independent judges.

Guess what? The expectations of the child’s future academic performance were significantly affected by the attractiveness of the photo. Can you believe it?

Leah Bumphrey: I can believe it, but isn’t that tragic that that one thing could… And if you’re not aware of it as a teacher, as a professional, man, think of the opportunities that you’re losing.

It reminds me, and this is a story that takes me back a little bit. I had been in sales for about a decade. I was off on maternity leave and of course, I had someone I loved and trusted in our sales program that was looking after my customers. When I came back from maternity leave, I was all excited to be back to work and one of my customers didn’t want me back and I was thinking, “What happened?”

They were picking this other gal that was very successful in sales and I trusted and she had done nothing. They didn’t want me back because they were comparing the types of shoes I wore with the types of shoes she wore. And I was told that, right? It was that simple. You know what? They’re looking and you just don’t seem that successful.

Well, I was more than happy never to step foot in that business again because I guess my shoes weren’t as fancy, but they made a judgment. Now, in this case, they were well taken care of by the well-shod woman that I still work with. But isn’t that amazing to you?

Dennis Collins: Amazing, but not surprising. Because again, heuristics, Leah, do amazing things inside our brains. They can work for us and against us. But here’s the key for sales practitioners and marketing practitioners. We need awareness of this heuristic, we need to know how it works for us and how it works against us.

The research, the science on this is even more amazing about dating and about who we’re attracted to. In college, for instance, they did a study in 2017 about college students who were virtually attending class — they weren’t on camera, they were just virtually attending the class — who were judged to be fairly attractive by independent judges. And they compared to those who were in class in a real live face-to-face class. And the professor could see them and they were judged to be attractive. Guess who got the lower grades?

The people in the virtual class couldn’t be seen. So the the attractive appearance of college students helped improve their grades. I mean, it’s not necessarily right, but it’s real.

Leah Bumphrey: And as you said, knowledge is power. And for knowing this at least then we have somewhere to go with it, you have somewhere to direct your client’s attention and to find that one thing that will make a positive difference.

Dennis Collins: Exactly. And that’s the lesson. I did have a lesson myself when I was running radio stations down in Miami. There was my main station. My big daddy station was a station called Light FM. It was a soft rock station. And we had to deal with this. We had all these attributes that the station was known for.

I mean, there were 20 of them. All these things the station was known for. But you know what we had to do to get to number one, which thank God we did. We had to pick one thing that people liked and promote that. A place for busy females to relax. For busy working women, particularly, to relax. When we finally got that attribute, which we already were given and promoted, then we got credit for all the other attributes.

It’s incredible. And it made us a lot of ratings and a lot of money.

Leah Bumphrey: But you were consistent, you were focused and you had picked that one thing. So when people thought of you, that was immediately where it went. It’s like the customer who didn’t want me looking after him because of my shoes. They obviously had a thing for shoes because that was the one thing that they couldn’t get beyond. Even though in other ways I was very helpful to their business.

Dennis Collins: Like you said, it’s amazing, but not surprising.

Let’s close out with three aspects of liking for our listeners today. Let me give you all three things you can think about when trying to use this in sales and marketing. Number one is physical attractiveness. We’ve already talked about that. That works. But let’s talk about your website, your social media, your collateral material. Put a face on it. How about celebrity endorsers? Why do celebrity endorsers work? Because we like them. We want to be like them. Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Serena Williams, to mention a few.

Let me give you a Michael Jordan example. Why do people love Michael Jordan? He did a TV spot for his sponsor Nike, called Failure. And here was the script of the TV spot.

“I missed more than 9, 000 shots, I lost over 300 games and 28 times, my teammates trusted me to make the game-winning shot, and I failed. But, because of these failures, I have succeeded.” Wow, that’s why people like Michael Jordan. That’s one of the ways he endeared himself.

The other thing is that we like people who are like us. So have you ever walked into an Apple store, Leah? I’m sure you’ve walked into an Apple store. How are they dressed, generally?

Leah Bumphrey: Nice, casual, comfortable.

Dennis Collins: With a suit and tie?

Leah Bumphrey: No, not at all. They’ve got the jeans. They’ve got a very sharp looking t shirt on and they’re ready for action. A lot of times wearing very cool glasses.

Dennis Collins: And they’re welcoming, aren’t they? They’re not intimidating.

That’s part of the similarity. They’re people just like us, okay? Even small similarities like the phrase that I’ve tried to use, I want to be more interested than interesting. Interested first, then interesting. Explore people’s interests, their backgrounds, their sporting likes and dislikes, their travel, their experiences.

You will find, I guarantee you, as we’ve trained salespeople, I have found that when we go this direction in the opening of a sale, we can always find something that is similar. That we have a similarity that we wouldn’t know of. I’ll give you another quick example, hurricane names. You guys don’t have to worry about hurricanes in Canada, but here in Florida, we get these crazy things called hurricanes.

And every year they put out a list, A to Z, okay? Well, guess what? Some scientists didn’t have enough to do, so they decided to do a study. The first letter in the name of the hurricane resonates with people who share the same first letter. For instance, the Hurricane Sandy, people with the first letter S in their name were 260 times more likely to donate to help the victims of Sandy.

And Sandy was a nasty hurricane.

Leah Bumphrey: That’s interesting because they connect with the name or with the letter.

Dennis Collins: That’s a tiny similarity. The same was true of Hurricane Katrina. People whose names began with K donated more than other people. It doesn’t matter how small. You may have experienced this.

Leah Bumphrey: Well, when I think of hurricane names, what I remember is when they made the switch from it always being a feminine name, to always being a woman’s name. And now they go back and forth. And that was stark because I remember as a little girl going, you know, having that discussion with my dad and it was, you know, the fieriness of women, that’s why they picked that.

But the reality is, they had to switch it because that did influence how people were looking at storms and their connection with them. And so now we go back and forth. Although Hurricane George doesn’t scare me as much as Hurricane Sandy.

Dennis Collins: Yeah, well, unfortunately, I remember Hurricane Andrew. I was living in South Florida and that was not fun. Andrew being A, the first storm of the year. And it was the most devastating storm we’ve ever experienced, but that’s for another episode.

Leah Bumphrey: Okay, we don’t name our blizzards up here for a whole bunch of reasons, but we just stay away from that.

Dennis Collins: I’m not sure why they named hurricanes. Maybe they should just call them one, two, three, or ABC, but no, they have to have these names. I think it’s a good story. It helps get donations.

So last but not least, we all love sincere compliments. Can you tell the difference, Leah, between a sincere and an insincere compliment?

Leah Bumphrey: No, absolutely. I think everybody can. I think you can tell by the context. You can tell by what the person says and what they’re basing it on and whether they actually are talking to you and you see them having this conversation and saying, “You know, Dennis, I love the way you teach this” as opposed to “Yeah, yeah, that is really good.”

Dennis Collins: That’s true. If there’s very little context, it’s probably just fluff. We are drawn to people who compliment us. So in using the principle of liking ethically in your work in sales and marketing, use sincere compliments.

We like people who like us. So give congratulations, give good reviews, give acknowledgments. Those are all forms of compliments.

Leah Bumphrey: And compliments connect us and that comes back to our original discussion on relationships, right? This is how you form a relationship. It’s real.

But it has to be based on something solid. If it doesn’t, then it’s just, as you said, it’s just fluff. It’s really nothing. And they’re thinking, “You’re just another rep trying to get their money.”

Dennis Collins: Another rep trying to get their money. Well, we have covered this topic. We could do more on this, but I think we did a good job today.

I think we at least approached the subject. And I hope our listeners realize how important the principle of liking is when crafting sales and marketing messages. Those are just some of the ways you can use it. We’ll probably talk about some more later, but yeah. Enough for today. What do you think, Leah?

Leah Bumphrey: Well, I just hope they really like this.

Dennis Collins: I hope so, too. Get in touch with us. You know, DennisCollins@wizardofads.com. LeahBumphrey@wizardofads.com. We’d love to hear from you. That’s all for today. Connect & Convert. We’ll be back soon. Stay tuned.

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