Dear Friend,

This week we’re going to continue with our third week of some of the most valuable marketing and psychology lessons that I’ve learned and how I have applied them. And it’s been really fun for me to kind of look back through my library here and remember the source of some of the most valuable lessons that I’ve learned and remember some of the stories of how I’ve been able to apply them.

And last week I talked a little bit about one of my favourite books called ‘Influence’ by Robert Cialdini and this week I’m going to talk about another one of these principles from his book that have really had a big impact on me, and that is another one of the six weapons of influence that he has identified, it’s something called commitment and consistency. And the way that commitment and consistency works is that basically we are wired to act consistently with a commitment that we’ve made.

So if we are… if we say we’re going to do something or if we take action towards doing something, or we do something that would identify us as a certain type of person that we are wired to behave consistently with that commitment. And you know again there are all kinds of different studies that have been done to show how this works, and it’s very interesting because as I was looking through I remember some of the examples that he uses here are staging some of these great experiments and they did an experiment in New York where they would at the beach stage a situation where somebody is at the beach, they’ve got their radio and they’ve got some stuff there and they will park themselves right beside other unsuspecting beach goers and they would stage a robbery, where the person who had gone and sat down beside the people would leave and go into the water or go to the bathroom or just leave the area and somebody else would come and steal their stuff and run off. And in 20 times that they staged that situation only four out of the 20 times did somebody even try to stop the other person from taking their stuff, even though they were close to them and they knew that it wasn’t the same person.

But when that same procedure was tried another 20 times with just a slight twist the results were very different. The next time that they tried this they would have the person who was holding the experiment would get up and before they would leave their things they would turn to the person and they would say ‘will you watch my things?’ and then they would leave. And again the robber, the staged robber would come and try and take the things and 19 out of the 20 people who were asked became sort of vigilantes, you know running after and trying to stop the thief. And you know it’s very interesting because when they made the commitment to watch the stuff they were much more likely to follow up with that.

Now another example is in California they were staging an experiment where a researcher who was posing as a volunteer worker would go door to door in a neighbourhood and they would make this outrageous request of home owners, they were asking them if they would allow them to post a billboard in their front lawns, a public service billboard. And they would show people a picture showing what the billboard would look like, they’d show them a picture of a nice, attractive house with this huge billboard that practically blocked the view of the house and sign was very big, it was kind of poorly lettered that said ‘drive carefully’. And they asked people if they would be willing to do this without any other kind of explanation and were refused almost exclusively, 17 percent of the people allowed them to put a drive carefully billboard in their front lawn.

Now another group of people reacted pretty differently, they were able to get 76 percent of this particular group of people to install this billboard by going to the homes two weeks earlier and asking people to install just a little three inch square sign in their window that said ‘be a safe driver’. And it was such a small request, just a little thing, it was very… like those little stickers that ‘we support the boy scouts’ or little things like that that people will put in their windows, and this was the same kind of thing. There was no mention of the billboard that was going to come later, but when they went back to the group of people who would put up this little sign in their window they found that 76 percent of them would allow them to use their front yards, something like… that’s like a 500 or 600 percent increase in the number of people that would do it because now they saw themselves as social activists. They’d taken a small step that identified them as somebody who cared about their community and wanted to be of service.

And there’s all kinds of examples in the book of experiment after experiment like this where it’s incredible how little commitments can get people to take bigger actions. And when I understood that you see that come through in a lot of the things that we talk about in marketing of having people ask for a free report or having somebody ask for a subscription to your monthly newsletter about new homes that are coming on the market or asking for a report on homes that have sold in their neighbourhood. So in all the things that I’ve done in getting listings.com and finding buyers.com, in all of the experiments that I’ve been doing we’ve found that people when you can start somebody on a path that it’s much more likely that they will work with you ultimately when it comes time for them to buy or sell their home.

That’s why we don’t ask people right up front to choose us to sell their home or to choose us to buy their home, what we offer to them and this goes back to last week’s Marketing Monday where we were talking about the law of reciprocity where if we can have somebody accept a gift or accept a favour from us they’re so much more likely to want to return that favour. And that works hand in hand with this law of commitment and consistency, if somebody asks for a report on the home sales in their neighbourhood and we provide that free of charge, we provide that as a gift and we continue to provide updated information it’s very, very easy for people to continue acting consistently with that semi commitment that they’ve made to us by asking for and accepting our offer of help.

And so the lesson in this is that if you can almost think two or three moves ahead where you can think in terms of offering something of value to somebody that they’re asking for it would identify them as somebody who is intending on either selling their house or buying a house or getting a mortgage, and there’s opportunity for you to give to somebody… to give to them without any strings attached, without any expectation of a return. And you notice that in all the things that I do there’s never any required forms, you see things where on websites or submission forms when people are going to a website and you have all these red stars that are required fields.

And what my whole approach to that has been that I don’t want to have any kind of requirements for people to get information because I want to know that the people who did leave their correct information and all of their contact information have done it from free will, have done it out of their own choice. Not that they were forced to do it because it was a required field or that they’ve grudgingly done it. What I want is for people to take that first step voluntarily, I’m offering something of value and I’m willing to give it to them, there’s no requirement that they give me their correct information but if they do I know that they’ve done it because they chose to do it, not because they were forced to do it.

And if can just concentrate on getting people to take the first step, no matter how small it is, there’s a much, much higher chance that they will continue taking actions that are consistent with that initial step. If they ask for a report on how to buy a lovely home with zero down payment it’s much more likely that they will when you offer them an opportunity to come to a home buyer workshop where they can find out how to buy a home with zero down, that they’ll attend that or that they will come to a Saturday tour of homes with you, or that they will want to meet with you and work with you to help them find their house.

So it’s a fantastic lesson that I’ve been able to learn and adapt and have really found to be absolutely true that if you can just lead with the giving hand and let people build their own reasons for moving forward with you, without trying to force people into taking actions you’re going to be really as far ahead as you can be. So that’s it for this week, tune in next time and we’ll talk about even more ways to get listings, to find buyers and to convert leads. So happy Monday and we’ll talk to you next time.

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