Persuasion

When authority and urgency fail…

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Yesterday, I wrote about a remarkable piece of persuasion:

Assassination survivor Alexei Navalny cold called one of the secret service officers behind the assassination attempt.

Navalny used some standard persuasion tricks to get the secret service officer to reveal all sorts of behind-the-curtain info during a 50-minute call.

So how about those persuasion tricks?

There were some obvious things. First, there were the trappings of authority.

Navalny called from a spoofed phone number, which made it seem he was inside the secret service headquarters. He claimed to be an aide to a high-ranking security official. And he seemed to have a lot of insider knowledge — such as names of people possibly involved in the assassination attempt.

So that’s one thing.

The second thing was urgency. Navalny, in his assumed alter ego, insisted this needed to be done here and now, because the big boss was waiting.

But that wasn’t enough. The guy on the other end of the line didn’t budge in spite of the authority or the urgency.

If you read the transcript — available online — you can hear the secret service officer dodging Navalny’s questions. “I don’t have this information… why don’t you call this other guy… I am at home with coronavirus.”

So how did Navalny finally get the secret service guy to break down?

Simple. He said the following:

“Let me help you. On a scale from 1 to 10, how do you assess Alexandrov’s work? I understand that he is your colleague, but nevertheless…”

The secret service guy said, “I assess him positively.”

Navalny then asked a few more 1-10 questions.

​​The secret service guy answered.

And then Navalny started asking more probing questions. As I told you, he finished some 50 minutes later, having squeezed the secret service guy for a lot of classified, inside information.

The technical term for what happened to the secret service agent is commitment.

You get somebody to commit to a small thing… and they will be more likely to commit to a big thing after.

It’s like a big and heavy chain sitting on a massive ship. The chain is way to heavy for you to lift and toss overboard. But if you start just one or two links down the side of the ship… then the whole thing might uncoil and come hurtling down into the water.

That’s commitment. It’s how you can persuade people to do crazy things.

The Navalny story is one example of it. But there are plenty more, all around you. It’s why the headline and the lead of a sales letter are so important… it’s why a customer who paid you $5 will be more likely to buy a $1000 course than somebody who never gave you any money… and it’s why people who have been burned on a get-rich-quick scheme will get burned on a second and a third.

​So what’s my takeaway for you?

Nothing. I’m just glad you read this email all the way to the end. By the way, would you like to subscribe to my email newsletter for more content like this? If yes, here’s where to go.

Spy thriller persuasion in the real world

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It sounds like a scene out of a Jason Bourne movie:

A man survives a near-fatal assassination attempt. After months of recovery, he decides to figure out exactly who was responsible and how and why.

Being rather clever, he has a hunch of where to start. So he picks up the phone, and starts going down a list of secret service agents who have been trailing him for years.

He calls the first person on the list. No response.

He calls the second person, and introduces himself using a fake name.

There’s a pause on the other end of the line. “I know exactly who you are,” the other man finally says. Click.

The assassination survivor calls the third name on the list.

“Hello?”

“Konstantin Borisovich?”

“Yes, yes!”

“This is Ustinov Maxim Sergeevich, aide to Nikolay Platonovich Patrushev. I received your number from Vladimir Mikhailovich Bogdanov. I apologise for the early hour, but I urgently require 10 minutes of your time.”

“All right.”

50 minutes later, the assassination survivor has milked the secret service agent for the names and methods and dates behind the failed assassination.

Like I said, it sounds like something you would see in a movie. But it was real, and it happened only last week. The assassination survivor was Alexei Navalny, a leading Russian opposition politician, who was poisoned on a plane back in September.

All in all, this was a pretty spectacular piece of persuasion and social engineering. To put it in context, just ask yourself:

How would you go about tricking a trained secret service agent to open up and reveal secret assassination stuff to you on an unsecured line?

It might surprise you that Navalny did it through standard persuasion techniques. Stuff that’s straight out of Robert Cialdini’s Influence.

I won’t list all the techniques Navalny used. But if you like, I will write about one of them in more detail tomorrow. It’s how Navalny finally got poor Konstantin Borisovich to break down and open up… and it also underlies all of direct marketing.

If you’d like to read tomorrow’s article, you might like to subscribe to my email newsletter.

Wounded children walking

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“Every man you’ve ever known, loved, and trusted has lied to you.”

That was the sentence that Chris Haddad tacked on at the front of one of his VSLs in the relationship niche. Chris says this one sentence doubled conversions.

So what’s going on?

Well, the sentence is shocking. And shocking pattern interrupts work well at the start of a VSL to attract attention. But there’s more to it than that.

I heard a successful copywriter say that if you take a product’s features, you can ask “So what?” to get to the benefit of that feature.

And you can ask “So what?” again, to get to the benefit of that benefit.

And you can keep asking the same “So what?” question… until you get to the end. And the end is always the same:

“So I can feel better about myself.”

This same copywriter summed it up with a self-help quote. “We are all wounded children walking around in adult bodies.”

For somebody who’s in the direct response relationship market, that wound might be a broken promise or rejection or harm early on in life… which has trailed this person like a hungry shadow ever since.

In other parts of the direct response world, the wound might be something different.

But everybody — at least everybody who’s of interest to you if you write copy — has such a wound. And if you can address it right at the start of your message, like Chris did with his VSL… then the right people will listen.

Listen:

I have an email newsletter where I write about persuasion and copywriting. If you consider yourself to be a smart, ambitious person, and you have uncomfortably high standards for yourself… then you might find it valuable. You can subscribe here.

How to fake exciting discovery stories

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Tony Robbins once shared a stage with a knight’s suit of armor.

At one point during his talk, Tony got close to the knight. Terrible static appeared on his mic. When he walked away, the static stopped.

The next time Tony got close to the knight, terrible static shot up again. He stepped away. The static stopped.

The third time it was about to happen, people in the audience started shouting. “Don’t get close to the knight!”

It turned out later than an ambulance in the neighborhood was somehow messing with Tony’s sound equipment. Once the ambulance left, the sound problems disappeared. It wasn’t the knight at all.

The human brain needs causation like a hot dog needs mustard. “Terrible sound! What’s behind it? It must be the knight!”

This works really well much of the time.

Sometimes it goes wrong, like in the Tony Robbins story above.

And in rare cases of clever persuasion… it can be used to lead people by the nose. For example:

During a webinar last year, Parris Lampropoulos analyzed a sales letter. It was written by his most successful copy cub.

The lead starts off with a true story of a 104-year-old scientist who won the Nobel Prize for her discoveries related to brain stuff.

The gist was this old lady saying, “I feel sharper now than when I was 20!”

The sales letter goes on to talk about the woman’s discoveries… and how the supplement for sale ties into her amazing research.

Now rewind.

Did you catch that?

It’s the same trick as with the knight above, at least for my hypergullible brain.

Because when I read this sales letter, my brain concluded, “Oh, she feels sharper because of her brain stuff discoveries. And this supplement is a way for me to tap into that, and get back what little I had when I was 20.”

But the sales letter doesn’t say that anywhere. The quaint old lady could have been feeling great because of her genetics… or because of her daily regimen of drinking beet juice. We just don’t know.

What we do know is that, when you’re writing copy, it’s best to have a genuine breakthrough coupled with an exciting discovery story.

But if you don’t have that… you can cheat. Just roll your breakthrough onto the stage… and then bring out an exciting story that’s not really about this discovery. Put them next to each other. Your prospect’s brain will do the rest.

Now rewind.

Did you catch that?

This whole article was a way of eliminating people who aren’t interested in persuasion or copywriting. Since you made it to the bottom, maybe this stuff interests you. In that case, you might like to sign up for my email newsletter.

“… I want to think about it”

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In a private and exclusive Facebook group I am lucky to be a member of, marketer Travis Sago asked the following:

“How do you respond to, ‘I want to think about it?'”

Travis was talking about doing one-on-one sales, rather than persuading the masses.

His question ties in nicely to my post from yesterday. That was about A-list copywriter Gary Bencivenga, and the failure he experienced when trying to sell in person.

So ask yourself. How would you respond if a prospect wants time to think about buying whatever you’re selling?

If you know online marketing, you might spike up the urgency.

“Only 72 left in stock!”

“The timer is ticking! Once it runs out, this offer will be taken down!”

“The price will go up after midnight!”

That’s not what Travis recommends. Instead, this is what he says:

“Take all the time you need. What had you considering this at all?”

That’s very clever and nuanced. It sums up, in two sentences, much wisdom that came from negotiation coach Jim Camp. Camp talked about things like going for the no… eliminating your own neediness… and using open-ended questions to get your adversary to paint a vision of his own pain.

Camp’s system was used in big ticket, multi-million dollar negotiations. Travis is using it to sell $5k and $10k and $50k offers. He says this approach has made him millions, and I believe him.

So now you know an effective way to deal with an important objection in one-on-one sales.

But what if you’re doing online mass marketing, or writing sales copy? Can you profit from Travis’s laid-back system? Or would using it be suicide?

After years of slow thinking, I have one or two thoughts on the matter. And maybe, I will share them some time soon, after the timer runs out. If you want to hear what I have to say, you can sign up for my email newsletter.

Bencivenga’s salesmanship mistake

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Master copywriter Gary Bencivenga once shared a personal story of failure:

Back in the day, Gary was working at a small direct response ad agency called Callas, Powell, Rosenthal, and Bloch.

They put out an ad in the Wall Street Journal with the headline,

“Announcing a direct response advertising agency that will guarantee to outpull your best ad.”

If you’ve been reading my writing for a while, you know how well this ad did. It attracted qualified leads like Oregon attracts aging hippies. Suddenly, crowds of qualified business owners wanted to work with CPRB. Of course, most still had to be closed in person.

So Gary went out to meet one such business owner at the guy’s office.

“Thanks for coming out,” said the businessman. “Now, tell me why I should work with you.”

(Pause for a second. And ask yourself, how would you answer this question? Do it for real. You might be ahead of Gary B, because…)

Gary, using everything he’d learned about persuasion in print, gave the businessman a show.

He listed all the proof showing how CPRB produced results… how they had worked out the perfect formula for creating winners… how they were so confident in their results that they would back them up with a creative “Either it succeeds, or you pay nothing” guarantee.

Gary talked for an eternity. He laid out his entire, irrefutable case. And then he dropped back into his seat, short of breath and a little damp from the effort.

“Sounds good,” the businessman said. “Let me think about it, and I’ll get back to you.”

​​He never did contact Gary or Gary’s agency again.

It turns out Gary fell victim to one of the classic blunders of salesmanship and marketing, the most famous of which is, “Never sell ammunition on subscription.”

But only slightly less famous is, well, let me save that for tomorrow. And I’ll tell you what Gary could have done instead, for much better effect.

But let me ask you a question:

What got you interested in reading this post to begin with? Think about that for a second. And maybe you will come up with a reason why you want to read more similar content… and why you would like to subscribe to my daily email newsletter.

How to write “killer copy” in any market… even if… you don’t deserve it!

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Of course you do deserve to write killer copy, right? You read the right books… you hand copy successful sales letters… you listen to what more experienced copywriters have to say.

But let’s say you’re still not getting results. What could be missing?

Here’s a bit of wisdom from the Prince of Print himself, the self-aggrandizing legend, Sir Gary of Halbert.

Gary once wrote a sales letter for a sexy sex guide. A few of the bullets:

* Three sure-fire ways to tell if your spouse or “significant other” has had sex with someone else in the last 24 hours!

* What lesbians know about oral sex which men don’t… and… why more men today are losing their women to other women!

* What (and how) a man can learn about his woman’s masturbation secrets… which will… supercharge HIS sex life!

Intriguing stuff… but the headline is 80% of the sale, right? And that’s what I want to quickly share with you today. Gary’s headline read:

“How To Have “Killer Sex” At Any Age… Even If… You Don’t Deserve It!”

It’s the tail of that headline that caught my eye.

Because if somebody’s a good prospect for your “How to” direct response product… then they’ve almost certainly got feelings of defectiveness and low self-worth. At least as regards that specific problem.

They’ve tried solving the problem before. They haven’t succeeded. They can only take that disgust and frustration in one of two places. Inwards or outwards.

Often it’s inwards.

And if you use that — even just by calling it out, like Gary did in his headline — it could make all the difference. You could be on your way to producing truly killer copy. In any market.

Sounds good?

But maybe you still feel unworthy. Maybe you feel you haven’t done all those things I listed at the top. You can fix that. And quickly. To start, click here and sign up for my daily newsletter, all about copywriting and marketing wisdom.

Nobel scientists stunned to produce must-read news

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“It will change everything,” said Andrei Lupas, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute.

“Stunning,” said Professor Venki Ramakrishnan, Nobel Laureate and President of the Royal Society. “It has occurred decades before many people in the field would have predicted.”

You may have heard the news published yesterday. DeepMind, an AI project within Google, “solved” the 50-year-old problem of protein folding. (I say “solved” because DeepMind does a good job, much better than anybody else. But it’s not perfect.)

This is a big deal. It will help scientists unravel the many mysteries still hidden in the human genome. It also means that the singularity is near. If you haven’t yet started building your anti-Skynet bunker, the time is nigh.

But let’s talk persuasion.

My point today is that the human brain looooves shortcuts.

We are giant shortcut-seeking machines.

For example, we rarely try to figure out things ourselves. Instead we look around. “What’s that guy doing? Eh, I bet that’s good enough. I’ll do the same.”

Another shortcut we take is to only look at extremes. So The World’s 50 Best Restaurants wields more clout than the Michelin guide. Why? Because it’s easier. There’s only one no. 1 restaurant among the 50 Best. But there are 135 restaurants with the highest 3-star Michelin rating.

You see my point. As Gene Schwartz said, “there is nothing so astounding as the astonishment of experts.” Particularly if those experts are the very top experts, the ones who got a Nobel Prize.

Because when you 1) take experts and 2) make them amazed, you create must-read news. And news is another shortcut that the brain loves to take, right on down to the order page. But that’s another story, for another time.

If you’d like to read that story when it comes out, you can subscribe to my daily email newsletter. It will appear there first.

Why I didn’t collect my $10.5 million

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Today I found a tantalizing email in my spam folder. The sender was Mrs. Mary J. Parker. The subject line read:

“FROM THE UNITED NATIONS POLICE (UNPOL)”

The email explained UNPOL was contacting me because of some money I’d wired to Nigeria.

This is a bit embarrassing. But a while back, I got another email. It described a unique opportunity to help somebody and get rich at the same time. At least that’s how it seemed.

I wired the money as that first email asked. And I waited to get rich. But I never heard back from anybody, or saw my money again.

Anyways, the email from Mrs. Parker informed me that a bunch of organizations, including “Scotland Yard Police, Interpol, Federal Bureau of Investigation, (FBI) United States of America, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) of Nigeria and all the African Crime fighter leaders” have been working hard to capture the fraudsters who grabbed my money and the money of other people like me.

These law protection agencies caught a bunch of these “Internet rats.” They retrieved billions of dollars.

And now, to make it up to me, they wanted to send me $10.5 million so I could start a new life. All I had to do was furnish a certain Dr Richard Kelly with $450 and also my correct and valid details.

Now here’s something that might shock you:

I decided to pass up this offer. Even though I’d previously wired money to unknown persons in Nigeria. And even though $10.5 million was on the line. Why I did this is the subject of this post.

Let me set things up by telling you about two direct mail campaigns. The first campaign was written by Gary Bencivenga. It made a generous offer:

Six free issues of Boardroom’s Bottom Line/Personal newsletter, plus a premium book. All for free, no strings attached.

It was such a generous offer that Gary thought it needed a reason why. So he used the idea of a survey.

“Fill out this survey,” Gary’s letter basically said, “and send it back to us. As thanks, we’ll send you six free issues and the book.”

This campaign was a massive success. A bunch of people sent in their surveys and got their trial six months of Bottom Line/Personal.

The trouble is, they didn’t subscribe much when the trial expired. And those who did subscribe didn’t buy much of Boardroom’s other books or offers.

But a control is a control. And so this survey offer kept running.

Until the second campaign. Which was was also written by Gary Bencivenga. And which also made the same generous offer.

But instead of using the free survey, the second campaign sent a 64-page booklet, titled The Little Black Book of Secrets.

This booklet had the most interesting secrets from different issues of Bottom Line/Personal… along with occasional calls-to-action to get your six free issues + bonus.

Result?

The second campaign pulled in only HALF the number of responses of the survey campaign. But twice as many of those people actually paid to subscribe when their trial ended. Plus, these non-gimmick customers bought way more of Boardroom’s other products.

In the long term, the second campaign was the winner, and became the new control. Which brings me back to the email I got from UNPOL.

The people at UNPOL did right by giving me a second opportunity to wire money to Nigeria. That’s standard direct marketing — it’s called having a back end. But here’s the thing:

I’m a greedy and opportunistic person.

Sure, I liked the big promise of being able to get rich quickly. That’s why I wired my money over the first time. But my interest was fleeting, and I’ve already moved on. That’s why I didn’t reply to Mrs. Parker’s offer today.

It’s pretty much the same as those people who filled in a 2-minute survey to get something free from Boardroom. Because hype and impulsiveness can get you lots of buyers… but those buyers can make a wobbly foundation for your business.

As Michael Fishman said once:

“Your selling copy in the prospecting process can actually impact the longevity of a customer with the company. So what I mean by that is if you make very, very big promises for a self-help product, a health or investment product… if you make very, very big promises for that about quick results and overnight success, etc… the kinds of people that will find that believable and ultimately will buy turn out to be folks that are not very committed in the long run to your company.”

But you’ve stuck with me for over 750 words now. Do you feel yourself becoming a bit committed to reading my stuff for the long run? In that case, you might like to subscribe to my daily email newsletter. It’s free, now and in six months’ time. Here’s the optin.

Tall Chinese boys and the Zappos case study

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I often wonder why teens seem to be getting taller, even in countries that are not famous for tallness — like Italy or China. Today I found a potential answer.

According to a study published this month in The Lancet, it comes down to nutrition. Improving nutrition is why Chinese boys became 4 inches taller in 35 years, and went from 150th tallest on the list to 65th. Meanwhile, boys in the UK got only one inch taller during that time, which dropped them from 28th place to 39th.

Dr Andrea Rodriguez Martinez, the lead author of this study, concluded by saying:

“Our findings should motivate policies that increase the availability and reduce the cost of nutritious foods, as this will help children grow taller without gaining excessive weight for their height.”

It was the bit about “increasing availability” and “reducing cost” that got my attention. It reminded me of a case study reported in Jonah Berger’s book the Catalyst, about the online shoe retailer Zappos.

In their early days, Zappos was limited in how low they could cut their prices — Nike didn’t want their cool new sneakers being sold cheap.

But even if Zappos could offer lower prices than in retail stores, people would still be wary of buying shoes online.

So what Zappos did instead was remove roadblocks to buying. They offered free shipping instead of lowering prices.

It could have been disastrous for the company… but it was not. Zappos went from struggling ecomm startup to a $1.2 billion buyout from Amazon.

So my message to Dr Rodriguez is, instead of pushing for food voucher programs… advocate for more vending machines selling expensive but delicious dehydrated zucchini chips. And watch those kids shoot up in height rather than width.

But it’s unlikely Dr Rodriguez will listen to me. Maybe you will.

So my message for you is that free shipping makes any offer more enticing… and that price is often not the main objection that you need to address. Rather than trying to compete on price, ask yourself why your prospects are not buying already — and then remove that roadblock directly.

Let me give you an example:

I write a daily email newsletter. It’s free, so I can’t cut its price any lower without paying you to sign up. But the fact is, you can subscribe to it and if it’s not right for you… you can unsubscribe any time with just one click. No risk. No hassle. So why not try it out? Click here to sign up now.