Robert Cialdini

Rejection-then-retreat in negotiation, pick up, and sales funnels

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Would you do me a favor real quick? It’s going to be painless and won’t cost you a cent:

​​Would you go on Amazon right now and leave a review for my book The 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters? It doesn’t matter if you’ve read the book or not.

I’m waiting.

What, you’re still here?

No review for me?

That’s too bad. I’m a little saddened to be honest. But then please at least read this article to the end.

I myself have been re-reading Robert Cialdini’s Influence for the past several days. And since I’m a slow reader, I’ve only gotten as far as Chapter 2, Reciprocity.

You know what reciprocity is. It’s when you do somebody a favor… and that way you oblige them to do you a favor in turn. It’s a standard technique of grifters, conmen, and Hare Krishna devotees, because it works even if you force a favor on the other person.

I remembered that much about Cialdini’s book. But I forgot about the other kind of reciprocity Cialdini describes.

Cialdini calls this other method rejection-then-retreat. That’s when, rather than forcing a favor, you force a concession.

It’s simple to do:

You start out with a big first ask. When that’s rejected, you back off to what you really wanted all along. You’ve made a concession… now it’s the other guy’s turn.

Very devious. Very clever. And very familiar, when you think about it.

It’s the standard way people negotiate. “$10k? Oh no, absolutely not. This Miata is worth at least $22k. But I guess I could let it go for 18… 14? No, you’ve gotta be kidding me. 17 and that’s my final offer. 16? Deal.”

It’s also a standard gambit for pickup artists. I won’t give you the salacious details here. You can use your own imagination.

And finally, rejection-and-retreat is in play in every modern sales funnel, which features a front-end offer, some upsells, and inevitably, downsells if you don’t take the upsell:

“All right, so you don’t want the incredibly valuable lifetime subscription to Cat & Mouse Stockpicking Alerts for only $4,999. Will you at least accept a 2-year subscription, for only $387?”

And since you’ve read my post to the end, let me tell you this:

This reciprocity stuff is powerful. Do it right, and you can really manipulate people, even against their own interest. But beware.

Reciprocity is a perfect example of what I wrote about a couple days ago. It’s a technique that can wear out quick if you abuse it. And when it wears out, you won’t just lose that one-time sale. You will also lose the chance to do business with that person, probably for life.

Oh, and if you think I’ve done you any kind of a favor by exposing you to this devious rejection-then retreat stuff… then you know how to repay me. I have an email newsletter. Consider signing up for it. And if you decide you want to, here’s where to go.

Scared of being indoctrinated? Then don’t watch this video

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According to celebritynetworth.com, marketer Greg Renker is worth $600 million. It’s possible that’s lowballing poor Greg.

​​After all, the company Greg cofounded some 30 years ago, Guthy-Renker, does more than $2 billion worth of sales each year.

Guthy-Renker is a big beast. And today, they market in all kinds of channels. But for a long time, their bread and butter was one main medium — infomercials.

They got started by selling the book Think And Grow Rich on TV. They made $10 million from that.

And then they had a much bigger hit – selling a set of self-help audio tapes called Personal Power. The author of Personal Power? A young Tony Robbins.

I heard Greg Renker tell an interesting story about Tony. Greg said there was this secret book that Tony really liked and read and over. Nobody else knew about it. I guess this was around the late 1980s.

So Greg and all his team went out and also bought the book and devoured it. “Aha! That’s the secret to Tony’s charisma and success…”

Well the book is not a secret any more. It’s called Influence, and it was written by Robert Cialdini. I’m sure you’ve heard of it, and you’ve probably read it too.

Like I said, I guess this must have been in the late 1980s. It must have been before the Personal Power infomercial came out in 1990. Because that infomercial is like Cialdini’s Influence come to life on TV.

The infomercial starts out by showing you Hollywood celebrities… world-class athletes… and members of Congress… all lining up to hear what this young guy named Tony has to say.

Then there a bunch of testimonials by ordinary folks. Their finances and family lives and emotional well-being have all been transformed. Just by listening to Tony’s tapes.

Then you see Tony and Hall of Fame NFL quarterback Fran Tarkenton. They’re getting into a helicopter, which Tony pilots himself. They fly from Tony’s castle in San Diego to Tony’s second home, in Palm Springs.

Finally, after about 5 minutes of buildup, you see Tony close up and you hear him speak.

He’s a really good-looking guy. And he flashes you his warm, genuine smile, and he starts to talk in a confident and yet humble tone.

That’s like chapters 4 through 6 of Influence right there.

No wonder Dan Kennedy, who was an advisor for Guthy-Renker from day one, said they could have put anybody in Tony’s place and the tapes would still sell.

Maybe Dan was exaggerating. But not a lot.

Sure, you might not have Guthy-Renker’s resources. And the guru you’re promoting might not have Tony Robbins’s credibility or winning smile.

But all those things from the start of the Personal Power infomercial can be done on a smaller scale. And they will still work to build up anybody, well, almost anybody, into a powerful but benevolent god who needs to be obeyed.

Anyways, if you haven’t watched the Personal Power infomercial, I think it’s worth your time. Just be careful. Because you can get sucked in.

For example, I got sucked in. I listened to the infomercial a few times for the marketing education… and the next thing you know, I have Tony’s actual program on repeat and I re-listen to it from beginning to end, every six months or so.

But if the prospect of getting indoctrinated doesn’t scare you too much… then click below to see Influence in action:

Influence 2.0 (your choice)

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“The washing machine cannot be fixed,” my landlady texted me today. “So I don’t know what’s better. To replace it and bother you with the workers coming and going. Or to just have you wash your stuff at my place.”

I considered my options.

It would be nice to have a working washing machine. But I’ll only be in the apartment until the end of the month. The landlady lives downstairs. And she does have a point. Workers coming and going to take out the old machine and set up the new one… it would be a hassle and a distraction.

“No problem,” I texted back, “I’ll do the laundry at your place.”

Only then did it occur to me how this was a clever strategy on her part. Had she said, “The washing machine cannot be fixed. But it’s no problem! Just use mine! It will be easiest for you!” Had she said that, I would have raised all kinds of objections. At least in my mind.

As you might know, what the landlady did is a classic persuasion technique. It’s called giving people a menu. From Jonah Berger’s  book The Catalyst:

Try to convince people to do something, and they spend a lot of time counterarguing. Thinking about all the various reasons why it’s a bad idea or why something else would be better. Why they don’t want to do what was suggested.

But give people multiple options, and suddenly things shift.

Rather than thinking about what is wrong with whatever was suggested, they think about which one is better. Rather than poking holes in whatever was raised, they think about which of the options is best for them. And because they’ve been participating, they’re much more likely to go along with one of them in the end.

Berger gives examples of using menus to persuade your kids to brush their teeth and your clients to accept your plan of action. But here’s a warning:

If you abuse this, it can turn into a standard pushy salesman’s grift. “So Mr. Bejako… do you want that new Miata in red… or in black?”

“Hold on buddy. I never said I want a Miata. Why are you trying to trick me?”

So keeping this in mind, I want to leave you with a couple of choices. Of course, you are perfectly free to ignore both and to take no action.

Choice one is to go and check out Berger’s The Catalyst, which I mentioned above. I really like this book, and I think of it as a kind of 2.0 version of Cialdini’s Influence. If you want to see why, check out this page for more info about The Catalyst:

https://bejakovic.com/catalyst

Choice two is to not bother reading the nearly 300 pages of The Catalyst. Instead you can simply sign up for my email newsletter. That’s where I share the best marketing and persuasion ideas I come across.

In fact, that’s where I already shared some great ideas from The Catalyst, and where I’m sure to share more. Here’s where to click if you’d like to sign up.

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.

Woody Allen and Mark Ford walk into a library together…

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“I don’t enjoy reading,” Woody Allen said once in an interview. “But it’s necessary for a writer, so I have to do it.”

Preach, Woody.

I’ve always found reading is one of those things I do out of responsibility, not enjoyment.

But do you really have to read to be a successful writer? Or at least a successful copywriter?

I don’t know. But I heard two expert copywriters talking today. And their opinion seems to be yes.

The two copywriters in question were John Forde and Mark Ford. You might know them as the two guys who wrote the book Great Leads, which is up there with Cialdini’s Influence and Gene Schwartz’s Breakthrough Advertising as elementary education for a copywriter.

So John asked Mark, where do you get your big ideas from?

Reading, said Mark.

Not by swiping what worked before. Not by intuition. Not by some magic spark of creativity.

Instead, Mark reads. And when something makes him excited and interested, he takes note, and he uses that idea, in some form, in his own writing.

Which might sound pretty simple. Or even cheap. But hold on. Because here’s a second tip from the same interview:

Mark says Googled reading won’t lead you to a big idea. You’ve got to read books.

Yes, it’s work. Maybe even unenjoyable work. But so what? Read lots of books, carefully, and you can make lots of money as a result. And as Woody Allen will tell you:

“Money is not everything, but it is better than having one’s health.”

But here’s what not to do:

Don’t read my daily email newsletter. It won’t lead to your next big idea. And it’s not enjoyable.

If you don’t believe me, or you want to judge for yourself what my daily emails are like, then click here.

Getting your prospect and yourself to obey

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Over the past 36 hours, I’ve written a 20-page VSL.

It wasn’t completely from scratch — there were a bunch of notes and research and a fairly detailed brief I had written earlier.

But still. Yesterday morning, all that stuff looked like a rotting head of cabbage on the shelf of a Hungarian grocery store.

And as of 3 minutes ago, I have a polished VSL, along with several alternate headline complexes, suitable for handing off to the client.

The point I want to make here is simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s not powerful. It goes all the way back to that demi-god of persuasion, Robert Cialdini.

I’m talking about the power of urgency, and specifically, the power of a deadline.

Human beings will do all sorts of things because of a deadline, including writing a 20-page VSL in 36 hours.

But in most cases — certainly in my case yesterday and today — a deadline really doesn’t mean anything.

I’m not sure my client even realized today is the deadline for this project… And if he did, I doubt it would have been any kind of problem to ask for a bit of extra time, say until Monday.

But my brain never treated either of those as options.

“Deadlines are deadlines,” the gray blob said, “and they need to be obeyed.”

Your prospects are the same way.

So invent a deadline. If your deadline is genuine, great. But even if not, people will be moved to obey. And often, they will be moved more than by any inducements or promises or blandishments you could ever make.

Speaking of which, here’s an offer that will expire at the top of the hour:

I write a daily email newsletter. Joining it is free if you do it now. Click here to sign up.

Getting slapped under the table by consistency and commitment

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A few days ago, email marketer Josh Earl went on a rant against “consistency and commitment.”

As you might know, this is one of the principles from Robert Cialdini’s book Influence. According to Cialdini, people will act in ways that are consistent with their previous actions and beliefs.

Many marketers get an involuntary hardon as soon as Cialdini’s name is mentioned.

So it’s no surprise that “consistency and commitment” have been used to sell lots of marketing gimmicks. And that’s what Josh is complaining about:

“Marketers have glommed onto this idea big time. So you’ll hear them geeking out about how you can double your optin rate by hiding your signup form behind a faux survey question, or improve your sales by getting people to reply to an email, because ‘consistency and commitment, man!'”

Josh goes on to say that consistency and commitment mostly don’t work. What’s worse, they can even lead you astray. “Time to kick ‘consistency and commitment’ to the curb,” he concludes.

This argument made me think of a video I’d seen a few weeks back.

A young, skinny guy challenges the Russian slap champion.

(You haven’t seen this sport? Basically, two guys take turns slapping each other until one of them breaks down and goes crying to his mom.)

The young challenger is super confident and cocky, because he’s injected synthol into his biceps to make them look huge.

He thinks his Popeye arms will somehow let him slap harder. So he takes a swing and slaps the champion right on the ear. The champion just shakes it off.

And then it’s the slap champion’s turn.

He carefully measures his swing… pulls his giant arm back… and slaps the synthol challeger clean under the table, so three guys have to help him up.

To my mind, synthol guy is the two-step optin form that Josh is complaining about.

Consistency and commitment are more like the slap champion.

They really are powerful, just like Cialdini says. And they have made many direct marketers rich.

In other words, I don’t agree with Josh. But if you want to read his entire post, so you can make up your own mind, here’s where you can find it:

https://joshuaearl.com/bacon-petition

Cialdini and the art of laptop maintenance

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I crossed a Rubicon of sorts yesterday.

I was helping my mom set up her new laptop. She just got the same Macbook as I have.

“My God,” I thought to myself, “it’s so clean.”

I’ve had my laptop for years and I’ve never once bothered cleaning the keyboard or screen. It was gross. So last night, when I got home, I took some wet wipes and spent 15 mins wiping down the screen, polishing the trackpad, getting in between the keys to get the accumulated grime and dust.

That was in the evening, in the dark.

This morning, I got up and saw the laptop in the light of day.

And no, all the scrubbing hadn’t ruined it or scratched it or corroded it.

But I did see it wasn’t perfectly clean still. So I got more wipes, and revisited all the same goddamn keys and the little strip above the keyboard and why won’t this foggy area on right side get polished?

Mind you, I had lived with a filthy laptop for years.

So why get obsessive now?

And why not be happy that my laptop is simply good enough, much cleaner, although not perfect?

I believe there’s a fundamental law of human nature at work here. It underlies my obsessive laptop cleaning… the massive success of companies like the Franklin Mint… and even the behavior of defecting American GI’s in Korean POW camps.

You’ve probably heard of this fundamental rule. It’s one of Robert Cialdini’s 6 pillars of INFLUENCE.

I’m talking about psychological consistency and the need for completeness.

It’s one of the reasons why people who have bought your product are the absolute best prospects for buying even more of your product.

Or buying a very similar, highly substitutable product.

Odds are, even if they don’t absolutely need it… they will want it, in order to be psychologically consistent with themselves.

That’s why, if you’re only selling one product to your customers one time, you’re missing out on a big opportunity.

But here’s some potentially good news.

If you want to find out about a risk-free, guaranteed way to make more sales to such customers at zero cost, you’ll want to read the third and final part of my upcoming book. More info here:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/

Are you Joe Hepp to the real con game?

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Yesterday, a friend and I spent a lot of time tracking down the phrase “Joe Hepp.”

It appears in A House of Games, a David Mamet film about con men.

“Are you Joe Hepp?” is apparently an old circus saying that means, “Are you a know-it-all?” It later morphed into, “Are you hep?” — meaning “are you in the know?” — and later hip, hippy, hipster, etc.

But here’s something you might find more interesting.

It’s the etymology of another phrase from A House of Games. It comes up when the main con man, Mike, talks about what a con game really is.

It’s short for confidence game, says Mike.

You might have already known that.

But do you know why it’s called a confidence game?

Not because the con man gains your confidence in order to cheat you. Instead, it’s because he gives you his confidence. And this makes you trust him, and makes you susceptible for manipulation and persuasion.

In other words, it’s the old reciprocity principle from Robert Cialdini’s book Influence.

Except, not as it’s applied in the lame and ineffective way of most marketers (“If I bombard my prospects with free pdfs and hard-teaching emails, then they will feel obliged to eventually buy from me”).

No.

There are much better, more subtle, and more effective ways to apply reciprocity — AKA the con game — to copywriting and marketing.

I won’t lay them out here.

But if you’d like to know what I have in mind, you might find some answers here:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

The 7th pillar of influence

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Fair warning: the following post contains some sexual, politically incorrect references. It might offend some people.

It’s ok to click away. But if you insist on reading, here goes:

A hairy English man named Yad once shared the story of an out-of-body experience. It wasn’t his experience, actually. Rather, it was the girl he was with who had this strange thing happen to her.

Now in case you don’t know, Yad is one of the world’s great masters of stopping a girl on the street, in broad daylight, completely sober, to chat for a minute and ask for her phone number.

Well, most of the time, Yad asks for the number. Sometimes, he pushes it, and asks the girl on a mini-date right away.

That’s what happened in this case. Except, the mini-date went well, and turned into a maxi-date. In fact, even though they had just met on the street a few hours earlier, Yad and this girl wound up back home in the evening, and found themselves in bed together. And that’s when the out-of-body experience supposedly happened.

You see, the girl was amazed by Yad’s seemingly irresistable confidence at every step of the way, from approaching her on the street, to asking her out, to moving her from bar to bar, and now getting her naked and in bed.

She was wondering how much further this would go, and whether she was really willing to sleep with a guy she had just met on the street only hours earlier.

In the end, she said something like, “We were having sex, but at the same time I felt like I was just having this out-of-body experience, floating around above the bed, watching all this unfold and asking myself, ‘Who is this guy and how is he so relaxed about this whole thing?'”

Well, I’m not here to plug Yad or his pickup skills today. Instead, I want to talk about the 7th pillar of influence.

You might already know something about the first 6 pillars. They were identified and written up by Robert Cialdini in his book Influence. These are the 6 golden rules that  persuaders of all stripes supposedly use — stuff like reciprocity, liking, social proof, etc.

But I believe there is another big pillar of influence that Cialdini left out. It’s in the story above. My guess is that it also drives about 90% of Internet traffic today. And according to famous copywriter Gary Halbert, it might even be the #1 reason that people buy stuff from advertisements.

Have you got it yet? Here’s a hint. It’s the common thread in all of the following headlines:

“Grains puffed to 8 times normal size”

“Its reputation and its odor precede it”

“The amazing money-making secret of a desperate nerd from Ohio”

“Why whales got so big”

I’m sure by now you have it so I’ll stop teasing. That 7th (and possibly most important) pillar is plain old, tried and true…

Curiosity.

Yep, curiosity. Curiosity can drive clicks. It can sell products. And as you can read in the story above, it can even get a girl to sleep with a hairy English man only hours after he’s met her.

Yad on a good day

Which is all good, but how do you go about creating curiosity? Good question. And it’s something that I plan to answer in detail. But not today. If you want to get my take on it, you might want to sign up to my daily email newsletter.