… a powerful technique to have prospects sell themselves on your idea, and feel good about doing it!
Beginners in sales often have a mistaken belief that their job is to “persuade ” the prospect to buy. If they mature (and survive) past this early stage, they may come to a realization that the only person that can persuade a prospect is the prospect themselves. Any action that does not occur from the prospect’s own desire is probably the result of misrepresentation, fraud, coercion or pressure tactics.
But what if you could create an environment where the prospect could persuade themselves?
Social Proof is a powerful and prevalent psychological phenomenon where people look at the actions of others to decide how to act themselves. A 2008 study by Noah J. Goldstein, Robert B. Cialdini, and Vladas Griskevicius demonstrated how persuasive this influence tactic is. To observe it, they conducted a study over several months in a mid-sized, mid-priced, hotel to see if they could get guests to be more environmentally friendly.
In the first instance of the study they placed cards in the guest rooms asking people to:
- “HELP SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT. You can show your respect for nature and help save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay.”
About 1/3 of the guests complied with this request. They then changed the wording to:
- “JOIN YOUR FELLOW GUESTS IN HELPING TO SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT. Almost 75% of guests who are asked to participate in our new resource savings program do help by using their towels more than once. You can join your fellow guests in this program to help save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay.”
The new “social proof” oriented message immediately caused a 25% upswing in towel reuse.
The researchers then focused their experiment on whether different reference groups would affect the outcomes. Using the same hotel as in the first experiment, they placed five different message cards in the guest rooms:
- “HELP SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT. You can show your respect for nature and help save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay.”
- “JOIN YOUR FELLOW GUESTS IN HELPING TO SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT. In a study conducted in Fall 2003, 75% of the guests participated in our new resource savings program by using their towels more than once. You can join your fellow guests in this program to help save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay.”
- “JOIN YOUR FELLOW GUESTS IN HELPING TO SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT. In a study conducted in Fall 2003, 75% of the guests who stayed in this room (#xxx) participated in our new resource savings program by using their towels more than once. You can join your fellow guests in this program to help save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay.” [#xxx would be replaced with the room number]
- “JOIN YOUR FELLOW CITIZENS IN HELPING TO SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT. In a study conducted in Fall 2003, 75% of the guests participated in our new resource savings program by using their towels more than once. You can join your fellow citizens in this program to help save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay.”
- “JOIN THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO ARE HELPING TO SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT. In a study conducted in Fall 2003, 76% of the women and 74% of the men participated in our new resource savings program by using their towels more than once. You can join the other men and women in this program to help save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay.”
*message #2 differs from message #4 only in referring to the participant as either a “guest” or a “citizen”
As predicted, the messages that described the kinds of people that participated in environmentally friendly behaviour resulted in higher towel re-use. The most powerful instance was the same room message (#3) which resulted in almost 50% of guests re-using their towels, an upswing of almost 33% better than the standard environmental message.
How can you use this understanding of human nature? When you are creating your sales messages refer to the peer group your target market is part of and provide proof that the desired behaviour is already taking place. If you were selling golf clubs, here are 3 example messages you could use with the social proof element:
- These are the best selling golf clubs for beginners
- These are #1 selling clubs for women
- These are the same clubs that the majority of PGA players use
People love social proof because it lowers their risk of action by demonstrating that other people in their peer group are already doing it.
