A Self-Defense Manual the Industry Turned Into a Bible

Years ago, I learned the principles of persuasion. I was taking a marketing and sales training run by really successful small business owners and entrepreneurs, and I was taking notes on the tactics they were leveraging. Reciprocity. Commitment and consistency. Social proof. Authority. Liking. Scarcity.

These were all a set of tools, and it was shared that once you understood how to leverage them, you would never struggle to sell anything again. And I started to use them. Some of them I still use, because this is part of how human beings make decisions and take action.

But what nobody mentioned at the time, and what I only learned when I started to do my own research, was where any of this came from and why it was public knowledge.

It comes from a book called Influence by Robert Cialdini, a behavioral economist who spent a career studying how people get talked into things. He wanted to answer the question, why do people say yes even when they don't really want to? He wanted to understand why humans rely on these automatic psychological shortcuts rather than pure rational thought when making decisions. And he was inspired after realizing how easily he was personally manipulated into buying things he didn't actually want.

So he spent years going undercover at used car dealerships, fundraising organizations, and telemarketing firms to observe how compliance professionals, like marketers and salespeople, actually operate. He was drawn to the topic because he saw how easily people crossed the line from honest, ethical persuasion into manipulation, exploitation, and abuse.

So he wrote Influence, which was meant to be a psychological self-defense manual. He aimed to create an accessible guide to help regular everyday folks identify persuasive tactics and recognize if they were essentially being hacked, if they were having these tactics used against them in order to buy things they didn't actually want or need. He was trying to translate this heavy behavioral and social science research away from the academic world and hand it over as a practical framework for regular folks, so they would understand how they were being sold to.

Now, as you can imagine, marketers and salespeople took this book and ran with it. It was incredibly unsuccessful at first. It wasn't until marketers and salespeople discovered this book that they ran with it, and it became their bible for exactly how to get more people to say yes.

An entire industry took a book written to protect buyers and used it as a system for converting them. I want you to sit with that, because that is so gross to me, and unfortunately that is how these things have been weaponized against us.

Where These Tactics Show Up in Your Own Training

In the last episode, we talked about the patriarchy in pink. We talked about the archetypes, the brand personas, how this entire apparatus was built to make you trust someone faster than you otherwise would. That episode was about who is selling to you. This one is about how.

And it's not just in my industry. It's not only in the industry where we're coaches or consultants or running training programs. This is in every industry.

If you have ever, as a small business owner, taken a marketing training or a sales training, if you've ever gone to a conference, if one of those trainings ever handed you a sales script, if they've ever told you specific tactics to add in order to convert more people, and it made you feel a little like, mm, I don't know if I like this, then you have also been exposed to this without understanding where it came from and the original intent behind it.

Because most of what gets taught as marketing best practices wasn't built to help you make thoughtful, strategic decisions. It was built to stop you from making thoughtful, strategic decisions, and instead to get you to yes before you'd fully thought through that decision.

The matriarchy would never. Let's get into it.

Hey, CEO. It's Racheal Cook, founder of The CEO Collective® and your host for the Promote Yourself to CEO® podcast.

What This Series Has Covered So Far

I am so curious about how this series is landing for you, The Matriarchy Would Never, because this is what I have been thinking about for such a long time. This is what I have been reading about. This is what I have been researching behind the scenes. These are the conversations I've been having with people, and I feel like it's time to shine a big-ass spotlight on why this world that we're all a part of, the way that entrepreneurship and small business has been, is truly not serving us.

So I kicked off this series talking about how the matriarchy would never assume you are the safety net, and the underlying advice for women entrepreneurs that essentially assumes that someone else is handling life at home, that assumes that you are available 100% of the time at 100% capacity, which is just not true for the majority of us. And when that assumption is the one we are using to create strategy for our businesses and to create plans and to decide how our business is going to take shape, we end up continuously running into the reality of our lives.

What happens when your kid gets sick? What happens when your parents need help? What happens when there's no one else but you to handle those things, because you're the safety net?

And then in part two, I said the matriarchy would never sell you patriarchy in pink, and we talked about the version of entrepreneurship that has been sold to women by women, dressed as female empowerment with pink scripty font. So that one was all about who is selling to you and how they are leveraging things like the female lifestyle empowerment brand to get us to like them faster and trust them faster without actually thinking strategically.

This episode is about specifically how we are being sold. It's about how best practices have been taught to all of us without us really thinking about what is happening when we're leveraging them.

The Tactics Taught as Good Sales Skills

These are things that we have been told are professional skills that we all need to use if we actually want to make more sales and make more money. And if you don't use them, then somehow you're not committed enough. You should just get over it.

But I know for me, these are things that haven't always felt good, and I've always kind of struggled with the way that many of them are used. They don't feel aligned to me.

So you have probably been taught to use some of these in rooms or in programs that were created by reasonable people. Smart people have told me to use these tactics.

To put a countdown timer on the sales page. To say there's only three spots left even if I can easily accommodate more. To have a game plan for objection handling as a named skill, with a script for exactly how to handle somebody's questions, how to thoughtfully, warmly ask, well, what's really holding you back? as the closing move in a sales conversation, knowing that I am going to have that objection handled in no time. The price goes up at midnight. Bonuses expire at midnight. Everything apparently happens at midnight. A message written to look like it was typed just for you. And the one where somebody transitions from their free content into a pitch using let me just be really honest with you as the transition statement.

Every single one of those things has been taught as this is just good sales skills. If you want to become an amazing salesperson, this is how you do it, and it is a trainable skill, which is absolutely true.

And I'm going to say that sales isn't inherently a good or bad skill. But I think it's all about the way that it is being leveraged to shortcut critical thinking, to take that understanding of how we take action and how to get people to say yes, and use it against them.

The Question I Run on Every Tactic

So I have to ask, when we're using these different types of tactics, are they helping me to make thoughtful, strategic decisions, or are they being used to shortcut my critical thinking, to shut down my critical thinking? And this is how I discern whether or not a tactic has been taken too far.

Again, none of these tactics are wrong inherently.

A real authentic deadline is important information for making a thoughtful, critical decision for your business. A genuine lack of seats in a room is genuine information that I need in order to make a thoughtful decision. If you only have 30 seats available because there are only 30 chairs that fit in that room, that's the max capacity, that's real legitimate information. Telling somebody that the price is going up because your costs have gone up, that's real legitimate information that helps me make a smarter decision.

So the question isn't just whether these tactics are being used. It's why they're being used. Are they being used to help me make a thoughtful, informed decision, or to shut down that critical thinking and just get me to yes faster?

When the Ick Gets Called a Money Block

A lot of women that I've talked to have felt uneasy about using these tactics, and then they have been told, gaslighted, into believing that that feeling of unease, that feeling of mm, I don't like this very much, is a money block, is a mindset issue, is a lack of commitment.

And that's where I get pissed, because that is just not fair.

A lot of these tactics we have been taught are just best practices. So when we have those feelings of unease or squeamishness, like we don't like how this feels, that to me is really important information about whether or not I should be using this tactic in the way that it's being presented to me.

So let's talk about these different principles of persuasion. In fact, I'm going to share in the show notes a video about the principles of persuasion. It's about 10 or 11 minutes long. It's a great video that explains Robert Cialdini's principles of persuasion in a way that I think makes a lot of sense.

So we understand that these are all based on consumer behavior, buyer behavior, how people make buying decisions. And once you understand them, then you start to see how they could be leveraged against someone.

The principles that he shares in the book Influence are reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity, and unity. Unity actually came later, in his next book, which came out I think pretty recently, called Pre-Suasion.

And again, his initial book, Influence: The Principles of Persuasion, was not written as a handbook for marketers and salespeople. It turned into one. It was written as a way for regular folks to understand how they make decisions and these mental shortcuts that automatically happen to all of us, so that we can be more informed and more aware.

So I want you to know every single one of these can be used in an ethical and honest way, but they can also be used to shortcut critical thinking, and that's what I'm trying to call attention to today.

Scarcity, Urgency, and Thirty Two Chairs

The first principle is scarcity and urgency. This is a really important one, especially in marketing and sales, because it's often challenging to get people to take action if there is no reason for them to take that action today, to take that action when you want them to.

So it becomes useful in decision-making. How many times have you personally been wanting to buy something, wanting to sign up for something, and you kept forgetting about it, you kept putting it off, until you got the reminder, this is the last day to buy this ticket, or, this is the last time before prices go up? A real deadline is real information. So it can be used in an honest, ethical way.

Let's say you are trying to enroll people into your group program. If there is a start date, that is important information. You need people to enroll before the start date so that you can onboard them. That is a legitimate use of a deadline. If you have only a certain number of seats, if the room only holds 30 seats, that is legitimate scarcity.

Great example. I'm hosting a dinner later on this month here in Richmond, Virginia. I've been wanting to do this for a while, slight aside. It's called the CEO Supper Club. If you happen to be in the Richmond, Virginia area, every quarter I'm doing a restaurant takeover with a local chef and bringing together a room of 30 women entrepreneurs who just want to start building real connections, real community, and have deeper conversations than just, so what do you do?

So when I've been promoting this, I literally only have 30 seats. The restaurant we're taking over, there are only about 30 seats. Actually, there are 32 seats total. That is legitimate scarcity. I can't sell more than that, because there are no more physical chairs to put people in.

So this information is useful and helpful, and it should help people make a decision really thoughtfully, really intentionally, really strategically.

The Invented Deadline

The challenge becomes the invented deadline, and you might have seen these often. They show up a lot more in the online space. I see them when you click to learn more about something and the timer is resetting each time I click through and the page reloads. The closing date just continues to get moved. It's not actually ever really closing. So they are telling you, you have to buy it now, it's the last day, but the timer resets each time you click the link. The last spot is somehow still available every single week.

So when it comes to scarcity and urgency, it is useful and helpful when there are real deadlines, when there are real constraints that need to be considered. It's unethical when it's not true, when somebody is using it as a way to get you to make a decision now, hoping that you're going to panic buy because you don't want to miss out.

FOMO is real, and people will use the fear of missing out against you. You can see it when they are pushing really hard, but then magically the thing is still available next week. That's not cool. That's unethical to me, and I am not a fan of that. But I do think there is an ethical, honest way to do this.

Internal Urgency Without Twisting the Knife

The other part of scarcity and urgency I want to speak to is the difference between external urgency and internal urgency. We just talked about external urgency, the deadlines, the limited number of seats. But that is something we are sharing to get people to take action. It's external to the buyer.

Internal urgency is what someone is feeling inside that is moving them to take action now rather than later. And I had a great conversation with a client who said, you know, I really don't like pushing on external urgency. I'd prefer to tap into internal urgency, because then people are more motivated. They want to take action because they have that internal urgency of something's gotta change.

I absolutely agree. It can be really powerful to use internal urgency. But again, there are two sides to it.

What I sometimes see being sold, again as best practices, is this. If you've ever learned the skills of copywriting, you're often told to tap into what do they fear, what is the pain point. And literally take that fear and that pain point and amplify it. Twist the knife. Extend it out so it's almost catastrophized, like the worst possible thing will happen if you don't take action.

I really don't like this, because I feel like that's incredibly manipulative. It's a great way to bypass critical thinking, by tapping into someone's internal fear or pain about something.

So when I'm thinking about internalized urgency, I tend to think about, okay, what makes this actually relevant and important to this potential client right now? Why is this important and relevant right now to this person? And instead of tapping into their fear or pain around it, coming to them from a perspective of, I get it. I empathize. I understand how it feels to be in this situation right now. I understand why this is important and relevant to you right now, and then presenting the next step, how you can solve that problem for them.

I think you can do this without twisting the knife, without tapping into fear, without tapping into feelings of pain. And I think when it comes to using that internalized urgency, that to me is one of the best ways to approach it.

Because when people are coming from that internal urgency, yes, they are generally more motivated, and when they're coming to it not out of fear but out of a place of personal empowerment, a place of personal agency, I think they're going to ultimately get better results. They're going to be easier to work with than someone who is freaked out and panicked about something. I don't want anyone coming to me feeling panicked, or feeling like something is an emergency situation. That is not how I like to operate.

Liking, Personas, and Everyone With the Same Haircut

The next principle of persuasion is liking. We all know and have heard that people need to know, like, and trust you. That is what we've all been told about marketing forever, and it's true. A huge part of marketing is getting people to know who we are, getting them to like us enough to want to work with us, and getting them to trust that we can help them get the result they are looking for.

The problem comes up when things are created and crafted to build artificial liking, artificial trusting. It's when there is a persona being built specifically to create this type of relationship without it being earned, and that's what the Patriarchy in Pink episode was all about.

We talked in that episode about the different archetypes that are used to bypass our critical thinking and to get us to assume things about the person we're following. For example, I shared how the luxury lifestyler might be showing off designer handbags and wearing red-soled Louboutins as a way to indicate that they are successful because they have these luxury items.

The reason that can become problematic is when it's not authentic to that person. When all you have seen of them is what they have portrayed online, it breaks a tremendous amount of trust when suddenly you show up in a room and this person is completely different from what was presented to you. It becomes really problematic when it is not congruent.

I also personally experienced this. I remember the first time I went through a branding exercise, and I had to push against this, because this was in the 2010s when everybody was pushing the female lifestyle empowerment brand, the idea that to be successful as a woman entrepreneur you had to have certain things and use certain things to indicate success.

And I remember finally being like, no, I don't like this. I'm not going to put a luxury handbag that I don't even own in the photo shoot because it'll make me look successful. I don't even carry a luxury handbag. Anybody who knows me day to day knows that I'm probably carrying a tote bag or a backpack. I'm not wearing designer heels, because I can't even wear heels anymore. I'm more likely wearing a pair of Birkenstocks.

This has become more and more important to me for women entrepreneurs. There's so much pressure to look a certain way, and I think it's actually backfiring for a lot of us.

I remember talking to a friend not too long ago about how it feels like everybody's hired the same stylist, everybody's got the same haircut, everybody has the same beige, neutral toned, open concept homes, and they're using all of it to create this very carefully crafted image online, this brand persona online. But it just looks boring and flat to me, because I'm wondering, okay, who is this person?

When everybody starts to look the same and everything starts to look so curated and so perfect, you really start to wonder, who is this person really? Are they showing me who they are, or are they carefully crafting every single part of their brand persona?

This is important because we can very quickly like people based on what they present to us, and then not do any additional digging. So I think it's important that we go beyond the surface level whenever we are learning about different people to follow, different people we are getting information from, and that we take some time to do some due diligence and get to know who they really are. What evidence do we have about them? What are they really showing us, or is everything just super polished and curated?

Authority and the Flashlight in the Parking Lot

I think this piggybacks and leads right to the next piece, which is authority.

This one is probably the one I have the most issue with personally. I get really, really frustrated with this one, because a lot of people who teach marketing, who teach sales, who are teaching entrepreneurs how to build their empire, spend a lot of time talking about how to create authority as a skill with a training attached. Here is how to generate authority.

To me this is another sign of the broader cultural issue of anti-intellectualism we are having in this country, where people do not want to take the time and energy to do the deep work to build genuine expertise. They just want the shortcut, and the shortcut is you have to look like you're a few steps ahead of everybody else. If you're just a few steps ahead of them, then you can sell them your solution.

Oh, I have a hard time with that.

I can tell you that a lot of people have learned this. I initially learned it from Jeff Walker, who I've learned a lot from about how to do marketing online especially. He's the person who created the product launch formula, where you have a three or four-part video series that leads into a program. I've done a three or four-part video series over and over again. Nothing inherently wrong with that. But the story he shared about how to fake authority really upset me. I was so frustrated by it.

He shares a story about how he's trying to leave an event, and the parking lot is completely gridlocked. No one can get their car out. So someone jumps out of a car with a flashlight and starts waving for people to move, and the other drivers assume that person is an actual authority and follow their directions. And suddenly Jeff Walker and his friends are able to get their car out. That was his big light bulb moment of, you just have to look like an authority. People will follow you if you look like an authority.

I think this is incredibly dangerous, and an incredibly slippery slope.

In my own client base, I have a lot of clients who work in very credentialed, very regulated fields. I have a lot of clients who work in health and healthcare and mental health, and those fields need to have real expertise behind them. You could cause a lot of harm to somebody if you don't know what the hell you're doing, and that is why you have to go through school, you have to get the degrees, you have to sit for the exams, you have to maintain your credentialing, you have to report to an authority body that is making sure you're maintaining your credentials.

I also have clients who are in the finance world, or who are lawyers. Again, they have a lot of compliance they have to hold up to. They have a lot of testing they have to complete in order to do their work. They have to maintain their credentials. They have to submit things to compliance. And the reason is to prevent harm, to make sure that only qualified people are doing this work. These credentials are important. They protect consumers.

Where I have a hard time is where faked authority is used to extract money from people without actually having the real experience and expertise behind the scenes.

So I truly believe the matriarchy would never create false authority to get you to part with your money, because the matriarchy is built not on an extraction model, but on protecting the most vulnerable of us. Children, women, elderly, disabled. Anybody who's a vulnerable population, the matriarchy is there to protect them. So inherently, a matriarchy would not be okay with manufactured authority designed to get the most vulnerable people to pay for things from somebody who is not qualified to offer that solution, to teach that solution, to prescribe that solution.

Authority That Was Actually Earned

And the matriarchy would never manufacture authority out of a mess-to-success story.

Mess-to-success is one of the tactics a lot of people, Jeff Walker included, teach as the way to generate authority. The mess-to-success story is basically, I was broke and living on my sister's couch in her basement and had no prospects, and suddenly I learned this one thing, and wow, look at me now. I'm a multimillionaire, and here's my boat and my fancy car and my multimillion-dollar house, and whatever else they're using as signals of success.

The mess-to-success story was designed to hijack your critical thinking, and I'm here to tell you there are a lot more origin stories that are a lot more original, that are a lot more interesting, and that showcase your real earned expertise.

Authority should be earned through doing the work, through actually having the real education, the real expertise, the deep work of learning the thing. Of getting, if required, the degree or the certification, and then putting in the reps to get results for real people, and not just yourself. If you can only get results for yourself, you're not truly ready to claim that you're an authority or an expert yet. You've got to start working with other people and get results for them as well.

That's what a lot of people do when they go work in someone else's organization. A lot of my clients got to where they are because they didn't just roll out of bed and decide, I'm going to start a business on this, when they'd never done it before. They worked for someone else as a therapist for years before they started their own therapy practice. They worked behind the scenes in a financial services company, learning everything they could learn about finance before deciding to hang their own shingle. They didn't just wake up one day and think, oh, I'm going to say I'm an expert in this, and then start making money off of it. They put in the time to actually learn, and really, really deeply learn, what this was.

So this is one of the things that can also be a double-edged sword. I know a lot of women don't like to claim that they're an expert. I've done a lot of research on this. A lot of women don't think they're expert enough, and that's another side of this that can get a little tricky, because when I talk to a lot of my clients, I have to remind them that there are people who have nowhere near their amount of expertise who are selling this.

And as a woman entrepreneur, I'm not saying you have to have decades of experience before you can do the thing. But I am saying, be authentic with it. Don't make it up. Don't wake up one day and decide, I'm going to say I'm an expert in X, Y, and Z, when you've never done X, Y, and Z.

And when you're looking at other people you're wanting to hire, you're wanting to work with, take a little bit of time. Poke around a little bit and go, what has this person actually done? For how long? Who have they done it for? Not what have they personally done for themselves. That can be a part of it, but we need to know that they've been able to do this for other people as well.

Social Proof, Follower Counts, and Launch Numbers

And that's where the next principle of persuasion comes in. Social proof.

Social proof is incredibly powerful. One of the examples that Robert Cialdini gives in Influence is that if you want to look for a great restaurant to go to, you look for the restaurant that's the busiest, that is the most full. Because we assume that if this restaurant is slammed, packed full of people, the food must be good. That's what social proof basically is. If we can see a lot of people are there, it must be good.

That's a great shortcut when you're hungry and you're not sure where you want to go eat. The challenge is when the stakes are higher, and when the stakes are higher we have to use a little bit more critical thinking.

So when it comes to small business, there are a couple of ways social proof has been taken out of context. One is when we're looking at following sizes. We see this all over social media. We assume that if somebody has a really large following, they must be a credible expert. They must know what they're talking about.

Nothing is further from the truth, y'all. There are plenty of people who have massive followings who are not credible experts. They're just really good at building a following, they're really good at capturing attention, or they could just be really good at buying followers, which we've all seen. I think a lot of people are a little bit more discerning around that now.

If you're only looking at how big somebody's following is, you're going to miss a lot of really great experts, a lot of really influential thought leaders, because they might not be as good at marketing themselves. There are plenty of people who do incredible work who don't have massive followings.

In fact, I would say I'm a great example of this. I don't have a massive following, and I've never needed one in order to grow my business, because I'm not focused on quantity over quality. I would rather focus on talking to the right people instead of doing all these crazy tips and tricks and tactics to beat the algorithm online.

Another way we talk about social proof is when we start looking at things like launch numbers. There's a lot of hype out there around launch numbers, people talking about how big this business is, how much money they made during this launch. That can be something we consider social proof for how successful that particular person is at something.

But without context, we don't have enough information for that to be useful. A launch number doesn't tell us a whole lot. It doesn't tell us how big their audience is behind the scenes, how many people are actually on an email list, how much traffic they get, how much ad spend, how much team they have. It doesn't tell us their refund rate, their cancellation rate. It doesn't tell us how profitable that was. So an outlier launch number isn't hugely helpful for determining if something is actually successful or not.

Testimonials, Outliers, and Non-Revenue Wins

And of course, the next piece of social proof is testimonials and case studies. This one is a little bit more nuanced.

We all need to share testimonials and case studies, period. This is one of the most important things when I'm reviewing marketing for my clients. Do you have a testimonial or a case study to share with your community? Because it is really, really helpful when you have potential clients landing on your website or your sales page or your testimonials page to see that people have gotten real results working with you.

And of course, nuance and context here, there are some spaces where you're not going to have testimonials as easily. Seeing a testimonial is a little bit less likely in a medical setting, because people have their privacy there. But for a lot of us, testimonials are important.

The challenge comes up when every testimonial on every sales page was chosen specifically for the incredible results it got, and those results are outliers. That means the entire body of evidence a potential buyer has has been filtered through all of the testimonials being the biggest possible result, and that result is not indicative of the results regular folks get.

This is why you'll often see, especially on commercials, people having to have the quick disclaimer either written in tiny font at the bottom or said really, really quickly. Results not typical. The Federal Trade Commission has literally put rules out there that we are all supposed to be following, that if you are only sharing the outlier results and that is not typical of what most of your clients experience, you could potentially be sued by the FTC. They can come after you and fine you for that, because it is manipulative.

So we have to be really careful with this, because we could have results that are amazing that we want to showcase, and every story could be completely true. I hope you're documenting that. I hope you're documenting it and verifying it if you're going to share those stories. But the picture can still be wildly misleading because of what is left out of that story. There could be other things going on behind the scenes that led to that outlier that need to be talked about in order for that not to be a misleading testimonial or case study.

So when we are getting testimonials and case studies, we need to get a range of them that showcase what your typical results look like. And when you're getting those testimonials and case studies, get some of the context behind it. What did it actually take to get that result? Especially if there was some unique circumstance that accelerated that result. If there was something this person had that maybe other people don't normally have access to, disclose that. Say, yeah, they had this incredible result, and they happened to have this thing that made it possible for them to get that incredible result. I think that is really, really important.

I also think you shouldn't be showing only one kind of result, and I like to talk about this inside of my business as non-revenue results. As someone who teaches small business to small business owners, who's a coach for small business owners, it would be really easy for me to only focus on big revenue wins. I grew my business by this much.

I like to also look at what I call non-revenue wins, and these are the wins that are aligned with my client's definition of success. So I like to highlight things like my clients who were able to take a maternity leave and know that their business was going to continue running without them. My clients who were able to take a leave of absence or a sabbatical, and their business was able to run without them. Those are really fun for me, because those are the types of non-revenue goals they set with me as part of their definition of success, their vision for their business.

I love being able to share the non-revenue wins of things like, I was finally able to create this new thing in my business, or, I was able to find an amazing team member. Those aren't just I made this much money working with Racheal, and I think that is really, really valuable.

So think about your version of a non-revenue win. That came from me watching the world of health and wellness, and I got tired of just hearing about weight loss wins, like you lost this many pounds. I resonated more with the wins that were the non-scale victories. My pants fit better. I felt more confident. I had more energy. Those, to me, were also valuable and useful, so that's where that thinking came from.

Reciprocity, Commitment, and Unity

All right, there are a few more that I want to touch on. I went deepest into the ones I think can be the most challenging. The next three aren't as intense, I think.

Reciprocity is definitely a good practice. Reciprocity is all about when people give you something, you feel the desire to give them something in return. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.

Where it can become problematic is when the gift is engineered to create a feeling of obligation, which is how a lot of marketing has used this. You are offered the free workshop, the free webinar, the free content, but it's mostly a sales pitch. Very little content and a whole lot more sales. Or you're downloading a free resource that suddenly hits you with hard sales on the other side of it. You've probably seen this. You opt in for something, and you're immediately hit with a sales page. You should buy this right now. That's where it starts to get a little out of control.

So reciprocity is a good practice. I feel like there is a give and take in the world of small business, but we should be thoughtful about it, especially if we are promising a free resource and then immediately attaching a sale right as someone gets that free resource for the first time. There's a way to do this elegantly without it feeling like a complete bait and switch. We don't want that.

The next one is commitment and consistency. Commitment and consistency is helpful in marketing. We need to be showing up consistently. But what this principle is really talking about is that once somebody says yes, you want them to continue saying yes.

Where you have seen this is when you buy something and you're immediately hit with the upsell, and then the upsell, then the downsell, then the upsell, and you keep clicking through the pages, because they know that once you've said yes, it's easier to get you to continue saying yes and add to your order, add to your checkout cart.

This is where funnels get me really frustrated, and if I find myself in one of these, I'm just like, nope, I'm not going to do this. I have such a hard time with this one, because I feel like it kind of traps you, especially if the first part of it that you're saying yes to, you're like, yeah, I did want that thing, but now I don't want any of it. So if you've been in that, decide how you feel about it and how much you want to incorporate that type of thing.

I have no problem with adding a little upsell. If someone checks out for a CEO Retreat® with me and they're going to attend in person, I will often have a little button you can click on the checkout page where you can add a mastermind day, or sometimes I offer you can add a one-on-one with me, but it's all right there in that step. I'm not putting people through multiple different checkout pages before they can decide, because to me it just doesn't fit. It doesn't feel right.

The final one here is unity. Unity was introduced in the second book, Pre-Suasion, and this is where he's talking about shared identity as a sales tool.

This one can be a little tricky, because when you are using a shared identity as a sales tool, this is how community becomes a retention strategy. You want to be one of us. You want to be on the inside. You want to be an insider in the cool club.

And the reason it can be insidious is because it can create a very culty dynamic. MLMs are really well known for this. They create this culty dynamic where when you're in, you're in, and it just feels like, oh yeah, we're part of this team. But once you step away, you kind of lose all your connections. It feels like, oh, I guess they didn't really actually like me or care about me. They only liked me and cared about me when I was a part of the group. So that's where it can be really tricky.

I do think belonging and connectedness and community is incredibly important, but it should never be weaponized against people.

What Honest Persuasion Costs and What It Returns

As we wrap up this episode, which was a big dive into the concepts from the book Influence, the specific principles of persuasion, and what happens when they are used on one hand in a more questionable, manipulative way, versus on the other hand in a more honest and in-integrity way, there are three key things I want you to walk away with.

First, you're using these tactics with integrity when the buyer's judgment is intact. The buyer is able to walk away from that sale and able to think for themselves, think critically. They were able to make a thoughtful, strategic decision for themselves, for their business, for whatever the decision was about. And honestly, the sale either survives it or it shouldn't have happened. You're not using anything to manipulate, to coerce, to create FOMO, anything that would cause a knee-jerk reaction that that person might later regret.

That leads me to the second thing these principles have in common when used with honesty and integrity. It does cost you something in the short term, and that might surprise you, but think about it. We got this book because it was about how marketers and salespeople get people to say yes and buy things, and then that was exploited to increase the likelihood that they would say yes.

So if you're using these tactics in a more questionable, manipulative way, you're going to see more sales, faster conversion speed. You're going to have a lot more people who say yes. Up front, short term, you're going to make more.

On the other hand, if you are using these with honesty and integrity, you might see fewer sales up front. You might see it takes a little longer for that conversion. You might have a shorter list, a smaller pool of people who are actually the right fit. And that's not a bad thing, because what you're really trading off is a little bit of loss up front in the short term for the long-term gain.

The person who wants the short-term win, on the back end of that, long term, what tends to happen is there's a lot of buyer's remorse. They have high churn, they have high refunds, they have high cancellation. They end up with people who were not a good fit, and that is expensive. It is expensive to have people who are not a good fit. They need more support. They're going to take up more time and energy. They're not going to get the results that were promised. When you try to sell it to everyone and you have people who shouldn't be in the room paying to get in the room, it's going to cause problems long term. And what tends to happen long term is you're constantly having to go out and look for new folks.

But if you're using these things with honesty and integrity, then the third thing is that your business doesn't need to get in front of brand-new people nonstop, because you're not churning through people.

Your clients, because you took the time to make sure they were the right fit, you let them make the decision on their own using their own critical thinking, they were ready and in the right position to say yes to this. Guess what? Those people are more motivated. They're more likely to stick with whatever they have just signed up for, which means you're going to retain those clients. They're not going to cancel. They're not going to back out. They're not going to refund on you.

And when you retain those clients and they do the work, they go along through the process, whatever it is that you are sharing with them, they get results. And then when they get results, amazing things start to happen. They send you rave reviews, they send you referrals, and they bring you repeat business. They come back to work with you again and again. That is how we build relationships. That is how you have clients who have worked with you for years.

If you go for the short-term gain and you're using these tactics questionably and manipulatively, you are going to burn so many bridges, because it is a highly transactional approach when you sell indiscriminately to everybody when they are not a right fit, when you take anybody's money and you've manipulated them into that sale. You're going to find you have a high refund rate, you have people who churn out, you have people who need a whole lot of help in order to get results, and ultimately you've just got to keep feeding the beast, constantly getting in front of new folks.

Who Absorbs the Cost of a Wrong Yes

So then there's a question that ties this all together. When the buying decision turns out to be the wrong decision, who absorbs the cost?

If the tactics that were used were questionable or manipulative, then the buyer is usually who's paying the cost. Usually, on the back of that manipulation, there are also things happening like there's no recourse, and I've unfortunately seen a lot of this. They pay for the product, program, or service. They implement it, maybe badly, maybe not at all. They lost time. They lost money. And nobody really cares about them in a highly transactional model, because they've already looked for the next sale. So it wasn't ever really about getting that person the results they were looking for. It was just about getting them through to the sale.

On the other hand, when you use these tactics in a more honest and in-integrity way, the cost is shared. The disqualifier costs the seller sales up front. Having clear written policies, having clear values, these all can cost you as a business owner in a lower conversion rate in sales, because you are specifically only looking for the right fit people.

And I think that is something worth speaking to. Because you're taking on that cost, that risk, it's what makes this more of a relationship. I only want the right fit people to say yes. I don't want to just sell to anybody, because that's extraction. That's a transaction, and that's the whole difference in my mind between matriarchy and patriarchy in business.

It has nothing to do with whether you are a man or a woman running or owning the company. It's about who actually carries the risk here, and who absorbs the cost when it was the wrong decision.

It's harder to run a business with honesty and integrity. It doesn't convert as well in the short run. It requires that you often turn down money or sales or opportunities because they aren't a fit, and nobody's going around congratulating you for the sale you didn't make or for being honest.

The reason to do it anyway isn't to virtue signal. It's that the other way requires you to constantly be in transaction, transaction mode. It's that the other way requires you to constantly be using these questionable tactics, which to me only chips away at your soul a little bit at a time, over and over again, and you're constantly chasing the next sale. You have to constantly go out and find new people, and once you build a business in that way, you've got to feed the beast. The treadmill only gets faster. You have to keep going in that way.

Why Being Trustworthy Is Turning Into an Advantage

You're building a business where the buyer thinking clearly is an asset instead of an obstacle. And I think that's a competitive position now, because these tactics have been weaponized against us for so long that there is a huge feeling of distrust.

Everyone who I know is listening to this has been sold something they did not need. They have been sold something they regretted purchasing. And over time, it just makes you a lot more cautious and a lot more wary. Which means these tactics are losing power.

So seeing a countdown timer isn't going to work on you if you've seen it 100 times. Seeing a carefully crafted brand persona doesn't work as well on someone who has seen this person before, and you're clocking that this is an archetype. This is a pattern. There's nothing original about this.

So being the person who doesn't run these questionable, manipulative plays, to me, is becoming a more obvious choice rather than a naive one. And I was told for a long time that I was being naive if I didn't use these tactics in this particular way, if I didn't have my objection handling script nailed down, if I didn't get people to a yes no matter what.

Being trustworthy is turning into a market advantage, and it's kind of strange that that is where we are. It's like, why is this not the default setting? Blame marketers. They ruin everything.

But to me, this is a good development. The model that burns through people has to keep finding new ones. The model that is built on real relationships keeps those people, and keeps them for a long time, which builds a healthier, stronger, more sustainable business where everyone who is involved in that business is winning, is getting their needs met, is getting the results they wanted out of that relationship.

The One Question I Want You to Take With You

So I started this episode with the book Influence that we turned inside out. The man who wrote how persuasion actually works so that ordinary folks could defend themselves against it, and how the industry sold it back to us as a system for marketing and selling and converting each other. Something made to give people power, resold as a way to take it from them.

So here's what I want to leave you with, and it's just one question. Not a framework, not a checklist. One question.

And you are welcome to use it on me, because if you're in this audience, I'm going to invite you to work with me at some point. When I make that invitation, I hope you ask yourself, is this giving me information, or is this making it harder to think?

Once you see it, I promise you'll see it everywhere.

By the way, the CEO Ceiling Assessment workshop is happening Tuesday, October 20th. We are going to walk through the five areas of your business where you are quietly maxed out, and we're going to score it green, yellow, or red so that you can walk out knowing what your biggest constraint is right now instead of a vague list of things to feel bad about.

There's no timer. There's nothing expiring at midnight. But we are hosting this workshop live. If you want the replay, if you can't make it Tuesday at noon Eastern, that's okay. Go ahead and head over to theceocollective.com/ceo-ceiling-assessment. I'll put the link in the show notes.

Okay. Next episode, we are going to stop talking about the patriarchy, and we're going to start talking about how the matriarchy would approach business. I want to give you the exercise that I give all my clients, that I run through each time we sit down to talk about setting goals in your business. It is a really powerful exercise. So look out for that episode coming up soon. It takes about an hour and a pen. It's the most useful, practical thing you're going to get out of this entire series.

I'll see you in the next episode.