Real quick, guys, if you can think about how you found this podcast, somebody probably tweeted it, told you about it, shared it on Instagram or something like that. The only way this grows is through word of mouth. And so I don't run ads, I don't do sponsorships.

I don't sell anything. My only ask is that you continue to pay it forward to whoever showed you or however you found out about this podcast that you do the exact same thing. So if it was a review, if it was a post, if you do that, it would mean the world to me, and you'll throw some good karma out there for another entrepreneur.

Persuasion tool number five is authority. The reason it's so powerful is not because what an authority says is actually more persuasive in terms of the actual words they say, but because people put up fewer filters and accept more things as truth. Welcome to the game where we talk about how to sell more stuff to more people in more ways and build businesses worth owning.

I'm trying to build a billion dollar thing with acquisition.com. I always wish Bezos, Musk and Buffett had documented their journey, so I'm doing it for the rest of us. Please share and enjoy.

You can get anything you want in life if you can get other people to get it for you, which makes persuasion among the highest leveraged skills in the world. Think about it. If you just got one person to then just get everybody else to do things for you, then it means that's the only thing you'd have to learn in order to get whatever you want in life.

And the good news is, tons of research has been done on how to become more persuasive. And I have to give my nod to Robert Kialdini, the goat who made most research accessible to the masses in his book Influence. What I want to do is show you the most effective ways.

I applied his methods in my own business that now do over $200 million a year in combined revenue, and hopefully they work even better for you so that you can grow your business. $3 million plus a year so we can invest in it and grow it together. Tool number one is reciprocity.

Give that what you want to receive. When you show kindness and generosity towards others, they're more likely to return the favor and like you as a result. So, for example, if you pay for your friend's lunch, that person now feels obligated to return the favor.

They're like, hey, I'll get the next one. Right? Now, fundamentally, they don't have to do that, and we already assume that it works that way because we've just been doing it for so long. We've been humaning, right? But fundamentally, if you paid for it, there would be no obligation for them to pay you back.

We just almost expect it because it's that deep in our cultural DNA. Now, Kialdini gives a really beautiful example of how to leverage this in business. He shows an example for a waiter.

So, if a waiter puts a mint on the bill, they get 3% more tips, right? People get something, and they're more likely to tip them a little bit more. Now, here's a second version of that. The waiter gives the person two mints.

All of a sudden, the tips increase by 14% significantly more. If you could get a 14% pay jump just by putting a second mint on every single thing, why wouldn't you? I mean, it's worth paying $5 a month for a big bag of mints just to make sure you get paid. But the thing is that in business, there are tons of these $5 mint bags that are laying around that you can immediately implement into your own business.

And the third way they did the waiter example was that the person put a mint down, turn around, and put another mint on the table. And that created a 23% increase in tips. And it's the same reason that outside of a retail store, as soon as you come in, they offer you a cold water.

It's not because they're nice people. It's because they know that you'll feel indebted to them and be more likely to, a, stay longer, b, listen to them, and C, ultimately buy. So imagine how much it costs a store owner to give everybody who walks in the door a water, I don't know, $5 a day.

And if they get one person to buy extra a week off of that, which they probably get a lot more, is that worth the investment? It's probably the highest return on investment thing in his entire our business. So here's how it works. Psychologically reciprocity activates the brain's reward system, all right? And so it releases dopamine, which is a response to pleasurable experiences or stuff you like, including reciprocity, all right? And so this helps build social bonds and creates positive feelings towards people you can reciprocate with.

Right? Now, the main point is the reciprocity increases the feelings of trust and cooperation in social settings. So if you sell stuff or you want to persuade people, that's where you want to have the trust and cooperation, right? Cooperation is just another way of saying this person does what you want them to do. So here's how you can implement this in your life without being a weirdo.

So, years ago, I actually had this done to me, and I saw the effect, and it was wild, all right? So there was this guy that I thought was a complete weirdo. Now, whenever I saw him, he would try and ask me like 100 questions. So he was local to where I was.

He was in, like, some entrepreneur networks, and he would just, like, try and corner me, and I was like, dude, just get away from me. You know what I mean? It was like 100 questions. He just wouldn't let me leave.

So I started avoiding him entirely, right? And so eventually I had to confront him, like, stop talking to me. Like, go away, leave me alone and be quiet. And so what happened is he was so ashamed of the whole experience, whatever, he started sending me gifts every single month.

So I'm talking about like $500,000 gifts every month, like cutco knives and clothing, which is kind of weird, but it was expensive blue lemon stuff. Anyways, every single month he would send me this stuff. And for nine months he sent me birthday cakes that were custom made and ice cream, like it was wild.

And I still never responded. But after a while, I just started feeling bad because he just kept sending them and saying like, so sorry, I hope everything's awesome, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, you know what? Maybe I just saw him the wrong way.

And I was just like, got him off on the wrong foot. And so even though I knew what he was doing, it still worked. And I ended up going out to meet him again, turns out out still a weirdo.

But the thing is that it actually worked even though I knew everything he was doing. And so that's to show you how powerful this stuff is and to give you another one. Me personally, on the giving side, I tried to get in contact with Arnold Schwarzenegger when I was running Gym launch because I thought it would make a lot of sense and I wanted him to endorse my book.

That was like my whole goal. All right? And turns out nothing worked. It also turns out Arnold doesn't really care about endorsing some kids book.

But in order to get his attention, what leyland I did was he donated a million dollars to his charity. And then we ended up sitting down with Arnold multiple times, right? And because he used to be one of the famous people in the world, I knew I had to really step it up because he gets custom made gifts all the time, every single day. And so I knew I had to do something that was going to get his attention.

And the thing is, I don't want to give him money because he doesn't need it, but I had to give a cause that he cared about money. And so that was ultimately the thing that did it for me. And out of reciprocity, he wanted to like meet me, et cetera.

And so I'm telling you, this stuff works at all levels. Now, mind you, the gifts you have to do is proportional to the person you're trying to give to, right? But in the beginning, you can just start by giving people free gum when you're in class, which is the first time I learned it when I was in middle school, is that I turned around, open my thing, and I would hand everybody else gum. It turns out people weren't as mean to me when I gave them gum earlier that day.

And so a tiny little thing that cost me almost nothing, that made my life in middle school a little bit easier. Tool number two is consistency. We judge people based on their actions, all right? Consistency can be used in persuasion by asking someone to publicly commit to an idea or action.

Now, publicly can be just in front of you, but it can also be widely to the world, all right? So if you encourage someone to take small steps towards the commitment that they already made and reminding them of the commitment and asking them to remain consistent with it, then people are more likely to continue down that path. And if you set the original frame and the original commitment, then you can get them to be consistent with that thing in increasing larger steps. This is called the whole, like, foot in the door concept, all right? So it's the whole idea of, like, the salesman gets his foot in the door, like, give an inch, get a mile.

It's all around that. And the old saying exists because it's true. You are more likely it's slowly boiling the frog.

It's the same concept, right? Something that somebody would never say yes to originally would definitely be more likely to say yes to earlier. And so they did a research study where they had people post little signs that said Drive safely. It was a note card like this.

And they had it put them in the window for their neighborhood. And then they asked them two or three weeks later, hey, because you're somebody who's so committed to this safety, commitment, consistency, reminding them of the thing, they said, would you be willing to put a big sign in your art? And people said, sure, and they put a big sign in the yard. Now, they asked a different set of people, would you just be willing to put a big sign in your yard that says this stuff? And way more people said no.

And so just because they made the first ask and then the second ask in alignment and commitment and consistency, they're able to get way more yeses. So, for example, a charity organization may ask someone to pledge a certain amount of money publicly, right? And then they encourage them to take small steps towards filling that pledge, like setting up automatic monthly donations. And then finally, maybe they remind them of the commitment, ask them to do it even more, right? Because you're this type of person.

Do you also want to sponsor this kid in China? Whatever. So here's how it works behind the scenes, all right? No one wants to be known as inconsistencies. It's a bad character trait among humans.

Like, people don't like to be called flaky. People called volatile or erratic. It's kind of like craziness.

So people don't like that, so they want to appear stable, consistent throughout their life. It's one of the problems that politicians have because as soon as they say something, they have to stick with it forever, even if they change their minds. But people have a natural tendency to be consistent with their past behaviors and decisions, especially when they've made a commitment publicly.

All right? That's why switching brains is so hard for some people. And the only way for commitments to work is that they have to be voluntary. You can't force someone to make a commitment, otherwise the persuasion doesn't work.

They have to voluntarily do it, which is why you usually have to do it with questions, get them to admit it, get them to label themselves as a certain way or a certain type of person and then ask them to make an action in accordance to the thing they just voluntarily stated. So here's how I used it in my life, hopefully without being too much of a weirdo. So in sales scripting, you ask lots of questions during the discovery phase, all right? So that's the early part of the sales conversation.

Why are you here? What do you want? What is so important to you, et cetera. And you do that for two reasons. One, because you want to hear about the person's problem to make sure that you can actually solve it.

But secondly, because you like commitment and consistency guidelines. So as soon as the person labels themselves a certain way, you then reaffirm it. So you say, hey, just to be clear, are you the type person who X, Y and sees, and you want to make it a positive label? So you're the type of person who sticks with their commitments.

You're the type of person who takes action. You're the type of person who cares about their family. You're the type of person who values reinvesting in their business.

You say these statements because you're laying the commitment consistency that you're going to ask them to stick with later on in the conversation. And the key point is that once they agree to the label voluntarily, you then later can make the request in accordance with that. Because if they don't decide to do the thing, they have to either make an argument for why they are still the type of person and yet still don't do the thing, or they have to admit that they're not that type of person, both of which are much harder to do once you've voluntarily stated you are.

So for example, if I said, hey, you're the type of person. So let me get this straight. Are you the type of person who takes action and is willing to invest in themselves? If someone says yes, then later on if I say, hey, great, I think you should invest in yourself since you're the type of person who's really willing to take action and really likes to invest in themselves, then I think this would be perfect for you.

Boom. And then I can make the ask because I just reminded them twice of the commitments they made earlier and I'm asking them to be consistent with those later during the close. Hey guys, real quick.

For those of you guys who are 100 million dollar offers fans, I love you. I added in a lost chapter that has never been released. I'm releasing it now, Transparently.

I'm doing that to build Hype for 100 million dollar leads. But you will have the unreleased chapter. It talks about your first avatar and how to segment customers to make more money.

You can get it by going to acquisition.com leads. It's for free in exchange for your email so that I can email you when we launch 100 million dollar leads and so that you cannot miss out on it.

Because last time I sold out for like eight straight weeks really fast. So that is my way of making sure that you all get first dibs tool number three is social proof. People tend to confirm the actions and opinions of others in a given social group.

And the reason they do that is because it's safer. If 100 people walk this way, well, they must have some idea. And secret is they don't.

But people are still wired that way, right? And so people look to other people for cues about how to behave or what to believe. And this is how we learn to be human, right? When we're little kids, we just look at other people and we say, I'll do what they do because that's what humans do. And you start to become a human.

For example, if you see something on Amazon and it has 5005 star reviews, you're way more likely to buy it. Like, Amazon does this stuff because it knows it gets people to take action. It's a persuasive tool.

And so if you've ever heard a laugh track on a show where it's like ha ha in the background, people then laugh more than if there is no laugh track, which is wild, but we are so conditioned to behave in accordance with how everyone else does that. That laugh track persuades us, in other words, gets us to do something they want us to do, which is laugh better than anything else. And so here's how I used it in my own businesses.

One, I printed out every single five star review guy got online. So if you ever get a five star review on trust pilot or your product gets a review, or if you have a brick and mortar location, this is where it kills, is that you look at all your Yelp reviews and you screenshot every single one of them. So I screenshot at all of them and I framed every one of them so that floor to ceiling my lobby was five star reviews.

And then the other half was before and after pictures. So I'd have every single person and this is how you can weave this into your business is that in the beginning, right, when you take somebody on as a customer, et cetera, try and capture some sort of visual of their current state and then later when you have the opportunity, you can ask for the after. And so that you can put those together, you could display those at the beginning of your sales cycle so that people are more likely to believe you when you say, I can help you.

Because imagine a world where someone says like, hey Alex, I don't think you can help me lose weight. And I would just like, look around the room and be like, really? And then I would say, how much proof would you need to believe? And at what point is your requirement for proof more unreasonable than the amount of proof I have? And that crushes their belief of whether or not they could do it, or at least that I was good enough to do it. If you struggle to get testimonials, there's two reasons.

One is that you suck. Second is that you don't ask, all right? And so one of the things that I do is I also like to give an incentive to people to leave a testimonial. And so you can do that with high levels of service for a temporary period, which by the way, can just give them a trial of something that's more expensive later.

Great idea. Or if you're like in the digital space, you can give them access to exclusive media that they might not otherwise have, trainings programs, stuff, et cetera. And you can just unlock it only for people who do the thing.

Now, if someone doesn't want to freely give you a testimonial, do not push it. The way that I got over this, I say totally, I immediately back off. I'm like totally understand.

I didn't know we were like we had not done I would go totally other direction. I didn't know we had done such a bad job that you wouldn't want to talk about us publicly. And they're like, well, no, I'm not saying that.

It's like either way it's totally fine. What would I need to do in order for you to feel confident about being able to portray us public? Because now they have to answer the question and they'll give you whatever answer they will. If you can go do it, then do it and then come back.

Because oftentimes it's like a tiny little thing and it also gives you early indications that someone's not happy, which is also just great to have in business anyways. And so either you get more information or you get more testimonials. Either way you win.

Tool number four liking or what people like to call rapport. All right? So people like people who like them or who they perceive as friends. And the more you like someone, the more likely they are to say yes to you right.

And so the liking principle states that people are more likely to be persuaded by those that they like and want to be like. And that's the second part is important. All right? Physical attractiveness, similarity, and compliments are the three factors to get people to like you more, right? Duh.

But people still don't do it. And even if people know that other people are being paid, and they even did a research study to test this, they told people that they paid strangers to compliment them. And so they then got complimented by a stranger who they knew were getting paid to compliment them.

And guess what? They still like them more than strangers. They didn't. And so even if you know what someone's doing, it still works.

And they also found out that there is actually no cap to how much flattery someone will take, provided it's genuine. And so you can literally compliment someone endlessly over and over again as long as it's genuine. And they will continue to take it and like you more.

It's wild, but it works. And here's how I've tried to use this in Persuasion. So I always use the ACA framework, which is acknowledge what they say, compliment what they did about what they said, and then ask another question.

You can get basically anybody to like you in a sales conversation or in a social situation where all you just acknowledge what they just said because it shows that you're listening and paying attention to them. Because the thing that people like more than anything that they pay people hundreds of dollars an hour to is just to listen to them talk. What do you think therapists are? They just sit there and they just listen to you talk because your mom, your mama, your boyfriend or whatever don't want to listen to you anymore.

All right? So you pay people to talk. That's how much people value it. They pay more.

They pay hundreds of dollars an hour just to get someone to listen to them. So A, you listen, acknowledge what they said. C, you compliment them on what they just said and how it ties to them being a great person in some way, some positive attribute.

If you want to be a Super Saiyan, you link it to something you want them to be consistent with later, and then you ask them the next question to move them down the conversation. And so the way that I actually was able to keep my spirits high, because if you are ever front facing in a role, whether it's customer service or it's sales or anything, if you deal with customers all day, then you get tired. And so what I did was that I actually bought a mini trampoline and I put it next to my desk.

And so I would meet with people and I was doing 20 plus consults a day in person, and I would be bouncing on this trampoline and they would look at me like a psychopath, but I'd be grinning ear to ear, and I challenge you. You cannot be in a bad mood. And on a trampoline.

I've tried it. You can't do it. So you can't be tired, because you just start jumping again, and you're like, what am I doing? I'm such an idiot.

And so you laugh, you don't take yourself too seriously. And then what ends up happening is people would close more because they're like, this guy's such a goof. And when I didn't have the trampoline before that, I actually used to do a cartwheel every single time before I shook someone's hand when they walked in my gym.

So imagine you walk in the gym, some guy does a cartwheel, and it's like, hey, welcome to United Fitness. Nice to meet you. My name is Alex.

You would crack up, be like, who is this guy? But you know what you did after that? You give me money, all right? Because you liked me automatically. And even if someone was a sourpuss, I could still turn the mood around, because what they ultimately wanted to buy was the feeling that I was giving them during the conversation. If you want to be more advanced about this, you can actually ask prospects to fill out a small questionnaire before they get on the phone with you, just so you have more information about them, so you can make the call more valuable.

And now you can actually use that information to build the similarity, find things that you have in common, show how you're similar, et cetera, and then ultimately compliment them on those things much faster earlier on. Best $100 you can spend on your mood is $100. Trampling.

I promise you it really works. Persuasion tool number five is authority. The reason it's so powerful is not because what an authority says is actually more persuasive in terms of the actual words they say, but because people put up fewer filters and accept more things as truth.

And so if a doctor says XYZ to you, you just take it as gospel. And the reason we do that is because it actually takes less mental effort. Because if you are constantly determining whether something's true or not all day, as soon as you find a trusted source, what do you do? You just listen to it, right? Which is why mentors are so valuable, because it actually decreases our speed to decision making and getting action done, which is why we seek out mentors to begin with, which is maybe why you watch stuff on YouTube, right? It's like you want to learn stuff from a trusted source.

And so if Warren Buffett gives you investment advice, you can move on it faster because you just trust that he's right, even if his advice is the same as a high school teacher. Which means it has more persuasive ability, independent of the message, which is why the messenger and the message are inextricably linked in terms of their persuasive power. So what do you have to do to do this? You establish credibility as an authority figure and expertise.

You show diplomas, credentials, awards, industry recognition, et cetera, and your track record, which is if you followed my channel at all, all I talk about is building your life resume and having a track record to stand on rather than puffing your chest and having lots of charisma. Instead just saying, you can believe me because of what I've done, not what I'm telling you I'm going to do. And let me show you how powerful the authority frame is.

Think about a man who can tell the President of the United States to drop his trousers and stick his finger up his ass. Well, a proctologist can do that whenever they want because they're a doctor. And in that frame, in the doctor's office, they are the authority.

Wild, right? In the same degree, if you go into a gym setting, the reason personal trainers want to hang out at the gym all day isn't because they're fitness junkies, but because in the gym, it's the only place they have authority and status, because everywhere else they're just a poor trainer. But in that gym, they can get an executive of a Fortune 500 company to drop on the floor and give them burpees. It's wild, but it's true.

So the way that I establish authority is because of your track record, right? You show that you are good at this thing because of the things that you have already done, right? And you can show that through the experience you have and through your expertise in terms of how you can explain a concept. All right? But on top of that, if you had third party accreditation, then I printed out certifications for myself and every one of my trainers. And so I was able, because people would come in and be like, well, are your trainers certified? I would say, like, one, which ones do you want? They would never have any idea.

And two, I would say, well, just to put your concern at ease, all of my trainers are double or triple certified. Now, mind you, certifications are not accredited in the United States, meaning I could have ten certifications that I certified them myself. No one knows, right? And so I'm saying this to say, I did pay for my trainers to get certified through actual ones, but I also internally certified them so that every one of my trainers was either double or triple certified.

And that made them seem significantly more prestigious, so they had more authority, and so people would be far more likely to listen to me, and I could transfer that authority to my trainer so that they could run the business on my behalf. Persuasive Tool number six scarcity and urgency. Urgency is a function of time.

So promotion ends tomorrow. Scarcity is a function of units. I only have 100 of them left.

All right? So that's how you can talk about it. Intelligently people value what is scarce. The reason gold is inherently valuable versus a rock is that there's just less of it.

The reason Debers has become this diamond conglomerate, even though rubies and sapphires are actually rarer than diamonds, is they actually control the amount of supply in the marketplace. They own all the diamonds. They keep them in vaults just so that they can keep the scarcity high enough on the diamonds to fetch a premium price.

All right? And so the way that you implement this in persuasion is that you use limits, right? Limited time, limited supply. One time offers to create the perception of scarcity and ideally, actual scarcity. All right? The other way of doing is talking about loss language.

So instead of like, don't you want to get it's? You don't want to miss out on. Right. Different way of framing the same concept.

And they've actually tested this in copy, talking about missing out what people are not going to have. People have more loss aversion than they have desire to gain. So they'd rather save or not lose $100 than gain $100, even though economically it's the same.

So you can use that in your favor when you're trying to persuade someone. So here's an example you might have heard of in the luxury goods space. So if you've seen Chanel or Gucci or Prada or whatever, right? They actually don't tell the stores how much of any item they'll send.

So they'll have a new spring line and they'll send one or two or three purses and they won't tell the store how many they're going to send. And so in a real way, the salespeople have the same concept of urgency. They probably figured it out at corporate that even if they said, hey, say that we don't have that many purses, the salespeople like, actually we got more in back.

And so they just actually control the whole thing centrally. They only send them and they're like, I don't know when I'm going to get the next one in or if I'm going to get another one in at all. And so people are more likely to buy, but then they took it even further.

And during COVID if you saw it, there were lines out the door because there's like one person in, one person out. You know what stores kept that while everyone else let it go? The fancy stores. Why? Because they want to hold a scarce resource.

They want to show that there's tons of demand. That's a little bit of social proof of people. Like, you have to be special, it's exclusive in order to get in.

And if people wait for it, it is scarce and therefore more valuable. Now, a more common example is like a merch drop. So if I say I have a new hat available in my store, that's one thing but if I say that I signed 100 of them and that's all there are, and I'll never make this specific color again, I've made them one of a kind.

And if you have even the slightest desire to have one of those hats, you're now more likely to get it if you know they're limited because you want to do it now before you miss out forever. Now, the key to doing this is not being fake. It's the number one thing I can say.

If you have scarcity. And the thing is that people want to have scarcity, but they want to sell as many units as possible. I get that.

I don't know how to say this to you differently. Besides, trust me, if you actually put true scarcity on something, you will sell more. When I had my massive sales team, when we were doing turnarounds, so we had eight sales guys that were launching locations whenever we would do half of our sales in the last 25% of the period.

Sometimes even more than that. Sometimes like 60 or 70% of the sales. So when I had my gym launch business where I would turn around, this is before I did licensing.

I had eight guys that would fly out to location. We'd spend 21 days, three weeks on location. Here's the crazy part.

Two thirds of the sales happened in the last one third of the time period. And the lead flow was the same. But here's the thing.

The sales guys knew that their time was going to be over and they needed to leave and get the check they wanted. And the people that were coming in, the urgency of like, you have to sign up now in the beginning was like, it's three weeks away, but when it was two days away, everyone signed up back to back to back because it was limited in time. Now, some of the locations also at a limit in terms of their actual capacity.

So we could only sell 80 people. And so we knew the number. And the thing is, it would be slow in the beginning, and then it would speed up near the end, because the scarcer the resource got, the faster it sold.

So if you can handle 20 people a week in your business, or you have X amount of product right now, you probably have some sort of cap in units to be sold or ability to provide service. Tell people your limits and you'll increase their desire. The reason Amazon still says 23 left in stock is because they know that more people will buy it if they see that there's limits.

So if I said, hey, I can send you a thousand customers, smart, you probably couldn't take them. So just be explicit about how many you have left and you'll actually sell more.