Episode 050 – Weapons of Influence – Pt. 2 – Commitment & Consistency

This is second part of the series on Cialdini's weapons of influence

Episode Highlights

• Today we're talking commitment and consistency
• Generally spoken we humans tend to behave consistent with previous statements we made
• Ever saw a free trial for something? Consistency in high gear
• Let's take this example right away a little bit further:
  • before you let your demand owners use a free trial of a software or something ask them the following:
    • what will make this trial a success?
    • what constitutes a failure?
    • do we have objective criteria to measure if this is really trying out or have we already committed ourselves and hence limited our negotiation options
• also make sure, when ever you receive something that is claimed to be free, what you have to invest
• our colleagues time and effort that give a tool a test run are also valuable and should be considered as an investment
• Another - non business - example is poker
• Every played No Limit Texas Hold'em?
• Then you probably know how hard it becomes - aka to give up your cards and money - the more you have put in the pot
• Instead you invest more and more of your chips into the pot
• you want to stay consistent
• So how can we use this ourselves in our procurement practice?
• Make the other party commit
• Commit time, invite them to your office for locations so they invest in travel and accomodation
  • this is one of the reasons I prefer to have important negotiations always in our offices
  • besides the fact that it is our playground, they want to be consistent with their already made expenses and throw in more concessions to do so
  • besides that it also offers a great opportunity for applying reciprocity, which we talked about yesterday
• Let me share a story with you, that comes from Cialdini's chapter about this influencing tool that we can also easily translate to a neat negotiation tactic
  • Cialdini talks about a gentleman who goes shopping for business suits
  • he keeps the sales people in the shop busy, let's them exactly measure sizes etc
  • he uses their time commitment and then at the end asks: ok, so how many ties are you going to throw in for free?
  • you could do this by having them clarify all the tech details first
    • what material is your product made off?
    • can you provide a Bill of Materials and lead me through it?
    • how does it connect to our machine xyz
    • once they have explained all in very much detail start the commercials negotiations
    • frequently mention that they (not you!) have invested a lot of time already
      • but don't say something like "you don't want this wasted..."
    • just remind them constantly how much they have already invested
    • they will want to be consistent with their previous investments (aka concessions)
  • another idea would be to research the other parties public statements about their company
    • something like "our customers success is the driver for our business"
  • you then can use this in sentences like "as Supplier Company Inc is very customer focused, we as a customer would highly appreciate if you would honor our cash requirements by giving us this 90 days payment term"
• this sums up our episode about consistency and commitment, tomorrow we're going to talk about social proof and how you can use it in your negotiations

Resources

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