Reciprocity, Scarcity, Authority, Consistency, Liking and Consensus - if you are a regular reader of our posts here at Passle you'll have heard all about Cialdini's 6 principles of persuasion before (if not, watch the video below).

When it comes to content marketing/social selling I often talk about just three:

  • Reciprocity - if you share interesting content with someone that helps them solve their problems they are likely to help you in return.  I have closed a number of deals on the back of this by using our tool ISTATOY
  • Liking - if you show through your content that you have similarities to your target audience you will have more influence (this is not rocket science :)
  • Authority - showing your expertise will place you in a position of power when talking about other subjects - like what you are trying to sell.  What is interesting is you can adopt authority.  In this post I am adopting Cialdini's authority.

What I found out the other week when listening to Dan Connors from Applied Influence Group is that it is just as well I only use three.  Dan said that if you use more than 3 of these 'tactics' at any one time whilst trying to persuade someone to do something - or believe something you tell them - they will not work.  We have in-built radar that makes us feel uncomfortable when someone is trying to 'over sell' to us.  

So if you think that Cialdini is right about his 6 principles of persuasion be sure to only use 3 at a time!

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