Dr. Cialdini’s fourth principle of influence is Consistency.  This principle states that people want to remain consistent with what they have already said or done, and that even tiny commitments will lead to a strong desire to remain consistent to those commitments.

This is an extremely valuable lesson for anyone in sales!

Any salesperson will tell you that getting a prospect to call you back when they say they will, or to make themselves available for a future phone call at a set time, is incredibly important and can be quite challenging.  For some reason it has become socially acceptable to lie to salespeople, and prospects often do.

You’ll find a similar situation in restaurants, where people often make reservations and then don’t bother to tell the restaurant when they’ve decided not to come.  This obviously has the potential to cost the restaurant lost revenues, but it’s become socially accepted to just ignore that and blow them off.

A restaurant company that is a client of Dr. Cialdini’s contracted him to see if there was anything that could be done to reduce this costly situation at their restaurants.  Dr. Cialdini studied the process the host/hostess uses when taking reservations, and changed the conversation language that takes place from the following:

“Please call if you are unable to make your reservation”, to:

“Will you please call if anything changes and you are unable to make your reservation?”

This slight difference requires the customer to make a commitment to the host/hostess, which resulted in no-shows for reservations dropping from 30% to 10% at their restaurants.  This has a very significant impact on the financials of these restaurants!

The key, according to Dr. Cialdini, is to get a person to make a commitment to you that is:

• Active
• Public
• Voluntary

And he stresses that you can start small and build bigger over time; get people comfortable with making small commitments first and they will grow more comfortable with making large commitments over time.

As a salesperson, the opportunities to use this during your conversations with prospects are unlimited.  In our business, our salespeople do a lot of our sales cycle over the phone, setting follow up “appointments” for future phone calls.  Unfortunately, it’s very easy for people to skip these calls.  I believe that if our salespeople make sure to ask the following, we’ll be much better off:

“Will you please call me to let me know if you are unable to keep our appointment?”

We have several other very common situations in our sales cycle where we can use the Principle of Consistency.  I’m sure that if we do we will see a significant improvement in our sales cycle.