Using Social Proof to Improve Yourself, Your Sales, and Your Operation

I’ve been reading "Influence" by Robert Cialdini.? The section about Social Proof has me thinking about the impact that other people have on our decision making, and how we can use that to our advantage.

People are social creatures.? Throughout the history of humanity, there has been safety in numbers.? Society helps hunt.? It helps watch for predators.? Society helps raise our young and protect our old.

That history creates a need deep to belong within all of us.? That need manifests itself in strange ways.

Sometimes it is innocuous.? If you see someone in a park looking into the trees, you will be inclined to investigate the trees as well.? If there are 3 people looking up, then certainly there must be something interesting to see.? Cialdini says that if you ever want to play a prank on some strangers, you and two friends should go into a park and look intently at the trees – see how many people follow you.

Other times, social proof can cause people to act irrationally.? The stock market is an excellent example.? It acts irrationally and moves in wild swings.? Some of the great investors will tell you that the best thing you can do for your portfolio is not watch it every day.? That’s because the emotional swings of the marketplace will cause fear and greed in the best of us, making us inclined to make emotional decisions.

And still others it can be downright destructive.

Cults are an excellent example.

The mass suicide in Jonestown is an example of what can happen when a group of people is isolated, and the crowd starts to move in a destructive fashion.

I apologize for getting morbid on you, but there is a point that I’m trying to make.? It causes physical pain for us to go against societal trends.? We can either acknowledge that truth and use it to our advantage or deny it and allow ourselves to be manipulated.

In particular, people look to social proof as a way to make a decisions in 3 situations:

1.?????? When they are unsure

2.?????? When many people are doing it, and

3.?????? When people that are just like them are doing it.

Here are some thoughts on ways to use this tendency to our advantage.

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Personally –

There’s a saying that we are the average of our 5 closest friends.? Social proof puts that in a different light.? It’s not just colloquialism.? There is a hard-wired desire to behave in a way that makes us acceptable to the people around us.? That means the 5 people closest to us will dictate what is normal.

Their values will become our values.?

Their hobbies will become our hobbies.

Their habits will become our habits.

Their mindset will become our mindset.

I think this means that we must choose our friends to look like the person that we want to be.? That means if we want to be high achievers in business, we need to surround ourselves with high achievers.? They will have the habit and mindset that we need to copy.

I also believe this concept applies to the media we consume.?

Most of us don’t have the benefit of knowing Tim Cook, Elon Musk, or Barack Obama.? But we all have access to their biographies.?

I think this is the magic behind Charlie Munger’s admonition to study the eminent dead.? Embrace their thought processes.? By studying their lives and their way of life, we bring those people into our inner circle.? They elevate us.

Reading biographies is the easiest way to bring extraordinarily successful people into our inner orbit.

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Sales & Fundraising

People buy based on emotion, then use facts to justify their decisions.? One of the strongest ways to influence emotions is social proof.

Yet our first tendency as salespeople and fundraisers is to wax eloquently about features and benefits.? I know I’ve done it.

Salespeople want to talk endlessly about the benefits of their products.? Fundraisers focus on the facts about the societal impact of their cause.

But that’s not what people buy.? They buy based on emotion.? They buy to belong.

I hear this with the questions that people ask me.? They sound like this:

“Who are the other customers that you have?”

“Are you a member of the same conference as me?”

“What kind of experience do you have in my industry?”

“What kind of coverages to other organizations like me buy?”

People are looking for social proof.? They are unsure what they are supposed to buy, so they want to know what other people like themselves choose to do.

In the same way we can create unintended consequences with our facts.? When I say something like “It’s a shame that most organizations don’t carry high enough umbrella limits,” I am implicitly stating that it’s okay for my customer to not carry sufficient umbrella limits.?

When we normalize the wrong kind of behavior, people will intuitively think it’s acceptable because others are doing it.

This means when we’re trying to persuade someone to buy, we need to show them that other people are doing it.? There’s a lot of people doing it.? And those people look just like them.

Organization Building

Steve Jobs said that “A players” want to be around other “A players”.? He said be very careful about allowing “B players” on the team, because they bring “C players”.? That’s when the “A players” start to leave.

At first blush, that seems arrogant and aggressive.? But Steve Jobs built Apple, so he must have known a thing or two.? The idea makes so much more sense to me when we consider it in the light of social proof.

People will conform to the culture around them, or they will leave.? If the room is full of people totally bought into the mission that are willing to make significant personal sacrifices, the group will conform to that culture.? Low performers bring the average effort down.? They normalize lower performance.? They make it high achievement outside the cultural norm.

In essence, when we create an organizational culture, we are deciding who belongs to our tribe and who doesn’t.? Bringing in people that are not bought into the mission makes it permissible to not be totally committed.?

It can happen in reverse too.? A high achieving culture will push out low achievers.? A compassionate culture will push out selfish people.

Using social proof as a means to manage an organization is a key part of the formula.? Manage the social expectations within the group, and the group will go along.

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Conclusion

Social proof is a very powerful psychological concept.? It influences how we all make decisions.?? It influences what we consider to be normal for our own personal accomplishments.? It normalizes the decision for people to use your product or donate to your cause.? It also normalizes what is acceptable output from the team.? Understanding and using this concept to our advantage can help us all accomplish our goals.