Book Review: Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive

 Ever wonder why some ad campaigns are huge successes and others flop? Ever find yourself thinking that someone made a great argument only to find yourself still doing the opposite? As humans, there are many triggers that affect us and influence our decision making on a subconscious level.  Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive reveals 50 of these lessons and backs them up with real world examples and studies that may surprise you.

I'd like to highlight a few of the cases that were particularly interesting to me:

1) Inconveniencing your audience can increase your persuasiveness.

A famous infomercial broke sales records on the home shopping network simply by changing the phrase "operators are standing by" to "If operators are busy, please call again."  Why did that work? Because it conveyed that other people were already doing it.  The writers did their own test which confirmed that showing that other people are already doing something had a major impact on the success rate of what they were asking people to do (in the study's case it was reusing towels in the hotel).  

In the startup world, a great example of this is Blank Label.  Right around the time they got covered in the New York Times, their site got bogged down.  You may have seen founder Fan Bi's tweets apologizing for the delay, or if you went to their site, you would have seen a message telling people they couldn't guarantee on time delivery of shirts due to overwhelming demand.  Shockingly to them, the orders poured in even more, despite this.  If Fan had seen this, he may not have been as surprised by that success.

2) Favors behave like bread for the person receiving the favor and wine for the giver.

It turns out that when you do a favor for someone, you'll initially apply a lower value to the act, but over time you'll see it as a higher and higher value.  Meanwhile, the person receiving the favor will see it quite the opposite; they'll initially appreciate the favor most at the time they receive the favor and over time lessen the value of it.  As it turns out, our egos get in the way; over time, the giver begins to see their help as more significant (we are important after all!) while the receiver rationalizes that the help wasn't that important (I could have done it on my own!). 

So, as entrepreneurs, we're always (or should be) helping each other out and asking for assistance.  As you do this, remember that the best time to ask the person you just helped out for anything is shortly after helped them.  

3) Never talk about negative behaviors as a way to get others to do an opposite, positive behavior.

22 Million women did not vote last year.  800 million gallons of gas is wasted each day.  700,000 people just like you pour paint down the drain. You would think these kinds of messages would wake people up and say "oh, I'm doing it wrong."  But as it turns out, we follow the wisdom of the crowds and see negative statistics as a reinforcement of it being ok to do something.

In Yes!, they talk about issues with people stealing wood from the petrified forest. The park initially had signs  up talking about how much wood is stolen. This failed miserably. When the researches for the book Yes! had them change the signs to simply not mention that and ask people not to take any wood, there was a dramatic decrease in wood taken.

A great example I saw in New York City is the Carbon Counter in Times Square: 

The environmental movement would likely be much more successful if they recognized this lesson.  Any cleantech startups would be wise to recognize this as well.

Yes! is an amazing book jam packed full of scientifically backed studies that show how to be more successful in persuasion.  I like this book so much that when I have a startup of my own, I will require everyone to read this.  

If you have any questions about this book, please feel free to ask, but I apologize in advance for any delays due to overwhelming numbers of questions ;).