Use These 5 Psychology Tricks to Make a Ton of Money transcript

If you understand this, you will never run out of opportunities because everything you want in life requires persuasion. And the only way to persuade someone is to understand how they think. I run multiple nine-figure businesses and have personally sold hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm going to give you 20 years of proven psychological strategies that you can use to get anyone to say yes, broken down by the five areas of the brain.

Starting with the frontal lobe, which is responsible for reason, specifically the prefrontal cortex, is super important. Women have a larger one than men, actually. You might think that people take actions based on logic. You would be like most people then. But here's how you spot somebody who doesn't really know how to sell things in about 4 seconds. They try to convince someone not actually using the most important part of this brain, which is the creativity due to emotions.

They try to convince someone about features. The trash bag's super light. Our product has an incredible dashboard that processes your data at 300 megabytes per second. No, no, no. That's not useful at all. When people say they're trying to be reasonable, they don't need more reasons to buy from you. They actually want to know, what does good mean and is it going to be good for me? Your brain has so much going on at once that trying to figure out, is this going to be good for me, is nearly impossible.

So your brain resorts to these things called heuristics, which is a fancy way of saying a mental shortcut. I want to show you a breakdown that's going to change your life. I want to talk about something called the is this good triangle. So at the top, I want to think about it like authority. Does someone who should know say it's good? This is why you see so many experts recommending products, right? This is your authority.

Sometimes we also call it the kingmaker. You don't need Gordon Ramsay to recommend your restaurant for this to work, but Robert Cialdini's team, they actually ran this experiment on a real estate agency. A receptionist started adding a single sentence before she transferred the call. Let me put you through to Peter, our head of sales. He has over 20 years selling properties in this area. What do you think happened? Appointments went up.

How much? 20% just from adding this authority staff. Signed contracts went up 15%. One sentence. Authority usually works the best on someone who's alone and unfamiliar, but you can't say it about yourself. Get someone else to call you the expert. The second one is social proof. So, social proof really is this question. It's instead of is this good, it's how do other people react to this? And I'm not just talking about testimonials.

So, a group of psychologists ran a study with bathroom hotel cards. One card said, "Help save the environment. Show your respect for nature." The other said, "Almost 75% of guests who are asked to participate do reuse their towels." Which one won? The latter, right? The 75%. Why? Because people are going to do what other people socially have done. Also called a bandwagon effect. The way you use this is by telling the customer what most people do.

If you say, "We have this entry offer, but most people, they need our service more. So, they choose the middle offer." They're actually more likely to upgrade from your entry-level offer, especially if you do an important thing. Stick a number by it. Not just most people, but 75% of people need this offer. Number three, scarcity. So, scarcity is instead of is this good, how many are left? If not a lot, it must be good.

But there is a way to this that works in a way that makes you sound like every entry-level marketer who took one psychology class in college, which we don't want. I don't want you to say these words ever. Limited spots available. Nobody believes that. Write this instead. Remember, we want to use a number, so I have four slots in this cohort. Two are gone. This specificity feels more genuine. You're implying scarcity, not coming out and saying it. >> Oh, and a bonus tip for appealing to someone's frontal lobe, stop using round numbers.

Fascinating studies showing don't quote 450k, quote 437,500. Don't quote a client 10 grand, quote them 9,850 bucks. There is a cap to this though. One person took this advice too literally and listed his condo at 454,963 bucks. I think he got zero offers. So, why? Because you have to make your prices informed, not unhitched. If you nail this though, you're going to be able to logically convince people to buy more, but I want to get to the next reason why people won't buy.

Well, because maybe they've already decided they're not going to. Let's change their mind. Segment two, occipital lobe, or what they call vision. So, the occipital lobe comes in when you need to see things. You know that saying, "Never judge a book by its cover?" You should, and it turns out you already are. It takes you less than a second to make a judgment about somebody. You don't have a chance to say a single word.

In a fraction of a second, somebody else is deciding if you're serious, worthwhile, and somebody they should listen to. And there's so much that goes onto this. Namely, like the way you present yourself, your hair, your body language, your office, the colors on your slides, even the pictures on your website. And so, when you think about selling people on something, there was a psychologist who actually ran this study, fascinating, showing two different pictures on a home page.

Everything was the same except the background picture. Some people saw clouds in the sky, others saw pennies. The people who saw clouds started paying more attention to what? Ah, soft, fluffy, comfort. The people saw who saw pennies starting paid paying more attention to what? Money, small, my pocketbook. Think about how insane that is. The website actually never told them, "Care about money, care about comfort." The background did.

Now, why does that matter? Well, the website was for a mattress. So, by putting pennies anywhere near that website or dollar bills, it turns out, people would actually care more about price than they would the comfort. When they put clouds on it, more people bought. This is actually called priming. It's something where your environment quietly tells your brain what to pay attention to next. And because of this, the setup before the sale actually matters more than the sale itself.

And I want to tell you how you can control this. And also, I want you to think about one thing here. The next time you go to have a difficult conversation, maybe you should think more about what your setting is and how you're primed instead of what you're going to say to the other person. I bet you win more often. Let me show you. Colors. So, most color psychology online is way too simplistic. Blue means trust. Green means money.

It's not that clean. You have to look at the why behind the colors. For example, red. What does it do? You associate it with like a stop sign, an ambulance, blood. It's associated, according to urgency, and intensity, and competitiveness. In auctions, red made people bid more aggressively. But in one-on-one negotiations, red actually makes people lower offers. It also matters the shade of the color. So, the brighter and more saturated the colors were, the greater the arousal, let's call it, the excitement.

The effects of a color depend on hue, saturation, brightness, all of it kind of interacting together. And here's your color cheat sheet. Bright saturated red, high energy, competition. Burgundy, restrained power, old money. Bright blue, energetic, modern. Navy, restrained confidence, right? Bright green, growth, energy. Dark green, stability, wealth growth. See how it's like basically the brighter it is, the more energy, and then the same emotion according to each one.

The next one, if you want to get paid like a pro, you have to dress like a pro. And the best part of this is it really doesn't matter how attractive you are. I know a lot of people like pretty privilege, that is a thing, but that's not what we're talking about here. I'm not trying to get you to do a nose job and a facelift. A study from Princeton found that the same faces paired with richer-looking clothing were actually judged as more competent, and it depends on the context.

So, like if you're dressing for door-to-door sales jobs in Ohio, that means you're probably going to wear a uniform that's really crisp and obvious rather than if you're at a networking event and if you're in a uniform in New York, that's not going to fly. A good starting point is if you want to be in a fancy setting and be seen as luxury, that means natural fabrics. So, things like linen, get clothes that fit, muted colors like white or black or navy, no logos on any of these, and get one really nice piece.

Like really shouldn't be a jacket, it should be a watch or a purse that signals I'm successful. Here's my visual representation of it. You can have a huge impact by the way you move your body. So, for God's sakes, do not stand in a defensive posture if you're trying to get somebody to buy something from you. No crossed arms, no hands behind the back, which signifies I might be hiding something. Hands in front of you, you know, palms open in the beginning signals trust, no slouching, stand up straight.

Studies show this significantly boosts a speaker's persuasiveness, clarity, and whether they think that you're any good or not during sales pitches. You control the frame, you control the sale, and controlling the frame doesn't just happen by the way you look. You can have everything right, wear all the right colors, but if you lead right up to the delivery of the ask, and you mess up the ask at that point, nothing else matters, and all the time you put into your appearance kind of was for nothing.

All right, segment three, I want to talk about the parietal lobe, numbers. So, in this part of the brain, it's responsible for processing numbers, doing basic math. My part of this brain sucks. But when someone hears that your product costs, for instance, $5,000 or that you want this huge salary increase, this part of the brain processes that number. It has one major flaw, though. It can only evaluate a number against another number in isolation.

But, let me show you something. If I ask you, "Do you want to buy something for 10k?" This is a lot of money. Why? Cuz I have no price anchor, and the parietal lobe defaults to comparing it to zero. So, $10,000 very far away from zero dollars. So, that's a lot. But, now let's say I give you $10,000 offer, or what about if I charge you $100,000? Well, the difference between the two changes things, doesn't it? Suddenly, the 10k looks a lot cheaper, and you might pay it more easily.

The number actually means nothing. It's basically the frame around the number and how it's presented. And so, I want to show you three ways to use this to make more money consistently over time, and probably sell more at higher prices. There are three frames they use around numbers. They look like this, and I think about it like a ladder. First, I want you to say the big number first, even if it has nothing to do with your product.

For instance, there's a salesman selling a 75k product. Everybody fighting him on price. Then, he jokingly says, "Now, I know I can't charge you guys a million dollars for this." And suddenly, nobody was questioning his price anymore. It's kind of a silly joke, but it shows this really strong psychology principle that our parietal lobe needs another number to compare to. So, number two, we're going to give them the compared to what or the verses.

So, I talk about this in my book, Owner Be Owned. It's on page 40. Before you say the cost of the product, quantify how much the customer is going to make if they go with you, or how much money they will lose if they don't go with you, or how much money they'll save, or how much freedom they'll get, whatever it is. Now that you do that, the price doesn't seem so bad when it's compared to a even bigger gain or loss. Easy way to do this would be roofing cost 4k, but man, And you don't fix it, $40,000 worth of problems in your house.

So, show them the verses. And then number three, what do you say after the number? I call this one the not a damn thing, shut up. Here's why that's harder than it sounds. There was a study done that proved that people who don't add an argument to their offer have fewer counterarguments and higher outcomes in negotiations. So, your offer should sound like, "And the price is 20K. Are you in?" Not, "It's 20K because our competitors rates are this and we're going to provide that and we're going to do this in the business and this next thing." No, no, no.

I would actually probably say something like, "And the investment is $20,000. Are you ready for that?" And the bonus psychology hack, when people look at a price, they don't actually process the full number. They only judge by the number on the left, sort of. So, a lot of things, this is why everything is priced by like, you know, 97 cents or 99 cents because $3.99 feels slightly cheaper than $4 because of the left number bias.

The crazy part is sophisticated people think, "Ah, this is kind of gross. I would never do that." They actually fall for it the most. So, at this point, you've picked your number, you've framed it right, it does you've done your verses, you've shut up, but it still doesn't matter if you can't deliver your pitch in a convincing way. You'll still lose the sale in a second. Let's talk about how to change that. Segment four, temporal lobe, the language area of your brain.

This lobe is one of the main two you are using right now. Listening to me talk, that's your temporal lobe. And it's responsible for language processing. It's also the reason behind why two people can seemingly say the same thing and you get two totally different results. Why? Cuz there are actually two parts to language. There's what you say and there's how you say it. And so, some words work better than others and some ways of delivering work better.

I've been giving presentations in boardrooms and on stage for nearly 20 years. I'm going to let you steal my homework and we're going to hack this sensory part of the brain. Do's and don'ts. When you're speaking, I want you to get rid of what I call soft words, powerless words. These are phrases like kind of, sort of, I think, I feel. They make you look incompetent. If you don't believe in what you're selling, why should the other person?

This is Instead, what do you want to do? You want to have, really, like a lightning strike, powerful words. This will, you will, next step. Second is intensifiers, very, so, really, honestly. Okay, I think about these as fill-in-the- blank words. You don't really need them one way or the other. What would I do instead? Let's get you some powerful punctuation, right? Periods, exclamation points. If you need these very, so, really, honestly, your message isn't strong enough.

I want you to use stronger nouns, and I want you to use periods and exclamation points. I also want you to make sure you don't do the worst thing, especially a lot of women do that I see, which is call them filler words. Kind of looks like a butt. It's not. This is like, like, um, like, um. Instead, what do we do? Not a damn thing. This is your silence. If you need to think, instead of saying like, um, just pause, take a second.

And the fourth is sorry. I do not want you to apologize or be overly polite. Instead, what do I want you to do? Instead of sorry, I want you to think they should thank me for this. I am providing a service that is so valuable they should thank me. I want you to realize when you overly apologize and you're too polite, you're basically lowering yourself and the value of what you have to say by prefacing it with any of these, really.

Make everything you say concrete. This is a good rule, because if you can't visualize it, they won't value it. So, I don't want you to say things like we have fast delivery. This is what I would call vague. Instead, I want you to say things like it is going to be there by Friday, specific, aka a date. Don't say, "We're going to save you time and money." Okay, that's way too vague. Instead, I would say something like, "Clients who choose us save on average dollar amount." Or, you could even go with something like our X number of hours a month.

Great. It's easier for your brain to visualize and process specifics over vague vague premises. And then I want to talk about the third one, which is reflection. This is one of the most powerful tools in sales if you use it correctly. So, in one study, waitresses who repeated their clients' orders exactly how they said it back to them got tipped how much more do you guys think? 81%. So, what do we want to do? We actually want to mirror what our customer says.

We want to say almost exactly back to them. The waitresses who paraphrased, they only got tipped 61% of the time. So, you have to be specific and reflect back what the person said to you for this to work. Reflection plays off of this other thing called uh the psychology principle of consistency. Humans have this weird need to stay consistent in their identity and belief. It's basically why people say, "I am a Republican" or "I am a Democrat" and then only do the things that those types of people do.

Here's how this works if you want to make money. You have them express their problem in words. And then you lead up to the sale with, "Since you're experiencing exact words that they told you, I know this is a fit for you." All right, here's the other hard truth. It's not just what you say, it's how you say it. I think this gets broken down into five things. I'll tell them to you now. First, we're going to start with pace.

So, this is all about the speed at which you create excitement or momentum. Slow down to make something feel more important. You speed it up when you're excited and you want them to get ramped up, right? So, that speed or pace of how you speak is really important. What do you do when you want them to pay a lot of attention to you and really lean in? You might actually lower your pitch. Then, we want you to go into volume.

So, you increase your volume as a signal of energy or conviction. Actually, now that I think about it, I think this one and the next one are almost exactly the same. Originally, I thought there were five, but I actually think that these two are really similar. So, when I was thinking about it originally, volume would be how much higher or lower you go. But, as I thought about it for the normal person, you probably are going to sound weird if you try to change your pitch, okay?

"I'm really excited." I don't know. That's just comes off as fake to me. You could probably put these two together. The other one that I use a lot that's really important to though is pauses. This one's super painful, but really important. Remember when I told you to shut up? This is really uncomfortable. I know. But, silence is actually a good separator from great speakers and everybody else. Then, let's talk about intonation as the last one.

This one I use a lot, which is basically to control which word carries the meaning. This is the best option for you. This is the best option for you. This is the best option for you. It's the same words, but lots of different ways to say them and they give them different meanings. Before you say what you're going to say, ask yourself, "What point do I actually want to make?" And try to get your intonation to match that.

The way you do it more than anything else is one P that we didn't put on there, which is practice. I had an employee that um wanted to give a pitch. Something that we do when we try to do sales, and it's called the heart close. And he went on stage to give the heart close. Except, dude's actually got a closed heart. He was not in touch with his emotions, not in touch with his feelings. He was giving this really heartfelt story, but imagine if I'm like telling you a story about my father passing.

And what I actually say is like, "Well, my dad passed away, and what happened is it was on Tuesday, and it happened really quickly. And like my mom was really sad, and our entire family had a difficult time with it." I I nothing. But, if I'm like, my dad passed away on Tuesday. And my mom had a really hard time with it. Exact same words. But the only way you're going to get good at the second as opposed to the first is you're going to try it a lot.

All of this assumes the one principle this entire video is built on. Next segment, the insula, which is called the gut in some ways. The last part of the brain that is arguably the most important for closing the sale is the insula. It determines what we call your gut feeling and tries to answer the question, do I trust this person? You will not sell if you can't build trust. I want to show you how to do it in a way that's going to blow your brain on how easy it actually is.

Four trust builders in sales. The first one, my favorite, maybe besides the last one, is the anti- sale. What does this mean? This is the best way to increase trust with a client because you're actually not selling them on anything. I want you to believe in your product, but I promise you it's not right for everybody. So, you could have the cure for cancer and you still shouldn't try to sell it to everybody. Why? Not everyone has cancer.

This is where the anti-sale comes in. I want you to be honest with the person. You can almost tell in a second on their face if they're into something or not. You don't force it. And that way, even if you don't get the sale, that rapport can compound into referrals. It can compound into different product sets because you might be the first person they call since they know you're not going to try to sell them on everything.

Number two, I call the time waster. I don't want you to waste people's time. So many sales calls start with fake interest. Hey Brad, how you doing today? How was your weekend? Enjoying the sunshine? It's a little hot in Austin, Texas, isn't it? Oh my god, shut up. What? Why are we talking about this? People with money don't like having their time wasted. And they also don't typically like small talk. A way to build trust instantly is to get into it.

Hey Brad, great talking with you. I know you're slammed. I only want to talk to you about this one thing and get into it. That's it. I'm going to keep this one short in the spirit of the idea itself. Three, people trust people who are like them. This is another version of this mirror theory that we had previously. In one experiment, researchers found that simply discovering you shared a birthday with someone increased the person saying yes to you from 34% to 62%.

There's a bunch of other studies that have shown this same effect to close more sales. Now, you don't have to fake a birthday, although I for decades would send a notice out to people I really wanted to close and say, "By the way, it is my birthday. If you want to do something really special, you could do X." And I swear, you'll one get a bunch of responses and two get a bunch of people to do it. So, do a quick search on the person before you meet with them.

Do you share any interests that they post about? Do you follow the same topics on whatever social platform? Then when it naturally comes up, you know what to talk about. In fact, one time I got profiled by a con man who used to be a CIA agent. This is a true story and it's ridiculous. And I remember my like spidey senses going up at some point because one of my favorite authors is Christopher Hitchens. He was like, "Ha, I was reading Hitchens the other day." I was like, "I love Christopher Hitchens." He's like, "Oh, great." Uh and then I was talking about something else and he goes, "Yeah, I'm really into lifting weights and, you know, my wife and I do that a lot." And I like to lift weights, so I'm like, "Huh, okay, that's that's cool." And then he was like, "You know, my favorite book of all time." And then proceeded to list Alice Shrugged, one of my favorite books.

I was like, "This is weird. Like, we have too much in common." And then the guy proceeded to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from me. So, it works even in the bad sense. The next one I want you to think about the law of reciprocity, which I swear so many people know, but not enough use, which is give before you ask. The more you give, the more you are going to get. It doesn't have to be physical. You know, you can give a free pen at a event.

That's not going to do it. It really should be something that feels unique. A small note that you send them. An interesting piece of information tailored to them. The more you can give, the more trust you build and the higher the chance the person will buy from you. Get these four trust triggers right, you're going to close more about just anything you want in life. These topics aren't something you watch once and master.

This is something you have to study over and over and put into practice. So, I got something for you. If you want to talk to one of my advisors who have helped thousands of business owners with their sales and help you grow and make more money, then click the link right here. We will get you on a call.