Make More Sales With the Principle of Commitment and Consistency by Gihan Perera

Researchers Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser visited homes in a community, asking them for permission to erect big, ugly "Drive Carefully" signs on their front lawns. Not surprisingly, most home owners (over 80%) refused to grant permissions for these ugly signs. They then went to a second group with the same request. However, they had arranged for another researcher to visit the same people a few weeks earlier, asking them to erect smaller, less intrusive signs, which people were happy to do. When Freedman and Fraser later visited them with the larger signs, they were able to convince 75% of them to erect the same ugly signs that 80% of the first group had refused!

This is the principle of "commitment and consistency". You might not have heard of it being called that, but you've almost certainly heard of the "foot-in-the-door technique", which is the same thing. The principle is that if you can get somebody to agree to something small first (that's the commitment part), they are more likely to agree to something bigger later (that's the consistency part).

A perfect example is the mail-order book club that offers you "4 books for $4" as a special starting offer. They lose money on that first sale, but they know that once you've subscribed to the service, you're likely to continue using it and they will make money on future sales.

Cell phone contracts are another example. Telephone companies know that the monthly subscriber is a much more valuable client than the pre-paid user (So much so, in fact, that Optus - one of Australia's big telecommunication companies - was accused of using sneaky wording to classify a large number of its pre-paid subscribers as monthly subscribers, in order to make the figures look better to the public).

Another technique - often used by master salespeople - is known as the "puppy dog sale". The smart pet shop owner, instead of talking about the little doggie in the window, offers to send it home with the family for the weekend, with "no obligation". Of course, by the end of the weekend, the puppy has become the family's best friend, and few families would return it to the pet shop!

It's vital that you make the principle of commitment and consistency work for you, because if you do nothing, it will work against you. The hardest part of getting people to take action is getting them started, because there's a natural inertia that makes most people resistant to change.

But you can make that work for you, because it also means that once people have started on a course of action, that same resistance to change makes it more comfortable for them to keep going than to stop.

How do you use this on your Web site?

First, engage the visitor in some action as soon as they visit your site.

Offering them a free article, e-book, special report or mini-course is a good start. Even better, engage them in something interactive, like a survey or self-assessment questionnaire. If you can persuade them to complete a questionnaire, especially one in which they score poorly, you've got them committed to a course of action, and they will naturally feel compelled to search for the right answers.

Use the puppy dog sale to sell your product. If you have enough confidence in the value that it offers, give it to the client free of obligation, taking their credit card details but promising not to process the transaction for, say, 30 days. Some people will return the product, but many more will keep it and happily allow you to charge them for it after 30 days.

Another technique is to break up a large product into smaller parts, and to sell them individually. If you can make them seem part of a collection, clients who buy the first few will be eager to complete the collection.

Another technique is to sell your product or service as a subscription service, with a "till further notice" agreement on their credit card payment, just like the cell phone and cable companies do.


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