The DARK Psychology That Makes Clients CLOSE THEMSELVES

Can I tell you a secret? You're losing sales right now. Not because your offer is bad, but because the highest earning business owners and marketers in the world are using psychological triggers you don't even know exist. And here's the scary part. Those triggers are influencing how your customers think before you ever even speak to them. After over a decade in marketing, working with over 1500 businesses, including big brands like Google, Amazon, and Meta, I've seen one thing that separates businesses that struggle from the ones that can't stop selling. It's not funnels. It's not ads. It's psychology. So, in this video, I'm going to show you the 10 psychological triggers that are being used right now to influence how people think, feel, and buy, including one that can actually hurt your sales if you use it wrong. And most people are. And this chess piece on my desk, it's going to make a whole lot more sense in about 60 seconds. So, let's start with one psychological trigger that sounds completely backwards. The hard effect. This one is counterintuitive because it means that making your offer sound too easy can actually kill your sales. See, Harvard Business School researcher Michael Norton found that when people can see the effort behind a result, they value it significantly more, even when the outcome is identical. This is why a handcrafted table costs more than a factory-built one. Same looking table, totally different story. So, if your sales pitch right now sounds something like, "We handle everything for you. You don't actually have to lift a finger." Well, you might actually be hurting yourself because when the process looks effortless, people assume that the result is too. Fortunately, it's a simple fix. All you've got to do is show your process. Walk them through the research, the strategy, the testing. Let them see the complexity behind what you do. Because when they see the work, they believe the value. And think about this chess piece. If I just handed it to you and said, "That'll be $50, please." You'd laugh. But if I told you that this piece was handcarved from a single piece of obsidian that took over 40 hours to make. Well, now it feels a whole lot more interesting and definitely a whole lot more valuable, even if you're not in the market for handcarved chess pieces. Either way, same looking piece, but totally different perception. That's the hard effect. Psychological trigger number two, persuasion. And this one is about winning the sale before you ever even open your mouth. Robert Charaldini, the psychologist who wrote the book on influence, spent 30 years studying this. And one of his most fascinating findings was that when researchers placed achievement related images on a wall before asking people for help, images just like these ones, those people were 60% more likely to say yes to the exact same request. Think about what that means. The environment that you create before the conversation even starts is already shaping the answer that you're going to get. So, if you're jumping straight into sales calls without priming the person first, you're fighting uphill for no reason. Luckily, there's a few things that you can do here to make the sale just a whole lot easier. Things like a case study sent 24 hours before the call, a pre-all questionnaire that gets them thinking about their problems. Even the images on your website, all of this is persuasion, and it's happening whether you're designing it intentionally or not. The only question is whether it's working for you or against you. Number three, commitment and consistency. This one also comes from Charldini, and it might be the most powerful principle on this entire list. Here's the core idea. Once someone commits to something, even something small, they feel compelled to stay consistent with that commitment. Their brain just won't let them go back on the previous decision they made. There's a classic study here where researchers asked homeowners to put a small sticker in their window supporting a cause. Pretty much everybody said yes. I mean, it's just a small sticker after all. Two weeks later, a different team came back and asked the same homeowner to put this massive ugly sign in their front yard for the same cause. Here's where it gets interesting. Because the people who'd agreed to the sticker before were four times more likely to say yes to the big ugly sign. Because saying no would have felt inconsistent with who they'd already shown themselves to be. So the application is this. Stop asking for the big yes right away. Start with smaller micro commitments. Get them to say yes to something small like a free audit or a quick questionnaire or even asking a simple question on the call like, "Does that make sense?" Each small yes makes the big yes feel like the only logical next step. Number four, the decoy effect. And this is one of the sneakiest pricing strategies in all of psychology. Here's how it works. When you offer two options, people just compare them against each other. But when you add a third option that's clearly worse than one of the other ones, it makes the option that you actually want them to choose look like a no-brainer. That sounds confusing though, so let me show you what I mean. The most famous example comes from Dan Arieli's research on The Economist. They tested three subscription options. Online only for $59, print only for $125, and print plus online also for $125. That middle option, print only for $125. That's the decoy. Nobody picks it. But its presence makes the print plus online feel like a steal. Without the decoy, most people chose the cheaper option. But with the decoy, 84% chose the most expensive one. So if you've got two packages and people just keep picking the cheaper one, don't lower your price. add a decoy. A third option that makes your preferred package the obvious choice because pricing is never just about the number, it's about the context around that number. Number five, the Benjamin Franklin effect. And this one sounds completely backwards as well, which is exactly why it works. The story goes that old Ben Franklin had a political rival who just couldn't stand him. So instead of trying to win this guy over with favors and flattery, Franklin instead asked him if he could borrow a rare book from his personal library. The rival agreed. Franklin returned it with a thank you note. And from that point on, the rival became one of his closest allies. And here's the psychology. When someone does you a favor, their brain has to justify that effort. And the way it justifies it is by deciding that, well, they must like you. Otherwise, why would they have helped? Now, let's be honest for a second here. Most of us show up to client relationships trying to give and give and give. There's free value and free audits and free strategy sessions and that's fine, but it can actually position you as someone who's trying to prove their worth and prove their value to the client, which isn't fun or an effective position to be in. The Benjamin Franklin effect reverses this entirely. So, you want to ask for their opinion, ask for their feedback, ask for a small introduction. When someone invests even a little bit of effort into you, they don't like you less, they like you more. And that changes the entire dynamic of pretty much every conversation that follows. And by the way, this is why I keep this little chess piece on my desk. Because every one of these techniques is a move, and most people approach sales like they're playing checkers, one move at a time, hoping something lands. But when you understand the psychology, you're playing chess. Every move is deliberate. Every conversation is set up three moves in advance, and the outcome starts to feel almost inevitable. All right, let's keep going. And this next one is where you start to see how these techniques really start to stack together. Number six, the endowment effect. People value things more once they feel like they already own them. This is why car dealerships want you to take a test drive. It's why software companies offer free trials. And it's why the person who picks up a puppy at the shelter almost never puts it back. Once you're holding it, it's yours. And the thought of giving it up feels like a loss. Nobel Prize winner Daniel Conaman showed that people will ask for roughly twice as much to give something up as they'd pay to get it in the first place. Yeah, twice as much. So, the question for you is, how do you let someone hold what you have to offer before they buy it? Especially if you're selling a service. Well, you've got a lot of options. You can offer a free diagnostic, a sample strategy, a taste of the result. Even case studies and testimonials can help show someone what the ideal end result is going to look like. And when they can see themselves inside that ideal end outcome, they're not deciding whether to buy anymore. They're deciding whether to give up something that they already feel like they have. And if you want to see what this looks like in practice, let me show you something real quick. So the wrong way is just sending someone straight to a sales page and hoping that they buy or book an appointment or sign up. The right way, on the other hand, is to give them a taste of the result first. An intake form collects their situation. This then triggers an automatic response based on their answers and then books them into a call where you can walk them through the results together. By the time you make the offer, they already feel invested. Now, you don't need to build any of this from scratch, by the way. You can copy and paste my entire automations and scripts and templates. Or if you're not ready for that yet, same principle works with a Google form and a Zoom call. The psychology is what matters. Number seven, the less is better effect. And this one is going to change how you package everything. Imagine for a second two consultants. Both charge $5,000. Consultant A offers 12 calls and 47 templates and a private Slack channel and weekly email reviews and a bonus vault with 200 hours of training. Consultant B offers four strategy calls and a custom growth plan. same price, but consultant B sounds more premium. And here's why. Researchers found that people perceive more value when something feels focused rather than sprawling and scattered all over the place. In other words, a tightly packed offer signals confidence. A bloated one signals desperation. It's like the consultant is saying, "I need to throw in everything because the core thing just isn't enough." So, think about your offer. If you've got 47 bonuses and 12 modules and everything that you might possibly need, you might actually be signaling desperation because a bloated offer doesn't feel abundant, just feels overwhelming. The fix here is to trim. Pull out the core elements that drive 80% of the results. Then package them tightly. Make it feel focused and full instead of scattered and half empty. And then raise your price because abundance perception beats actual quantity every single time. What you want to do here is overflow a small container rather than trying to fill a giant warehouse. Number eight, the Prattfall effect. And most people do the exact opposite of what works. Psychologist Elliot Aronson discovered that when a highly competent person makes a small relatable mistake, people actually like them more. Not less, more. But here's the catch. This only works if the person is already seen as competent. If someone with no credibility makes a mistake, it just makes people's doubts worse. So here's what this means for you. If you've built authority, if you've shown results, if people already see you as someone who knows what they're doing, then talking about your struggles, your early failures, the dumb mistakes you made along the way, that doesn't hurt your positioning. It actually makes it stronger because perfection is intimidating. And intimidation, that just kills trust. There's a lot of people out there trying to look flawless. Every screenshot is perfect. Every result is cherrypicked. Every story is super duper polished so that it barely sounds real. But that actually triggers skepticism, not trust. The Prattfall effect says, "Show the cracks." It makes the rest of the armor look stronger. Unless, of course, you're just getting started, in which case, save this one for later. Number nine, omission bias. And this explains why your potential clients often do absolutely nothing, even when they clearly need help. Psychologist Jonathan Baron found that people would rather do nothing and risk a bad outcome than take action and risk being responsible for that bad outcome, even when the math clearly says that acting is the smarter choice. So, for example, a business owner knows their marketing isn't working. They can see their competitors pulling ahead, but instead of investing in a fix, they just wait. Not because they're lazy, but because their fear of making the wrong call feels way worse than that slow burn of just doing nothing. Another example, imagine someone who's been thinking about starting their business for months, maybe even years. Rather than trying to motivate them with how much they could earn or the kind of life they could have, the more powerful move is to flip it. Even if, for example, they'd only make an extra $2,000 a month. Well, that means every month they don't start, they're losing $2,000. That's $24,000 a year just sitting on the table. And that number only goes up the longer they wait. All of this means that the most powerful thing you can do here is make in action feel expensive. Don't just sell the dream of what they're going to get. Show them what they're losing right now just by waiting and doing nothing. Now, doing nothing has a price tag. And suddenly your service looks like a bargain compared to the cost of standing still. Okay. Psychological trigger number 10, the peak end rule. And I saved this one for last on purpose because it ties everything together. Daniel Conorman, same researcher behind the endowment effect, found that people don't judge an experience by the average of every single moment put together. They judge it by just two things. The peak, that single most intense moment, and the end, how it wraps up. This is why a restaurant can have mediocre appetizers and some boring salads, but if the main dish is incredible and dessert is perfect, you walk out saying that that was an amazing meal. You don't average the entire experience. you remember the [snorts] high point and the last point. This is important because it applies directly to your sales process, to your content, to your onboarding, to everything. Your clients won't remember every email, every call, every single touch point. They'll remember the moment that it clicked for them and how it ended. So, if your onboarding is forgettable, if your final deliverable lands with a whimper instead of a bang, none of the good stuff in the middle actually matters. So, design for the peak and design for the end. That's how you become someone that people actually talk about. That's how you turn one client into 10 without spending a dollar on ads. Now, before you go out there and start using all 10 of these, I've got three important warnings. Warning number one, psychology without empathy is manipulation, and people can smell it. If you're using these to trick people into buying something they don't need, it will backfire on you every single time. So, don't do that. Warning number two, these don't replace a good offer. If what you're selling doesn't actually solve a problem, no amount of psychology is going to save you. I mean, you might get the first sale, but you're never going to get the referral. And the referral is where the real money lives. Warning number three, and this is the one that most people skip right past. Most people are going to watch this. They're going to feel inspired for about 20 minutes and then go right back to doing exactly what they were doing before. But the people who actually win with this stuff are the ones who pick two or three of these and actually implement them this week. Not next month, not when everything feels ready, this week. And that brings me back to this chess piece. Because here's the thing that nobody wants to say out loud. If you've been thinking about starting your business or you've started but you're still figuring out how to get clients consistently, it's probably not because you need more information, it's because you haven't learned the psychology behind why people actually buy. So, the question isn't which of these techniques should I use? The question is, are you going to keep collecting ideas or are you going to actually use them? Now, everything I just walked you through all 10 of these techniques, I use a simple piece of software called Highle to put them into action. And you don't have to be technical to set it up. If you can send an email, you can do this. Most of the heavy lifting is actually already done. So, you're just customizing, not building from scratch. So, if you want to copy and paste my exact marketing system, I'll give you extended access and show you how I've set mine up. When you start your trial through the link below, here's what unlocks. Done for you highle snapshots, a 90-day implementation road map, word for word scripts, and private access to my insiders community. The links in the descriptions below the video. Click it, start your trial. And if you want to go even deeper into the psychology behind why clients chase you, close themselves, and pay premium prices without you ever having to feel pushy, I've got another video linked up right here. So tap or click that now and I'll see you in there in just a