We suspected it,
but Booking.com tested it.

And possibly ones that cost little or nothing?

It’s not easy.

If you are a capable, experienced CEO,
you have probably already implemented all the best ideas —
and so have your competitors.

This is exactly the point where I found myself
a few years ago: SPIN Selling, Challenger Sales, Value Selling
and many other practices and methodologies were no longer enough.

And yet, just open any smartphone to see how
the largest online companies keep breaking sales records.

Like Booking.com

Booking.com keeps improving its results
because it has adopted a new sales model.

Alongside the traditional “Value” offer,
it has integrated the lessons of Behavioral Economics:

Every time you click on a website,
you are gently nudged toward a decision.

This website is no exception.

Online and offline, your behaviors are monitored, analyzed, and encouraged every day.

Most of the time, a small change creates huge results

For example, by changing this sentence accompanying a product page in an e-commerce site from:

• "71 people have viewed this product today" to:
• "71 people have bought this product today"

sales increased by 100%.

Same effort — completely different results.

Our brain made a different decision — based on a single word.
It did so without us even realizing it.

The reason is that we are Carbon, not Silicon.

The way we decide is far from rational:

• Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon demonstrated that we are drowning in information. We are no longer able to rationalize “optimal” solutions while considering “all variables.” We tend to settle for the first plausible solution.

It gets worse:

• Another Nobel Prize winner, Daniel Kahneman, explained that we make decisions based on automatic patterns. We overlay these “patterns” onto the problem without evaluating any variables. We use these patterns automatically because most of the time they work. But often they don’t — and not optimally.

For example:

• We buy from Amazon because it offers a good selection with limited effort — not because we visited every possible website and chose the best price.
• We associate high price with quality — and restaurants keep placing outrageously priced dishes on the menu — that are rarely ordered — so the rest of the expensive menu feels reasonable and rewarding.

Today, people are overwhelmed by information and forced to make hundreds of decisions a day. Our brain has found a way to navigate this complexity by using shortcuts that help us decide automatically.

Even when we must make highly rational business decisions, we are ultimately influenced by these shortcuts — thinking patterns that originate in the way our biological brain works, in its evolutionary history from primates to Homo sapiens, in the survival strategies of the species.

If we do not learn to activate these shortcuts in the customer to guide the final decision, we expect the customer to interpret the value of our offer alone. And they will do so not based on rational value models, but by using a “random” shortcut — often the one most easily activated at that moment, not the one that benefits them most and almost never the one that guarantees us fair recognition.

I began to notice that Value Selling was no longer enough when, trying to help sales teams improve results with my background as a process engineer, data analyst, and AI expert, I could only get so far.

I then started exploring copywriting, design, communication, game theory — up to decision science and behavioral economics, where Cialdini is one of the pioneers.

When Cialdini offered the opportunity to become a member of the Cialdini Institute, I jumped aboard and discovered that the 7 principles were exactly what I was missing to help others decide.

Professor Cialdini’s “7 Principles of Persuasion” help us activate these shortcuts — to help others say yes.

And they do so with small adjustments like the one above: a different word, a word inversion, one additional piece of information… leading to Big Results. These are the small-BIGs I selected for you in my webinars, drawn from the original material of the Cialdini Institute.

There are far more than three.

They are based on over 40 years of scientific research. Warren Buffett, to cite one of its greatest admirers, publicly stated that Professor Cialdini’s book "Influence" is the book that helped him most in his business.

The bonus is Professor Cialdini’s high ethical standard: he uses his science to help others decide better — not to manipulate them.

Because among the ideas that can be immediately applied for results, there are certainly those who use shortcuts exclusively in their own interest, to the detriment of the customer.

The cases of Enron, Madoff, Ponzi, and years of Professor Cialdini’s studies have shown that wrongdoers benefit only in the short term. In the long run, they all regret it.

Not so those who use shortcuts to help customers decide. The results prove it.

Join Free the next Webinar on the "7 Principles of Persuasion":

Book here