Hide Your Face If Your Foot’s in the Door

Make the sale a slice at a time, I’ve advised. The first objective is getting the customer to say yes. In a wide variety of studies, it's been found that once the prospect says yes, he’s more likely to continue saying yes. 
     Present items which can be purchased in pieces. When aiming for a charitable contribution from a resistant prospect, request a small amount and then, if successful, ask for more later. If you’re community activists, don’t talk about even a small donation at the start. Instead, begin by presenting the petition to be signed.
     Get your foot in the door. The traveling salesman on the front porch with the perfect timing of an expert senses when the lady of the house is about to say no, and at precisely that point offers a combination of merchandise and cost which can't be refused. Once the lady says yes, thereby keeping the door from being slammed shut on the salesman's foot, the sale is built with upgrades and additional items.
     But successful implementation of that old tactic is a bit more complicated than it first appears, according to researchers at University of British Columbia and Florida State University. They began by asking study participants to show a small act of support for a cause. Then after a time interval, the same participants were asked if they’d do a more difficult and more meaningful task for the same cause.
     We’d expect that those who completed the small act were likely to agree to the larger action, on average. But that turned out not to be true for everybody. When the initial act was performed in public, the likelihood of consenting to the larger action was much less than when the small act was done without acknowledgement by others.
     Why? Two of the possibilities:

• Those who agreed to do the small act in public felt under pressure to go along. Those who did it more anonymously had greater commitment to the cause. 
• Those who did the small act in public were more likely to feel they’d done their social duty, so their motivation to do the larger act was less. 

     The Jewish scholar Maimonides described eight levels of charity. Least noble was when one gives unwillingly. Toward the top was giving without the recipient knowing from whom he received it.
     If we’re wanting noble commitment to a cause, public acknowledgement is counterproductive.

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Make the Sale a Slice at a Time 
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