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Pre-Suasion
What Is It About?
The world's best salespeople don't win by chance. They prepare someone's mind before they ask. This book reveals what they do differently: how words, images, and numbers shape the way you think. You'll learn why the moment matters more than the message, and how to use these insights without becoming manipulative.
The Three Key Ideas
The Privileged Moment
Persuasion succeeds or fails in the few seconds before the request, when pre-suasion makes someone receptive to a message before they hear it.
The Power of Attention
Whatever holds our attention right before a decision feels more important and more like the cause, so whoever directs attention controls the outcome.
Unity, the Seventh Principle
Beyond the six classic principles, Cialdini identifies a seventh, unity: people act not because they like you but because they see you as one of them.
Read a Sample
Pre-Suasion
Jim was the top salesman at a company that sold home fire alarm systems, and he always opened the same way. He'd sit down with a couple at their kitchen table, chat for a while, then hand them a ten-minute written test on fire safety. That wasn't anything special; every salesperson at the company did it. But the moment the couple started on the questions, Jim slapped his forehead. He'd left something important in his car, he said. Would they mind if he went out to get it and let himself back in, so he wouldn't have to interrupt them? They'd always say yes. Some even handed him their house key.
Robert Cialdini sat next to Jim at three of these presentations and saw the same thing happen each time. At first he chalked it up to absent-mindedness. The third time, he asked. Jim dodged the question twice before he finally blurted it out. "Think, Bob: Who do you let walk in and out of your house on their own? Only somebody you trust, right?" That's the whole secret. Jim didn't change a word of his pitch. He just made sure the family already associated him with trust by the time he got to the point. Cialdini calls the move brilliant, then adds right away that it isn't entirely ethical.
This book is about what happens before the request. For decades, Cialdini's Influence has been the classic on persuasion. Here he's asking a different question: why does the person with the better argument so often lose to the person who did a better job of preparing the moment? You'll meet the seventh principle, the one Cialdini overlooked for decades, and you'll learn how to use all of this without becoming Jim.
Who Is It For?
- Anyone who regularly asks other people for something and wants to prepare that moment deliberately.
- Anyone who wants to understand how attention and surroundings quietly steer decisions.
- Anyone who leads a team and wants to avoid the hidden costs that dishonesty creates even when no one gets caught.
- Anyone who has read Influence and wants to know what happens before the request, not just during it.
About the Author: Robert B. Cialdini
Robert Cialdini is the leading researcher on the psychology of persuasion and Regents' Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University. He spent three years working undercover alongside salespeople, advertisers, fundraisers and recruiters to find out what the best of them did differently in the moments before a request.
His books, including Influence, have sold more than three million copies in thirty-three languages, and Influence has long stood as the standard work on persuasion. In Pre-Suasion he moves beyond the six classic principles to examine what happens right before the request, and reveals the seventh: unity.
