Transcription
You flip a coin and it lands heads five times straight. Is tails now due? You must choose between two surgeries: one's a 90% survival rate, the other's just a 10% fatality rate. Which one do you pick?
You make 100,000 a year, and your neighbors all make 50,000. Your brother, on the other hand, he makes 300,000 a year, but his neighbors make over half a million each. Who's happier?
These scenarios have invisible forces of influence around them; we call them frames. And if you're not aware of frames, you can make some really dumb, boneheaded decisions. And if you are aware of frames and you know how to use them, then you can make millions of dollars, like I have. In this video, I'm going to show you how to use frames the way I've used them to sell over a million dollars worth of stuff.
Frame number one: the anchor frame. Say you're a strapping young lad on vacation in Italy when a beautiful young lass comes to you begging for help. She explains, "Four men have accosted me; they stole my phone." You, the heroic young man, why don't you go get it from them? The men are right over there, in fact, on Valentine Street. This is an experiment talked about in the book *Persuasion* by Robert Cialdini. Turns out the name of the street has a large influence over whether men went and tried to get that lady her phone back. You see, Valentine Street instantly conjures up images of romance and chivalry, but Main Street, blah. This is why you can see tails land five times in a row and then somehow think heads is due, even though a coin flip is always 50/50. This is why on my webinars I always ask for commitment before I begin to train.
So let me give you an example of how it would go. Today, I'm going to give you my A-level best because I have faith that you will actually use what I'm going to share with you. And nothing pains me more, nothing hurts me deeper, than somebody encountering a life-changing idea and letting it go to waste. So I'm going to give you my best, but in return, I'm going to ask you for your best. And so I ask you right now, as we go through this, to see yourself doing what I show you, to make it yours, to put it to work for you, to get results from it. So before we go any further, I want you to promise me that you will use what you find useful as soon as the opportunity presents itself. Does that sound fair? If so, commit to me with a "yes" in the chat box right now. If you want to coach people, before you give them the "how," get them committed first. That commitment will then frame the content in a way that is most likely to have the biggest impact.
Frame number two: the polarity frame. Let's say you're working a deal, and the deal is stalled. You have the perfect offer for the perfect client, but for some reason, it's radio silence. What most do in this situation is they fire off an email and they say, "Hey, are you still interested?" And guess what happens? It gets ignored. Instead, you should do what my friend Chris Voss does, who's the bestselling author of the negotiation book *Never Split the Difference*. He suggests you send this email: "Do you want this to fail?" See, the problem with "Are you still interested?" is it's easy to ignore, because they've seen so many emails like that before. And it's also easy to reply back with a lame "yes," which doesn't really move the deal forward. "Do you want this to fail," though, has real stakes involved in it, and it's unique; they haven't heard it before. And who wants to be responsible for its failing? So the polarity frame is when you take the truth and then you invert how you present it. Remember our earlier surgery example: 90% survival rate versus 10% fatality rate. It's the same fact, but how it's framed means everything. When marketing, I'm always looking at both the negative and the positive way to present something, and then I'm picking the one that I think will land with the biggest impact. For example, I'd rather use a testimonial that says, "I hate Jason Flinn; I wish I didn't have to pay him money, but unfortunately, no one else is anywhere near as good as him, and so I keep wiring him tens of thousands of dollars for his help, even though I want to punch him in his face." That's a much better testimonial than the standard, "Oh, Jason's the greatest in the world; I want to have his babies." Those kind of run-of-the-mill testimonials—in selling, I find the negative almost always outperforms the positive. When we set the record for the biggest affiliate promotion, selling 9.8 million in 8 days, the transition on my webinar from content to close went like this: "I have a major concern, and it can be boiled down to one single word: belief. You don't believe me. You say, 'Jason, it sounds too good to be true.' You think the testimonials are fake or doctored or misrepresented or manipulated one way or another. Is it that, or is it something more? Maybe you don't believe in yourself. They did it, but they aren't you. Can you do it? I believe that you can, and I'm willing to put my own money on the line to prove it." Everyone basically starts with the positive, and then they got nowhere to go with it. If you flip the frame and instead start with the negative, often it's more effective because it's more believable, and it's different, and then you can go to the positive from the negative.
Frame number three: the relative frame. Early in my career, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I got on a webinar one day looking to make some money. I had a good turnout on this webinar, and I go into the pitch, and then I reveal the price. It's either four installments of 97 or a full pay of 297. And back then, I didn't have any employees, so I set up my own order forms and all that jazz. And I set up this order form wrong—only I didn't know that yet. See, I did my whole spiel, really leaning into the cost savings of the full pay over the payment plan, and I just kept going on and on and on about, "Here's the offer, and here's the benefits, here's the bonuses," etc. And then finally, after I ran out of steam, I glanced at the chat box, only to discover, to my horror, that many attendees told me that my order form was set up for just two payments of 97 and not four. Oops. Thinking fast, I told my audience that I would honor my mistake, but only while the webinar was still live. And as soon as it was over, damn it, I was going to go fix that order form. And the result was a buying frenzy that I'd never seen before. You see, the audience was no longer looking at the price; they were looking at the savings. It wasn't that the offer cost $194; it was that they could save $103. They took the payment plan; they could save more money than if they took the full-priced option, and so they got excited, and they bought. We only understand the value of something if we can compare it to something else. That's why more people are happier making 100,000 a year with 50,000 a year neighbors than they are making 300,000 a year with 500,000 a year neighbors. When we sold software, we created an A, B, C offer: A would be personal use, 47 bucks for one license; B would be pro use, 77 bucks for 10 licenses; and C would be the agency use case, 97 bucks for 25 licenses. And then we do something special on a webinar: we quadruple the licenses on the agency level—97 bucks for 100 licenses. And people would go nuts because the agency-level offer licenses at less than one buck compared to pro, which was seven bucks a license, and personal, which was $47 a license. And this works with any number; it doesn't have to be dollars to dollars. A study was done once where they asked folks, "Hey, what's the last two digits of your Social Security number?" And then they said, "See that house over there? What do you think that house sold for?" And what they discovered was those with the higher Social Security numbers guessed higher prices on the home. Once I heard that study, I came up with this little piece of motivation. It goes like this: "The sun is 93 million miles away, yet it provides for 8 billion people on this planet, and you're telling me you can't find a thousand of them to pay you $11,000 each so you can make your first million?" When you put it that way, a million doesn't sound like much, does it? So there you have it. These are just three frames that you should consider. And most important is to be aware of the fact that everything has a frame, and if you're not consciously aware of it and trying to create it, you may be at the mercy of an invisible force of influence, which can limit you. So at the very least, seek to uncover the frame to help you make a better decision, and at the very best, come up with a message that helps the world, and then create the most powerful frame you can to put that message in.