The Persuasion Interview
From Success to Seduction, Consulting to Body Language

Michael Senoff interviews Kevin Hogan

Michael: How did you first become interested in persuasion? How did you evolve to where you are now?

Kevin: I didn't have a choice. When I was a kid, I grew up in Chicago; we grew up pretty poor. Life was not great. My dad had left our family when I was 4 years old, the day my youngest brother was born, so we were in quite a tough spot...

When you are born into a family that is financially poor, that triggers a lot of dominoes in life....stresses that other families and kids just don't have in "normal" families. "Going to the orphanage...?"

So from a very young age, I learned to start these mini-businesses. I sold greeting cards, Christmas cards; I'd shovel snow from people's driveways; I would cut people's lawns; I would pick weeds in their yards, not all at the same time...I just did more and more different things to earn income as I got older. What was evident from a very early age was that when I was selling something, I made more money...usually two or three times as much money for the same time investment.

But I also wondered why not everyone was buying from me. I took it very personally as all these people I sold to knew me. Some of these people should have bought these greeting cards because everybody needs greeting cards. So why are only half the people buying from me?

I started to think about that and as an 11, 12-year old kid started to read like Napoleon Hill and "Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude" W. Clement Stone.

I even read a couple of books on hypnosis as a kid, I remember one by Ormond McGill and it became fascination. And then I stayed in sales related stuff in addition to working doing anything and everything I possibly could.

University is where I picked up the real fascination in non-verbal communication, which turns out to be the most crucial element of face-to-face persuasion.

Today persuasion is more important than ever. And almost no one remotely understands it. Think online...

All these people believe that if they can "write copy" they will get rich.

They are wrong.

That is one element of a much, much greater picture. It's not necessarily all the words on the web site; it's the nuances on the web sites, the creator of the products, the image of the affiliate....all these things... that sell.

It's not necessarily the words you say to your prospect, it's the nuances, the environment; the waitresses, where you sit, all that stuff and so everything became fascinating when I started taking nonverbal communication classes at the University of Wisconsin and I got to take part in research projects.

It was all a revelation to me...like what you dress like and what you look like and how attractive you are or aren't; all that stuff influences. It changes everything; for attractive people, they live in one world; unattractive live in another. Wealthy people live in one world, poor people live in another one. But the perceptions that people have are formed so instantaneously whether it's your web site, or whether it's an ad on TV, or whatever; things influence people without them even being aware of it. And so it just became fascinating and all absorbing to me since I was a little kid and the obsession never stops.

It's interesting... Back in the late 70's through the late 80's, there were some basic non-verbal communication and human interaction-type classes; there were social attitude classes, the formation of social attitude, persuasion in groups.

At the time there had been a really powerful study done by Philip Zimbardo out in California with the famous prison experiment where half the kids were guards and half the kids were inmates. And this experiment was done right after Vietnam and it was a very much a time of protest. That one experiment triggered a lifetime of fascination with how the environment and the context will change you as a person.

There was not a lot of popular literature. There was the Hidden Persuaders, the Vance Packard book, and The True Believer of Hoffer and a few others but it was at this time that they actually started studying and putting it into college curriculum. Now today you won't see a lot of the stuff that I read about in psychology, but you'll see it in neuropsychology or you'll see it in consumer behavior and behavioral economics classes. A lot of the persuasion research I analyze is in the field of medicine.

For example, what does a doctor do in a specific situation; how does he present options to a patient? And then you observe how the patient will decide or the doctor will decide what to do based upon how the information was presented. So the stuff is not quite as secret as you might think but I will say that it's not easy to get because it's extremely expensive to acquire the actual studies and details of research.

You either have to be in that University learning from that professor or you have to be able to afford to subscribe to the academic journals, which are pretty spendy.

So this is an edge I have over the competition who might be talking about NLP or hypnosis or old fashioned selling techniques because I don't even think in those terms.

For me everything is about all of the new information that's come out in the last 20 years and I have to actually think back to how to sell; the old models of selling. Because they're not that relevant to me anymore. And they shouldn't be for most people because there's so much better stuff out there.

Coming up: Tips for Making Money One on One...

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Kevin Hogan
Network 3000 Publishing
3432 Denmark #108
Eagan, MN 55123
(612) 616-0732

Stock photography appears under license with istockphoto/kate_sept2004.

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