How persuasive are you in your personal and professional life? Is it easy for you to sell other people on your ideas and successfully convince them to buy in? 

Persuasion is a skill that can be learned and refined and a habit that can be adopted and put into practice to get what you want at work and in life. That’s the message presented in an article about mastering the art of influence from First Round Review and Tyler Odean, a former Google employee and now director of product at Reddit. 

The article covers a lot of ground, but the most interesting takeaway for me was the introduction and explanation of five biases that you should know about and consider when presenting an idea to someone else. 

Here are three of the five biases covered in the article:

1. Availability
The availability bias refers to the idea that the longer you are exposed to something, the more receptive to it you’ll likely be. In other words, it refers to “the human tendency to think that examples of things that come readily to mind are more representative than is actually the case.” 

Odean says that salespeople and founders should be aware of this bias when talking to potential customers because, in his words, “If you assume that other people are as familiar with your ideas as you are, you’ll assume they’ll be far more receptive than they actually will be”. He also explains that you can use availability bias to your advantage in sales by investing in brand awareness strategies—i.e. make people think that your product is familiar and trustworthy by showing up everywhere. You can do this by participating on social media, writing guest blog posts on other sites, launching ads, etc. 
 
2. Anchoring
Anchoring occurs “when individuals use an initial piece of information to make a subsequent judgment. Once an anchor is set, other judgments are made by adjusting away from that anchor, and there is a bias toward interpreting other information around the anchor.” Knowing what anchoring is will help you when it comes to talking to prospects about price or other values that you use when trying to get the sale.

In the First Round article, Odean illustrates anchoring bias in this way: “If I initially throw out a valuation of $10M, but then I want to move it to $15M, I have to basically convince you that it’s worth all those values in between individually. Why is it worth $11M, $12M, etc.? Make sure you respect your own anchor points when making these types of arguments.”
 
3. Representation
Representation bias refers to the idea that people generally take one point away from conversations or one picture from an experience and refer back to that one point or one image when trying to make future decisions. In the article, Odean stresses how damaging this can be in sales conversations. He says, “people pack meetings with every selling point they can think of. But that’s actually the worst thing to do.”

Odean goes on to say that salespeople need to be very careful when crafting their pitches and messages for potential customers. He says, “because they’ll remember random parts, you want to construct a message that — when sampled at any point — reinforces your argument and remains persuasive. Keep it to the highlight reel and stick to a very short, simple message that you repeat in different ways again and again.” He adds later in the article, “if you give them an image that involves negative elements — in which anything that’s not utterly awesome is negative — that can be more damaging than it should be.”

The last two biases mentioned in the article are Coherence and Framing. If you’re interested in reading about the final two, click here to read the full article from First Round.