Oren Klaff Quotes

The prize frame is the window through which you look at the world that allows you to see yourself as the prize: The money has to earn you, not the other way around. You’re flipping the script.

Seizing Situational Status Here are the steps involved in elevating your status in any situation. You will recognize some of these actions from framing, and for good reason. Frame control and status are closely related, as are the pitch techniques you will learn in Chapter 4. 1. Politely ignore power rituals and avoid beta traps. 2. Be unaffected by your customer’s global status (meaning the customer’s status inside and outside the business environment). 3. Look for opportunities to perpetrate small denials and defiances that strengthen your frame and elevate your status. 4. As soon as you take power, quickly move the discussion into an area where you are the domain expert, where your knowledge and information are unassailable by your audience. 5. Apply a prize frame by positioning yourself as the reward for making the decision to do business with you. 6. Confirm your alpha status by making your customer, who now temporarily occupies a beta position, make a statement that qualifies your higher status.

Since childhood, others have been trying to smuggle their ideas into your mind. So naturally your mental defenses have gotten really good. It’s as if you have a small team of cognitive security guards and bouncers who are trained to keep unfamiliar and confusing ideas away.

It doesn’t matter how well you argue, the way your points are crafted, or how elegant your flow and logic. If you do not have high status, you will not command the attention necessary to make your pitch heard. You will not persuade, and you will not easily get a deal done.

I was watching myself fall back onto the classic sales approach, with its tired old script: First become likable and build rapport, then explain “features and benefits,” next do a trial close, and then fight like an alley cat to overcome all the objections the buyer has come up with.

As you share your story, there has to be some suspense to it because you are going to create intrigue in the telling of the story by telling only part of the story. That’s right, you break the analyst frame by capturing audience attention with a provocative story of something that happened to you, and then you keep their attention by not telling them how it ends until you are ready.

If you have to explain your authority, power, position, leverage, and advantage, you do not hold the stronger frame.

Start-ups often prepare absurdly aggressive and optimistic plans, which have a very low likelihood of success, just to maximize the company’s perceived dollar value.” Your financial projections, whether for a product or a company, are supposed to answer such basic questions as, How strong is the company? What if plans go awry, does the company have enough cash to last a few bad quarters? Do you know how to budget well?

When you abide by the rituals of power instead of establishing your own, you reinforce the opposing power frame.

You know what decision you want the buyer to make, but the more you push in that direction, the more they dig in, slow down, and change the agenda. They want to make their own decision on their own timeline. Buyers buy how they want to buy, not how you want to sell.

You create novelty by violating the target’s expectations in a pleasing way.

To give a dopamine kick and create desire, offer a reward. To give a norepinephrine kick and create tension, take something away.

who believes that we feel decisions in our body, not our mind. There’s a whole side to us that computers don’t have and the “rational economic man” economists like to talk about doesn’t have either. Our bodies “know” the situations we meet in life and how we should respond.

Observing power rituals in business situations — such as acting deferential, engaging in meaningless small talk, or letting yourself be told what to do — reinforces the alpha status of your target and confirms your subordinate position. Do not do this!

Make people feel like the idea is coming from them and they will place more value on it, believe it more deeply, adopt it more quickly, and remember it more easily.