Micro-Commitments
Stack a series of small, easy yeses through the sale so the big decision arrives as the next natural step.
How it sounds
- You Does it make sense to look at this together for fifteen minutes?
- Buyer Sure, let's do it.
- You So reducing that manual work is the priority?
- Result By the real decision, it's just the next yes in a long line.
The full entry
Micro-commitments are the small agreements you gather along the way: “Does it make sense to look at this together for fifteen minutes?”, “So reducing that manual work is the priority?”, “Worth getting your ops lead on the next call?” Each is trivial to say yes to, and each one nudges the buyer toward seeing themselves as someone moving forward with you. By the time the real decision arrives, it is consistent with a dozen earlier yeses rather than a cold leap.
Use it across a whole deal, not in one burst. It rests on Robert Cialdini’s commitment and consistency principle (Influence, 1984): people act in line with what they have already agreed to, and it is the same mechanism behind the foot-in-the-door effect (Freedman and Fraser, 1966). It backfires if the “yeses” are obvious manipulation or if you mistake polite agreement for real buying intent.
The term micro-commitment is sales practice with no single documented originator; the underlying principle is Cialdini’s.