What liking is, and how to use it.

At work, this is the colleague everyone wants on their project. Often it isn’t the loudest voice or even the deepest expert. It’s the one who makes the kickoff call feel like a reunion. When the staffing spreadsheet goes around, their name gets requested by name. When two departments are feuding over a handover, they get sent in first, because both sides will take the meeting.

It shows up in how deals actually close. The proposal matters, but the decision often happens over lunch, on the walk between meeting rooms, in the ten minutes of pre-call small talk that a liking-led seller never treats as small. Procurement compares the decks; human beings buy from the vendor they’d be happy to be stuck in an airport with.

In everyday life it’s almost invisible. You remember the barista’s name and her exam schedule, so your coffee comes with a conversation. Neighbours who ignore the community email answer your texts. At school pickup you’re the parent other parents drift toward, and half the street’s logistics quietly route through your phone.

The pattern under all of it is the same: people say yes to people they like, and you are, usually without planning it, easy to like.

In Influence, Dr. Cialdini tells the story of Joe Girard, the record-setting Chevrolet salesman. Girard’s signature move was almost absurdly simple: every month, every one of his customers received a card in the mail, and the printed message never changed: "I like you." No pitch, no offer. Customers came back, and they brought their friends. The Tupperware home party, also described in Influence, ran on the same fuel: the purchases were driven less by the plastic bowls than by affection for the hostess, a friend whose living room you were sitting in and who benefited from every order.

Researchers have measured the machinery. In 2003, van Baaren and colleagues found that servers who repeated customers’ orders back word for word earned larger tips than servers who paraphrased. Mimicry alone, with no added charm, moved real money. Earlier, Drachman, deCarufel and Insko (1978) showed something stranger: compliments increased liking for the flatterer even when subjects knew the praise was inaccurate. Flattery works on people who can see it coming.

Then there is similarity, the quietest lever of all. The research summarized in Influence points one direction: we say yes more readily to people who dress like us, talk like us, and share our background. Salespeople trained to spot the customer’s hometown or hobby are using that small talk to make the sale.

Leading with liking gives you a set of advantages most people spend whole careers trying to imitate.

Every lead principle casts a shadow. Liking’s shadow is that warmth can start making your decisions for you.

The research points to a practical playbook, and none of it requires performance. Start with genuine similarity. Before any consequential conversation, find one real thing you share with the other person: a city, a former employer, a kid the same age, a hatred of the same spreadsheet. Real is the operative word; people detect manufactured common ground far more often than flatterers assume.

Give compliments you can defend. The flattery research is a reminder that appreciation moves people, so spend it honestly instead of gushing. Notice something specific the person actually did well and say so, ideally to a third party who will pass it along, which doubles its credibility.

Then engineer cooperation. The fastest route to being liked is working toward a shared goal, so structure conversations to put you both on the "same side of the table": a joint problem, a common deadline, a rival you can both push against. And hold one line absolutely: never counterfeit warmth. Faked liking reads eventually, and when it does, it costs far more than the deal in front of you.

Because liking works below awareness, defending against it takes a deliberate move: separate the person from the proposal. The counsel in Influence is to notice the liking rather than try to suppress it, which is impossible. If you realize you’ve come to like a salesperson unusually quickly, treat that warmth as information about the persuasion, not about the deal.

The test is one sentence long. Before you sign, ask yourself: "Would I take this deal from someone I didn’t like?" If the terms only look good in the glow of the relationship, the relationship is doing the selling.

Liking-led influence pays best where trust is the product and the cycle is long: anywhere people buy the person before they buy the thing.