Persuasion psychology for practical business moments.
Maximize Your Influence studies the mental triggers behind buying, trust, attention, and decision-making. Recent episodes move from credit-card spending psychology and supermarket design to webinar presence, storytelling, personal power, and closing sales conversations without relying on stale tricks.
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Maximize Your Influence is built around the mechanics of persuasion in business and everyday decision-making. It is practical first. The show studies why people buy, why they resist, why they pay attention, and why some messages feel easier to accept than others. Recent episodes use familiar commercial settings as evidence. Credit cards become a lesson in payment psychology because plastic can soften the emotional sting of spending. Cash creates a different kind of friction. Supermarkets become examples of designed persuasion, with layout treated as part of a larger subconscious trigger system. Online shopping becomes a case study in reviews, ratings, scarcity alerts, urgency, and borrowed credibility. The show also spends time on the person doing the persuading. Personal power is framed as a force that builds trust, confidence, authenticity, and longer-term influence beyond a single sale. Imposter syndrome gets treated as both an internal barrier and a challenge when persuading someone who doubts their own decisions. Presentations receive the same practical scrutiny. A dull online meeting is not just boring; it is a missed chance to create presence, interaction, and connection. Storytelling is presented as a faster route to emotion, attention, retention, and trust, especially in branding, recruiting, marketing, advertising, and motivating. The sales advice is often blunt about outdated methods. The show argues that discovering wants and needs can matter more than a polished final close. Its rhythm is brisk, repetitive in a coaching way, and focused on turning psychology into usable behavior. Listeners looking for careful academic debate may find it more tactical than scholarly. Listeners working in sales, negotiation, speaking, or marketing will find a steady stream of frameworks for reading people and shaping decisions.
Made for: Best suited for salespeople, negotiators, presenters, marketers, and people who want concrete ways to improve trust, attention, and decision-making conversations.
What sets it apart: The show anchors influence lessons in everyday buyer behavior, from payment methods and online reviews to webinars and supermarket design. It favors direct coaching and repeatable tactics over broad business inspiration.
Maximize Your Influence: Your source for the top persuasion, influence, and negotiation techniques that will help you maximize your success in life and in business!
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded look at how reviews and legitimate scarcity can help buyers move from hesitation to action.
Amazon's persuasion toolkit gets a clear, practical read, with user reviews, ratings, and low-stock alerts framed as cues that reduce perceived risk and help buyers decide faster.
A plainspoken look at how buying decisions split between risk and reward.
Podcast 545 keeps its focus on buying decisions and the psychology behind them, using Kurt Mortensen to draw a clean line between minimizing risk and chasing reward.
Storytelling is treated as a sales tool from first hello to the closing ask.
Kurt Mortensen, author of Persuasion IQ, Laws of Charisma, and Maximum Influence, treats storytelling as a sales tool rather than a decorative extra.
Plain-spoken sales coaching for the real field.
Door-to-door lessons from the field.
Founder sales lessons from the messy middle.
Kurt Mortensen interviews Paul Smith, author of 'Lead with the Story', on using storytelling in sales.
Kurt Mortensen explores how to reduce risk and maximize reward in buying decisions, tying it to brain motivation.
This episode explores how to build trust and borrow credibility in a low-trust world, featuring insights from author Kurt Mortensen on persuasion and influence techniques.
Kurt Mortensen of Maximize Your Influence argues that a researched first offer can create an anchor and secure better negotiation terms.
Kurt Mortensen’s Maximize Your Influence episode explains mindfulness as deliberate attention to the present moment and connects it to persuasion, listening, and sales.
Kurt Mortensen explains how priming uses words, images, sounds, gestures, and environments to shape a prospect’s mindset before a persuasive request.
Kurt Mortensen interviews Shark Tank investor Kevin Harrington about mentorship, entrepreneurship, product launches, and what he calls invisible leverage.
This episode explores the psychological differences between paying with cash versus credit cards, explaining how credit reduces immediate buyer pain and increases spending through abstract, delayed transactions.
This episode explores how to become more charismatic and influential in virtual presentations and webinars by understanding the psychology behind engaging online audiences.
This episode explores how supermarkets use psychological principles and subconscious triggers to influence consumer behavior and drive impulse purchases.
This episode explores how developing personal power, rather than relying on luck or traditional methods, is a secret weapon for increasing persuasion and influence in a cluttered world.
This episode explores how imposter syndrome—a mental pattern of self-doubt and fear of being exposed as a fraud—sabotages persuasion and influence by eroding confidence and authenticity.
Maximize Your Influence examines how Amazon uses personalization, reviews, scarcity alerts, loyalty benefits, price anchoring, and one-click checkout to influence purchases.
This episode explores how storytelling can enhance persuasion, build trust, and improve sales by connecting emotionally with audiences.
This episode discusses strategies for persuading experienced salespeople by focusing on understanding their needs and using updated sales tools rather than traditional closing techniques.
This episode explores the psychology of persuasion and negotiation, discussing when to seek yes or no responses and introducing strategic concepts like FITD and DITF to maximize influence.
This episode explores strategies for transforming fear into excitement to enhance personal influence, covering both public speaking and decision-making scenarios.