What makes selling easy and makes it a joy to be sold to? I believe that the basis of selling is to have a good relationship with your customer and to truly believe that your product is of real value. NLP can help achieve this but if it is used to trick people it will backfire. NLP is often described as the programming language of the brain.
The NLP ‘fast phobia cure’ brought about a revolution in the psychiatric world, because phobias were thought to be almost incurable. NLP has fixed phobias in under 10 minutes! The ability to affect the mind so profoundly enabled many techniques to be developed based on the principles of NLP. An obvious objective of the sales process is to find a way to influence someone into becoming a paying customer.
Robert B. Cialdini (Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University) made a study of ‘influence’. In his book ‘Influence: Science and Practice’ he says “People prefer to say yes to individuals they know and like.”
I have seen young couples in love, good friends and siblings, who know each other so well they can finish each other’s sentences. Using NLP terminology they are said to be ‘in rapport’. Rapport can be noticed in people when a person sits with the same posture as their colleague, picks up their drinks at the same time, uses the same terminology and just enjoy each other’s company. How is this relevant to making a sale?
The rapport techniques of NLP are based around mirroring the prospects physical behaviour, breathing rate and language predicates. We all experience the world by our brain making sense of the signals it receives from our senses: sight, sound, feelings, taste and smell. Taste and smell are very relevant to perfumeries, florists and restaurants but the majority of sales can be described in pictures, sounds and feelings.
People will feel more comfortable, and will be more likely to buy, if they are talking to someone who is dressed in a similar way, moves in a similar way and uses language in a similar way. Having the sensory acuity to notice how another person creates their reality can give you a real advantage. Mirroring their behaviour, body language, posture, breathing rate and language can create a state of rapport. Rapport makes selling easier.
Having a belief in your product and a willingness to get to know, and serve, your customers can make creating rapport a natural process. My advice is to be honest, open and authentic. Obviously my ability to do this has been improved by my (eventual) understanding of the building blocks of the human experience. The influential language patterns, that I have found so effective, have led me to an understanding that all of us can have an experience of happiness, and success, with little effort. But it does require a profound understanding of how people think.
NLP allows people to control their focus; Focussing on our customers gets us better results than focusing on ourselves. Worrying about making the sale, or how we might be perceived, gets in the way of full and open communication. I create a ‘detachment to outcome’. I obviously want to make a sale, but I drop my attachment to that outcome. Instead I have a commitment; to develop a relationship that enables my prospect to make an informed decision. A ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ are both acceptable answers, because I am just developing a friendship not trying to pressure them into anything. People buy feelings. You can nurture their feelings; unless you are thinking of your own Steve Dickinson is a trainer, coach and speaker at Dickinson Coaching – to find out more about NLP and how it can help you, please contact him on 07866 765693.
