Category Archives: Covert Persuasion

How To Exploit Glitches In The System For Fun And Profit

Nice To Meet You

So the other day I was out on my morning walk, (so I guess I should say the other morning) when I bumped into this old guy that I hadn’t seen before. He was some old guy that I see downtown sometimes. At first I didn’t recognize him, because he wasn’t wearing his downtown clothes. So I had to go through that momentary transderivational search when the brain pretty much freezes all forward progress and searches it’s database for the relevant information.

I was once on this university campus when me and a friend were having fun seeing how long of a transderivational search we could induce in people. The brain is incredibly fast when coming up with information, but sometimes it gets stuck momentarily.

For example, if you grab a bottle of clear liquid, that you think is water, from the fridge after a hard workout, and upon taking a huge gulp find out that it’s vodka, your brain will spend maybe half a second freezing and trying to figure out what in the hell is going on. Opening up the fridge is automatic. Drinking water when you are thirsty is automatic. Your whole mind/body system is in pure automatic water drinking mode, so when you chug down the vodka, your brain has to momentarily stop all processes until it figures out what in the world is going on. It may even take you a few seconds to realize it’s vodka, and not gasoline or battery acid.

Compare that to sitting in a bar and ordering a shot of vodka. You see it coming, so naturally there is no disruption. This actually happened to me once. I was in a restaurant, and I ordered a scotch on the rocks. My girlfriend got some kind of mixed drink or something. The waitress brought us each a glass of ice water. Or what I thought was ice water. I took a big gulp of what I thought was ice water, and almost upchucked on the table. She had mixed up my order, and brought me a glass of straight gin on the rocks.

So at this university, I borrowed a stapler from some girl working in the student center. A friend and I were putting up some flyers. When I returned the stapler, I gave her a ballpoint pen instead. But when I gave it to her, I said, “Thanks, here’s your stapler,” and handed her the pen. Her face froze for about half a second until she realized what had been going on. It’s pretty interesting when you do this to somebody on purpose. Their face immediately loses all expression, and their pupils dilate briefly as their brain diverts thinking resources to try and make sense of what is going on. The brain loves to run on autopilot whenever possible, so throwing a monkey wrench in there tends to mess things up.

There was this guy named Milton Erickson. He invented a kind of conversational hypnosis that he used in therapy on people. The cool thing about Dr. Erickson was that he would go out and experiment on people. Not conk them on the head the take out their organs experiment, but what up to them and do goofy things like giving them pens instead of staplers and see how they’d respond.

One of the things he invented was called a double bind. You give somebody two choices, so they think they are retaining their free will (this is important to humans) but in reality the choice is pretty much the same. He would say things like “Do you want to shake hands with your left or your right hand?” People would think and say “right hand.” They would realize that he was pretty much forcing them to shake hands. Of course, you can go too far with this. He would walk up to people and say, “Do you want to give me five dollars or ten?” In which case people would laugh and walk away.

Another thing he invented was the handshake interrupt. Maybe you’ve heard of this. A handshake is one of those things that is automatic, and takes up a significant portion of brain processing power. The physical part about shaking somebody’s hand is automatic, but at the same time you are gearing up to hear a person’s name for the first time, and give yours. There is actually a lot involved.
So you have this automatic process that involves receiving information, usually without question, from the other person. You are not likely to question another person’s name, but at the same time, it is new information, so it puts the brain in a particularly vulnerable position. Which Dr. Erickson learned to exploit.

He would walk up to somebody, stick out his hand and say “Hi, I’m Milton, nice to meet….” And then he would suddenly change into a completely unexpected behavior, right at the point when the other person’s brain was open. He would take their hand, and quickly turn it around so the person was looking at their own palm. Then he would give them a few simple commands that would slip into their open to receive brains.

Now, when he started, he was nervous and unsure, which other people picked up on, and so it didn’t work so well. But when he practiced it and got better, he would do the hand in the face part just as natural as the handshake part, and people would go along with it.

So he’d walk up to somebody, say “Hi my name is Dr. Erickson, nice to….(put the other guys palm facing him)… and as you look at this you can think of all those things that make you feel that certain way…ways that make you wonder how many different things you can discover, now, that will allow you to feel those really good feelings, standing, there, thinking those thoughts…” And then he would simply walk away, leaving the guy looking at his hand. Usually about ten or fifteen seconds later, the guy would snap out of it, and look around, wondering what in the world just happened.

And when I finally realized who the old guy was, I greeted him accordingly. I asked him what he was doing in this neck of the woods, and not downtown where he is supposed to be. He said that he was visiting his grandkids, who live two houses down from mine. He had enough of their screaming and was out trying to clear his head. It’s good to do that sometimes.

Lessons From An End Of The World Marketing Genius

Do You Really Know What You Are Getting Into?

I was hanging out downtown the other day, and ran into this particularly strange character. He was one of those guys that have the big signs warning of the impending end of the world. Sometimes his sign will say “The End is Near,” and or other similar messages. Sometimes though, his signs don’t make any sense whatsoever. Like the other day he had a sign that said “They are aware of all of what you think you don’t know,” which I had to read a couple times before I realized it really didn’t make any sense.

So naturally, being the curious guy that I am, I went and asked him. I was kind of half expecting him to be a complete nutcase, and give me some wild reason that masked his complete and utter detachment from reality. But what I got was something altogether different.

It was kind of like that time when I was a kid back in boy scouts. Our troop would go on these yearly hikes. They were about fifty miles, and took about a week. To make sure we were all up to snuff, we would have to go on three “qualifying” hikes prior to the big one. There would be five successive weekends where we would the troop would leave early Saturday morning, hike for eight or so miles, camp out, and then return on Sunday. You had to go on three of these five in order to go on the long one. The scoutmasters that went along didn’t want to be stuck carrying some kid’s stuff because he couldn’t carry it himself.

That had happened a couple years before. They didn’t have the three-trip rule, and just went straight away into the weeklong hike. There was this one kid that joined up, and his mom assured the scoutmaster that he would be able to handle it. After about two miles in, everybody realized this kid should be anywhere but on a hiking trail with a thirty-pound pack.

The scoutmasters divided up his stuff until his pack was maybe five pounds. Even then he struggled. Hiking up hills in high elevation where the air is thin is not the easiest thing in the world, and this kid was proof. His mom had unloaded this kid on the troop to take care of him for a week, and the adults all had to unload him of his stuff. And the rest of us kids had to pretend to be nice to him while we walked slower than normal so he wouldn’t be left behind. Talk about a burden.

I read this book once that was talking about business success. It said that the most successful people are one’s that are able to carry their own weight, as well as offering something to the organization. There is a certain winning combination. It gave several examples of different job interviews, and some of the answers people gave. Several of the unsuccessful candidates were keen to find out things about the job like vacation time, benefits, how often they can get raises, and so on. Managers naturally weren’t to anxious to hire these people.

Others on the other hand were a little too much in the opposite direction. They were about how good they were, how many massive skills they had, and why they should be hired. Managers didn’t really like these people because they didn’t really take much of an interest in the particular organization. They seemed to have a one size fits all ego that expected the world to bow down in awe of its skills.

The ones that were the most successful were the ones that were confident in their abilities, and were able to elicit certain aspects of the business, and then explain to the interviewer how their particular skills would be of specific benefit to the company.

The conclusion of this book was that if you are ever interviewing for jobs, to first make a list of some skills you have, and keep a mental list of several examples of how you demonstrated those skills in the past. Then when you are in the interview, find out what kind of person they are looking for, and then give examples from your own past that show you are an obvious choice for the organization. Obviously it helps to do a little bit of research before going to the interview, but with the amazing amount of information at your disposal through the Internet, that should be fairly easy.

The bottom line is to not only know your skills, but be able to find several examples from your past, and be able figure out as many creative ways as possible to show how they are applicable to as many situations as you can. This will get you a lot further than showing up with your proverbial hat in your hand asking about benefits and vacation time.

After we finally made it back after what seemed like the longest week in backpacking history, we never saw that kid again. He was quiet all the way back, and after a few polite and subdued goodbye’s that was that. I did see our head scoutmaster having a word with his mom. It didn’t appear to be an angry exchange, but he did seem to be explaining several things to her, and she appeared to be listening as though she had made some kind of a mistake. She kept nodding her head in what looked like sincere appreciation.

Perhaps she didn’t pawn him off to the troop after all. Maybe she just misunderstood what she was getting her son into. Many people don’t have a good idea of what they are getting themselves into. Which is exactly why the troop instituted the three qualifying hike rule to make sure everybody knows what’s coming when we went on the week long fifty mile hike.

I have to admit, thinking back to those fifty-mile hikes, I had some of the best times of my childhood. Fishing in pristine lakes, being in huge beautiful valleys surrounded by snow capped mountains without any other people in sight except for my friends and me. Seeing bears and deer and all kinds of other animals in their natural habitat is something you don’t ever forget.

It turned out this guy was doing marketing experiments for a church. There was a certain church in the area, whose name he made me promise I wouldn’t repeat. They were testing different marketing slogans. It was a rather big church, a non-denominational Christian church, and they were always trying to expand their members. They hired this guy from an advertising company, and would come up with different slogans for his message board, and simply note people’s reactions.

He would measure their reactions by how often they did double takes, if they slowed down when they passed him, or if they came up and talked to him. He told me that so far, the message that had a positive spin had the most effect on people, with messages of imminent world destruction coming in a close second.

So if the marquee messages at your local church alternate between peace and love, and threats of eternal hell bound damnation, now you know why.

The Power Of Influence – Tool Or Weapon?

Do You Know When Your Strings Are Being Pulled?

There are two laws of influence that can be used in a particularly powerful combination. These two laws have been identified by Robert Cialdini in his bestselling book, “Influence, Science And Practice.” If you are interested in influence at all, and would like to either become better at it, or just to understand how pretty much everybody around you is using these techniques, you should read this book.

There is a vague belief that persuasion is kind of an “art,” and that people that are good at it are like musicians or painters who are born with some natural talent. But Dr. Cialdini has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that persuasion is indeed a science, rather than an art. A science that can be learned and applied either to benefit an individual, a company, or the leader of a nation.

There are several examples of how these principles of influence have been used without much concern for ethical considerations, but they still work nevertheless.

There is one fantastic example that comes to mind, which I’d like to share with you today. This was illustrated in “Influence.”

The first principle this involves is one of “commitment and consistency.” This is the idea that people are much more willing to do something if they have already publicly stated they will something, or have done something before that is similar.

A great Internet example is “click through.” If you visit a website of somebody trying to sell you something, you’ll likely have to click through several different pages to actually get to the point where you type in your credit card number. The reasoning behind this is people are much more likely to take the next step if they’ve already taken several previous steps.

If you land on some web page, and read some advertising text, and there is a button at the bottom that says “Buy Now!” The percentage of people that click on it is fairly low. But instead, if you shorten your sales page, and on the bottom is a button that says, “Click to Read More!” You’ll get much more people clicking through. Once you get visitors to click through three or four pages, they’ll be much more likely to click on a “Buy Now” button.

Another example is in jury trials. When they finish a trial, and the jury convenes they will often conduct a “straw vote” meaning that just give their first impression, guilty or not guilty, before the jury starts to discuss the case. Here’s the interesting part.

In jury deliberations where each juror publicly states, out loud, whether they feel the defendant is guilty or not guilty, the deliberations last more than twice as long as those where they jurors submit their initial guilty or innocent vote via anonymous slips of paper.

When people state their opinions out loud, they are much less likely to later change them. But when they submit their opinions in private, on an anonymous slip of paper, they later change their minds rather easily.

Another principle is one called scarcity. I’m sure you are well aware of this. Limited supply. Sale only lasts for two days. Only the first one hundred customers.

Study after study shows that people will give something a much higher value when they think it is scarce. A group of researchers did an experiment where they had people sample a cookie. In one case, they convinced the samplers that there were plenty of cookies, and the test would be going for quite a while, etc etc.

Then they told a different group of testers that the cookies were a limited batch, and it was a recipe that was only being tried out for a short period of time, and the testers were lucky to be in on the experiment. Keep in mind the testers or samplers were never sold anything, so there was no buying pressure.

The results? The samplers who were told there were many more cookies of the same kind gave it an average rating. The testers who were told that it was a small group of cookies, and they were a select group of testers gave it an excellent rating.

But they were the same exact cookie. Simply by telling people it was scarce, it made the cookie taste better.

Now for the powerful, Christmas time combination. I have no idea if this still happens today, but this story was illustrated in “Influence,” the book I mentioned previous.

There was a toy manufacturer. They made a toy, and put all kinds of TV commercials on, directed at little kids. They used all kinds of marketing tricks, mainly scarcity. Only a limited number of dolls made. Get yours today. Everybody wants this doll for Christmas.

Only when the parents went to the store to get the doll, they were all sold out. So they had to get a substitute gift for their kid. Then, a couple months after Christmas, they somehow found a hidden warehouse filled with these dolls. Of course, the kids saw this, told their parents, and their parents were pretty much obligated to buy the toy, as they had promised to buy it at Christmas but couldn’t find it.

Here’s how it works. Kid sees toy, bugs parent. Parents promises kid to buy them that particular toy. When buying time comes, toy isn’t available. Parent buys replacement gift. Two months later, toy reappears. Kid says, “But Daddy, you promised!” Daddy now has to go and buy gift.

Simply by manipulating the supply of the toys (scarcity) to increase demand, and depending on commitment and consistency (Daddy, you promised!) the toy company was able to double it’s Christmas sales. They sold a slew of replacement gifts (jacked up in price because of daddy’s guilt for not finding the promised toy) and then again a couple months later, when the original gift magically appeared, they had an increase in sales when all their competitor were suffering from a post Christmas slump

The beauty (or evilness, depending on how you look at it) of a plan like this is that this is almost impossible to defend against. What parent is going to tell their child they can’t have what the TV has said every other kid is getting? What parent is going to break a promise to their kid?

Everywhere you look, there are advertisements developed by companies who know and apply these principles on a daily basis. It helps to understand these principles so that you can use them yourself (in an ethical, win win scenario, of course) and to defend against them when they are used against you.

The Paradox Of Choice

Which Do You Choose?

Which would you rather have, a big juicy hamburger, or a cracker with some peanut butter slapped on top? How about a nice two-week relaxing vacation on the beaches of Hawaii versus a free coupon worth on rental from your local video store? Or how about a date with Megan Fox compared to that homeless woman you saw the other day?

These may seem like obviously easy choices. But what about these:

You are standing next to the train tracks. There is a split right where you are standing. There is a train coming. As it stands, the strain is going to veer left. You have access to a switch that can make the train veer right if you flip the switch.
You notice there is a stranded bus filled with school kids on the tracks to the left. If the train continues on its course, it will hit the bus and kill the kids. But to the right, there is one fat guy working on the tracks. If you throw the switch to change tracks, the train will avoid the kids, but it will kill he fat guy.

What do you do?

If you do nothing, a busload of kids will die. If you throw the switch, you will save the kids, but you will be directly responsible for killing some fat guy.

Or how about this:

There is a boatload of kids drifting down a river, about to plunge off a waterfall. You are standing on a bridge. There is the same fat guy walking across the bridge. If you run up and push the fat guy off the bridge, he will hit the boat and diverge it from the waterfall, and save the kids.

What do you do?

Many people polled in various studies would pull the switch in the first scenario, as they see it as an act of saving the kids. But few people would actually run up and push the fat guy off the bridge.

Why?

They (those they people again) did a study where they took some students and had them stick their hands in a bucket of water, and then guess the temperature. Then they had the same students stick their same hands in the same water, but at the same time, they had them stick their other hands in another bucket of water, that was either really hot or really cold. When the other bucket was really hot, they underestimated the temperature of the test bucket. When the water was really cold, they overestimated the temperature of the test bucket.

Or how about this. It is not uncommon for real estate agents to show a potential client a really crappy house in a really crappy neighborhood that is within their stated price range. Then they show them another much better house, in a much better neighborhood that is priced slightly higher than their stated price range.

They’ve found that this works really well to convince them to increase their price limits. By showing them the first house (which is owned and maintained by the real estate company) they effectively make the second house look like a bargain.

Restaurants have also found this trick works really well when selling wine. If they have a bottle (or several bottles) they are trying to unload at, say, fifty dollars a bottle, the wine won’t sell very well if it is the most expensive bottle they have. But they’ve found by adding another bottle, priced at seventy five to a hundred dollars, they increase sales of the fifty dollar bottle significantly. It looks better in comparison.

Our brains don’t’ like to choose in a vacuum. We need to have something to compare our choices to. If the choice is only to buy a bottle of wine or not, we usually will choose not. But if it’s an expensive bottle or a cheaper bottle, we’ll choose the cheaper bottle.

This is a known psychological trick that has been used in sales for many years. We like to feel like we have a choice, like we are smart enough to evaluate those choices and make the best decision that we can. But our short hand thinking process can easily be hijacked by marketers who want to sell us something that we really don’t need.

There is one simple rule to avoid being duped. Simply know going in, before being presented with choices, what is important to you, what price you are willing to spend, and what options you want. And compare everything you see only to your list of options and your acceptable price.

Of course, if you are a marketer, and you are trying to sell something, say online, it would help dramatically to include something similar that is priced significantly higher. That way people will think the real item you have for sale is a bargain and they will be much more likely to buy it.

For example, if you run a product review page, and you are selling item “X” for fifty bucks, try and find a similar item, with only slightly better features, for two hundred bucks. Item “X” will seem like steal in comparison.

Another trick that has been proven very useful in this regard is to include only a little bit of information about the first, more expensive item, and then very detailed information about item “X.” That way, item “X” will not only seem cheaper by comparison, but your potential buyers will feel much more informed, and feel they are making a wise buying decision.

Happy marketing, and don’t push any fat guys off any bridges.

Sales And Seduction Tips From Milton Erickson

What The Creator of Conversational Hypnosis Can Teach us About Sales And Seduction

Every time you open your mouth, you have an intention. Whether this intention is conscious or not, planned or not, automatic or not, realized by you or not, this intention is there. Perhaps if somebody asks you the time, your intention is to behave in a socially appropriate manner without drawing undue attention to yourself.

If a homeless person walks up to you and asks for change, your intention is likely to end the uncomfortable conversation as quickly and painlessly as possible. For some this means to ignore him. For some it means giving him a dollar. For some it means an automatic physical altercation. As politically incorrect as it sounds, unless you set out specifically to volunteer in a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter, most people feel uncomfortable (for many, many different reasons) when approached by a homeless person asking for change.

If you are a guy, and you approach an attractive girl in a bar, your intention is likely to get her to like you, and perhaps more.

Most of these intentions are extremely vague, and largely unconscious. Very rarely do we stop and plan an outcome when somebody stops us on the street to ask us for directions or the time. Even though our response is automatic, we are trying to achieve an outcome of maintaining safety. Our automatic responses are largely based on protection, or defense.

Even the guy approaching the girl in the bar, although he has a somewhat conscious intention of getting her to like him, he is still likely operating from a frame of protection at the same time. He would love to be able to walk up to her, be as open and expressive as possible, make her laugh, show her his stunning personality and conversation skills. However, most of us guys are terrified of the public shame that the rejection of our advances would bring. So we hedge our bets, so to speak. We engage, but protect at the same time. This can prove extremely difficult.

The same goes with salespeople. Rejection can be awfully painful, even for the most seasoned veterans. Many times they approach the prospect with the same mindset of the guy approaching the girl in the bar. They’d love to proclaim how wonderful their product is, and clearly suggest that the prospect buy the product, but many are afraid to do so. One main weakness of almost anybody who has even been in sales is an inability to simply ask for the sale.

Most sales people beat around the bush, hoping the prospect will come to the conclusion on their own to buy the product. This rarely works. As most prospects usually need a nudge in the right direction.

However, there is another way. Actually a couple of other ways. Well, actually, lots of other ways, but I will only talk briefly about two of them. These were all “invented” by Milton Erickson, the father of conversational hypnosis. He came up with all kinds of powerfully persuasive conversation tools to help people overcome large life issues in a relatively short amount of time.

These two are very powerful ones that you can go out and use today, in a bar, with a girl, or with a prospect, or with your friends.

One is an indirect way of asking for the sale. This requires you be pretty good at reading body language, and facial expressions. The way you do this is to use what’s called an embedded question. Whenever you present a question to somebody, they will answer it, either verbally or not. But when you embed it in a sentence, then they don’t feel the pressure to answer it openly. But their body language and facial expression will give them away. Here’s how:

Say you are selling cars. You’ve been on the test drive, and your back in the office with the customer. They are still there, and they’ve been paying attention to you so far. You haven’t started talking about actual finances yet. You are still discussing whether or not they liked the car. You can say:

“Well, I don’t know whether or not you want to buy this car today, but before we talk about any kind of financial issues, let me talk to you about the extended warranty.”

Watch closely as you say the “buy the car today” part. If they seem like they are about to have a heart attack, you should probably hold off on asking them to sign a contract. If they seem to show any positive response at all, you’re in pretty good shape.

Same goes with the girl in the bar. You could say:

“I know we’ve been only talking for twenty minutes, and I don’t know if you feel comfortable giving your phone number to a guy you just met, but I think it’s important to be open when meeting new people. You never know when you are going to find somebody that could turn into a lifelong friend.”

Again, pay attention to how she responds when you say, “giving your phone number.” If she briefly lights up like a Christmas tree, she’s been dying for you to ask, and she’s into you. Proceed, and get her number. If she steps back and puts her hand protectively over her throat, you should politely excuse yourself.

That’s the “embedded question” method, and can be very powerful in testing how you are doing.

The other way is a bit more aggressive, and can be used by itself, or after you’ve successfully tested for a close. This trick is called the double bind. It involves giving them the illusion of a choice, when in actuality, both choices are the same thing.

For example, with the car example, you could say (as you pull out the contract):

“So were you going to use your current car as a trade in, or did you just want to make a down payment?” Either way they answer, it presupposes they are going to buy the car. This is, of course tough to do on a big-ticket item like a car. It can work better with smaller issues. You can use this for every part of the sales process, when you want to escalate to the next level.

“So did you want to test drive a blue one, or a red one?”
“So were you going to finance through us, or your own bank?”
“Would you rather test drive before or after we talk about financing?”

This works really well with phone sales when setting up appointments:

“I am going to be in your neighborhood next week, would Tuesday at 4:00 PM be OK, or is Thursday at 6:30 better?”

And you can also use it on the girl whose number you got:

“Say this is George from the other night, we talked at Flankies. I enjoyed our conversation, and I’d like to see you again, for a cup of coffee. Which is easier for you, Tuesday evening at 8:00, or Thursday at 9:30?”

You can use both of these together for a powerful increase in your closing percentage. Test their “buying temperature” with the embedded question, and then “close” them with the double bind. You’ll be amazed at your results.

NLP Techniques And Powerful Sales Tips

How You Can Use NLP Techniques Today To Easily Make More Money

If you’ve ever bought something, or sold anything, or used anything that was either bought or sold, then you are aware of the incredibly massive flow of money that surrounds sales. Every single day millions upon millions of people buy stuff that they need, stuff they want, and stuff they may never even use.

And in many of those cases, there is a salesperson making a commission on the sale. It could be a face-to-face sale, it could be a sale made over the phone; it could be an affiliate sale over the Internet. No matter how you slice it, every day billions of dollars change hands.

Ever since Krosus of Persia came up with the idea of coins, the world has never been the same. You could earn this magical thing called money through your efforts, and with this called money, you could buy pretty much whatever you wanted.

Indeed, historians have noted that the first two industries that popped up soon after Krosus’ coins were casinos and houses of ill repute. The world’s oldest profession is twofold.

And in every transaction, everybody is making their cut. Here in Japan, if you want to go down to the Kimono shop and buy yourself a decent silk kimono, you’re gonna be set back at least ten thousand dollars. That is a prime example of everybody getting a piece of the pie.

Starting with the silk worm, the silk is somehow transformed into a piece of cloth, then dyed, then cut, then carefully stitched together into an exquisite pattern, then sold by a happy shopkeeper to a happy customer for ten thousand dollars, or more. And every step along the way, somebody is getting paid. A lot.

So how do you get your piece of the pie? How do you get in the game and get paid, just like everybody else? Learn to sell. And believe it or not, that is much easier than it sounds. People have been buying and selling for hundreds of thousands of years. Even other animals use a form of barter. The bee pollinates the flower in exchange for the raw material to make honey. The bee doesn’t give a whit about the survival of the particular species of flower, and the flower isn’t concerned with how the bee is going to use its nectar.

But nature has provided them the basis for a mutually agreeable business relationship. All that is required is that each participant holds up its end of the bargain.

And therein lies the biggest roadblock to selling. Whenever we humans we a salesperson, we are immediately on guard. We sometimes feel as if they are trying to con us out of our hard earned dollars. So we have this resistance. Once that resistance is overcome, our natural inclination of buying and selling can flourish.

How is that done? Through the art of rapport. When you build rapport with a client, they will trust you with their money. They will trust your opinion and recommendations, and they will likely buy from you.

How do you create rapport? Many sales techniques will teach you to make small talk, find areas of similarity, and compliment them on their shirt or their watch. Use their name several times in the conversation. While this may work it is not nearly as powerful (or as easy) as rapport building techniques taught in NLP.

How do you do this? By simply noticing their model of the world, and matching it as much as you possibly can. This starts with matching their body language. If they are crossing their legs, you cross yours. If they scratch their nose, you scratch your cheek. If they take a deep breath and lean back, you do the same.

If they speak slowly, so do you. If they put extra emphasis on certain words, you do the same. And never, ever paraphrase. Nothing kills rapport faster than paraphrasing. Especially if they are using words that are vague. For example, if they say they are interested in “safety,” don’t change their word to “protection.” These may be two completely different words with two completely different meanings in their mind.

If they say “I want a car that will provide safety to my family,” they key phrase is “..provide safety to my family.” The only change you should make is changing the “my” to “your” when you feed it back to them. So when you are describing your best model:” And another thing people really like about this car is that it provides safety to your family.”

It can take time to master this, because you have to let go of your fears and ego and get out of your head and actually pay attention to the person you are talking to. But just like with any other skill, the more you practice, the better you’ll get.

When you can sit down with a client, and match their world, they will feel at a deep level that you really understand them, and their needs. And you will able to sell them almost anything.

Of course it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyways, that you should never ever sell something to somebody that they really don’t need or want, or isn’t in their best interests. This will create all kinds of bad karma that will come back to haunt you, in some way.

One way around this, and something salespeople don’t usually think about, is referrals. If you have a client in front of you that you have developed considerable rapport with, and you honestly don’t have a product that suits them, or your services just aren’t right for them, be the first to acknowledge that. Most people have a hard time saying no. When you, as a salesperson, tell your client that you really can’t help them, and even provide them with some alternatives, you will create a huge amount of trust, and respect. And that usually means a ton of referrals.

In sales, trust and respect will earn you more money than you can possibly imagine. If you focus on earning trust and respect through rapport, then the money (and the honey) will inevitably follow.

How To Use Neurolinguistic Programming To Maximize Your Sales Skills

If you’ve ever heard of neurolinguistic programming, then you know that it is an incredibly powerful tool to be used in almost any area of life, from almost any perspective.

Many people are aware of neurolinguistic programming, or NLP, as a tool for persuasion in both sales and seduction. Many sales techniques employ NLP to increase sales and income for astute salespeople, and others use it to improve their dating skills.

One of the often passed over areas of NLP is the method through which it was discovered itself. The word ‘discovered’ isn’t quite the right term, nor is invented, or created or any other terms that are used to describe a new technology.

The reason this is so is that NLP is not new technology at all. It is a collection of many techniques that were modeled and codified from people that were “natural’s” in there respective fields.

Many times people will look at somebody that is naturally persuasive, or naturally charismatic and say “Oh, look! He’s using NLP! I wonder where he studied?” usually the person in question is not using NLP at all, at least not to their knowledge. They really are a “natural.”

A natural is anybody that is skilled in on area. Salespeople, public speakers, and guys that are wildly successful with seducing women. Most of these people have no idea that they are using “NLP.” They just do what comes “natural” to them, and it gets them massive success in their field.

History is filled with people that use skills that are “taught” in NLP, even though they existed thousands of years ago. One good example is the letters of St. Paul. In case you’ve never heard of St. Paul, he a was this guy who used to be named Saul, then he had a vision of Jesus one day. At the time, Saul was against the rising cult of Christianity, and persecuted them every chance he got. When he saw Christ in a vision, he quickly changed his tune, and became a champion of Christianity.

He traveled to all of the Christian communities made it his life mission to spread Christianity. If any of his letters are an indication, he was a powerfully persuasive speaker. And his oration, if it was anything like his writing style, contained many elements taught in NLP.

Where the idea of NLP came into play was through the area of “modeling,” one of NLP’s most overlooked but perhaps most powerful application. Everybody wants to know the right patterns, the correct vocal inflections, how exactly to read people.

Having decent modeling skills is much more powerful. With modeling skills you have the ability to learn anything, from anybody, and apply in your own area of choice. You don’t even have to model all the characteristics of the person you are modeling, only the one’s you’d like to use for yourself.

The secret to modeling is to model everything about the person you are modeling What are they doing, how are they doing it, what do they believe about their own skills, how do they prepare themselves mentally for what they are doing.

For example, if you were to model Tiger Woods, you’d need to first model your body after his as closely as possible. Muscle strength, muscle flexibility, body fat percentage, etc. Then you’d have to model his technique as closely as possible. Exactly how far back he swings, his weight distribution on his feet as he hits the ball, the exact force with which he smashes the ball a million yards down the center of the fairway.

But you couldn’t stop there. You would next need to model his mindset, his beliefs, and his self-talk. What does he say to himself about his skills? What exactly does he visualize before he shoots? Does he get any physical sensations in his body while he is visualizing? If so where?

Most people (myself included) only get as far as holding a club and swinging it clumsily at a ball before declaring that they suck at golf.

One mistake many make when modeling is by asking somebody questions that they can’t answer. For example, lets say you want to model a fantastic salesperson at your company. So you ask them, “why are you such a good salesperson?”

If you’re lucky, they became a good salesperson because they studied sales technique after sales technique, tried them in different scenarios, kept the ones that worked, and improved on them while discarding the one’s that didn’t. They can then share with you the precise methods they studied, how they practiced, what exercises and drills they did to get to where they are.

Unfortunately, most people that are good in sales are just naturally good in sales. And they likely have no idea why they are good in sales. So you’ll get an answer like “Well, when I was a kid I always like mowing other people’s lawns and got really interested in figuring out how to make money, I guess.”

Not very helpful.

Better, more in depth questions would be:

How do you feel when you sell?
What do you say to yourself when you sell?
How do you feel when you don’t get a sale?
What do you say to yourself when you don’t get a sale?
What kinds of things do you visualize just before you meet a prospect?
What happens when a prospect has objections? What do you think, feel, and say to yourself?
How do you feel about our prospects as you are talking to them?
How do you feel about the product you are selling?

These are just a few of the questions that will help you to model somebody and be able to improve your skills.

All humans are natural modelers. Everything we learned, we learned from modeling. We learned to walk and talk by watching and copying others. We learned our ideas, beliefs and models of the world by looking at the adults as we grew up and simply copied them.

It would be fantastic if the top salesperson at your company would let you follow him around for a few months until you were selling as good as he was, but that isn’t likely.

As adults, we need to model consciously as well as unconsciously. One way is through a relaxed visualization. Take the top salesperson as an example. Say he or she let you tag along with them on a few sales. You just sat back and watched them in action.

Then later, you can relax, close your eyes, and visualize them making a sale. Then slowly replace yourself for them in your visualization. Do this a few times, and let your unconscious learn from them how to sell. This is a particularly powerful method, and when combined with asking them the right questions, you can dramatically improve your skills. When you add in learning proven methods from other materials, you can safely assure yourself of massive success.

NLP Tips For Covert Persuasion

If you are in sales, or if you’d like to be able to covertly persuade somebody, this will give you some useful NLP based sales tips that you can go out and use today. They are fairly straightforward, easy to learn, and extremely powerful.

There based on a couple of ideas. The first is anchoring, or in this particular case, spatial anchoring. Anchoring was first discovered by Pavlov, who was doing some other experiments. He was measuring the saliva from dogs, as they got ready to eat. He would ring the bell, and the dogs would come, and they would eat. He noticed that just by ringing the bell, the dogs would salivate, whether or not the food was actually there or not.

He took an automatic physiological response, and transferred it from its natural trigger, the food, and moved it to a new trigger, the bell. Effectively setting an anchor in the rigging of the bell that would not cause the same automatic physiological response as the food.

This works just as well in humans. If you fall in love with your third grade teacher, and she happens to have red hair, some of that feeling you had for her will be transferred to red hair. So now, twenty years later, you’ll have an automatic unconscious emotional response to women with red hair, and not likely have any idea why.

This happens all the time naturally, and in NLP you learn to use it consciously to influence the emotional responses of others.

The first step is to elicit the response that you’d like. The more specific response, the more complicated and involved it will be. It’s a lot easier to elicit a response for general happiness than it is for that feeling you get just before you sign the deed for your new house.

What you can do is to elicit a response for happiness, anchor it spatially, and then take that and anchor it to the action or thought you’d like them to have, with happiness.

A spatial anchor is just a visual cue that they can see. In Pavlov’s case, he had created an auditory anchor. You can also create a kinesthetic, or touch, anchor, but that requires a deep level of rapport. If you are a salesperson, you probably won’t be able to get away with touching your clients on the shoulder or knee repeatedly.

A simple way to do this is to use your left hand for bad, and you right hand for good. Whenever the client is talking about something unpleasant, listen intently, and describe whatever it was back to them, as exactly as you can, and while they say something like “oh yea, that’s terrible,” or whatever, simple hold your left hand out to the side just like you normally would.

Similarly, get them talking about something good. Anything. It doesn’t have to be related in any way to what you will be persuading them to do later. Just do the same thing, only this time gesture with your right hand whenever you are feeding them back their words to elicit their “good” feeling.

After a few minutes of seemingly casual conversation, you should have a strong anchor for “bad” in your left hand, and a strong anchor for “good” in your right hand. Now it’s time to go to work.

Whenever you make a suggestion you’d like them to take, gesture with your right hand. Whenever you talk about something they might do that you don’t want, use your left hand. Shopping around, waiting to make a decision, anything regarding your competitor goes on the left. Buying your product, enjoying your product, telling all their friends about your product, your idea, whatever, goes in your right hand.

This one simple trick will put you light years ahead of everybody else when it comes to persuasion. It will be like having two secret buttons inside your clients mind, one for good feelings, and one for bad feelings. Of course, it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: This is very powerful, and could easily be misused to convince people to do something against their will.

Some, I repeat, some, politicians are very good at this. In the debate with Senator Dole, then President Clinton used this extremely effectively. Of course he was not in one to one conversation, so he had to kind of “guess” at things to say that would evoke good feelings and bad feelings. Whenever he said things he assumed would evoke good feelings? He covertly pointed at himself. Bad things? You guessed it. He covertly pointed at his opponent, who didn’t stand a chance.

Do you think that may be the reason he had such popular support, despite all his transgressions? He was, and is, a master of persuasion. This may even be one of the reasons why they sent him, instead of somebody else, who actually worked in the current administration, to North Korea to free those two journalists.

Now that you know this powerful technique, it’s kind of fun to watch politicians give speeches, and to see if their gestures match up with their words, or if they are just random hands flying around. You’ll find that most politicians don’t have a clue, despite having the best advisors and public image coaches in the world.

Their hands fly all over the place with no discernable match between good feelings, and bad feelings. Many times they use the same gestures for good stuff, and for bad stuff, effectively shooting themselves in the foot.

When you can match your gestures with your message, and be consistent and congruent, you can be easily be more persuasive than the world’s most powerful politicians.

I’m sure you can think of some uses for these new skills.