Tag Archives: Sales Skills

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.

Powerful Memories to Increase Public Speaking Skills and Obliterate Fear

I was talking to a friend the other day; actually I interrupted my friend the other day is a more accurate way of putting it. He was reading a book about public speaking, and how to overcome the fear of public speaking. He had recently been promoted at his work, and he was going to have to do a lot of traveling to other divisions, and meet with large groups of potential clients. He was going to have to speak in front of some very large groups, so he was a bit worried about overcome his fear of public speaking. He actually had a stack of books he was working on. It seems he was kind of worried that his new promotion would take him places that he wasn’t quite ready to go.

I can recall another friend from a few years ago that was in a similar situation. He was always getting promoted at work, and he was always learning new skills. From public speaking, to sales, to negotiation, he was always making himself more valuable to the company. He would always invest at least twenty percent of his salary in himself, from books to seminars to self-improvement programs. And he always reaped fantastic rewards. He was telling me about a particular useful tool that he used, which was a memory-improving product.

He explained to me about emotional memory, and how the history of any human is so incredibly rich and powerful and so completely overstuffed with memories that we can choose anything we want to create in the future, and look back into the past to find an appropriate memory. The cool thing about the human brain is that it can apply almost any memory to any situation. Memories don’t really have any particular meaning except the meaning that we give to them. And the cool thing is that we can give the same memory different meanings depending on how you’d like to project yourself into the future.

For example, I’m sure as you sit there, reading this, you can bring to mind some memories from the past. Maybe from yesterday, or maybe from a year ago. And some of those memories that you are remembering now can be helpful, while others will cause a certain amount of anxiety. And if you can just take all those memories that cause some anxiety, and put them aside, you can free your mind up to bring to bear all the memories that give you feelings of pleasure and happiness.

Like that one time, a while ago, where that one thing happened that was particularly pleasant. Maybe you were planning on it happening, maybe it happened spontaneously. Either way, as you bring it to mind now, you can start to see what happens when you project it into the future. And whether or not you can close your eyes and think of that is not really important. What’s important I that you can begin to realize that you can recall any memory from your past that you want, and deliver it to your future, so when you get there, it will be waiting for you.

But emotional memory wasn’t even the main gist of the program my friend had so successfully used. It was more of a technical memory program that taught how to easily remember complex sets of facts and information, so when you needed to present them to a large group of people, you would not only be able to feel extremely comfortable giving a speech in public, but you would be persuasive as well, which could naturally increase your ability to sell and make lots of money.

How to Remove Public Speaking Fear and Skyrocket Your Sales Skills

If you are in sales, any kind of sales, there is one skill you can learn that will have a powerful effect on all your other skills for selling. And when you realize in almost every interaction you have with others, you are selling something at some level. An idea, your point of view, a behavior that you want others to perform. Whether you are going to convince that gorgeous woman to come over to your place for dinner, or persuade your kids to finish their homework before watching TV, you are selling something.

And there is one powerful skill that can dramatically help you in all aspects of this. That, of course, is public speaking. I’m sure you know that public speaking is the number one fear of people today. Almost everybody dreads the idea of being called up to speak. If you’ve ever had to give a toast, or even introduce somebody to large group of people, you know how nerve wracking it can be. Overcoming public speaking fear can be the singularly most beneficial decision you can make. It will increase your self-confidence, increase your self-esteem, and give you much more clarity of thought when choosing your words during normal, every day conversations.

And if you are in an honest to goodness sales job, where you have to put yourself in front of people day in and day out, overcoming the anxiety of public speaking can do wonders for your closing ratio. It’s a well-known fact that giving talks on a regular basis, regardless of what business you are in can do wonders for your income.

So how does one go about reducing public speaking fears? How can you banish public speaking anxiety once and for all? There are two ways to approach this. One is through various forms of mental imagery and visualization, training your brain to think of speaking in a different way, so it doesn’t cause you the anxiety that it might have before. These can be a wonderful way to make it feel easy and natural to not only feel comfortable giving public speeches, but to look forward to doing them as well.

One way to do this is to imagine the feeling you will get when you finish your speech, and you can hear the applause of the audience. Really get a good picture in your mind of what that looks like, sounds like, and feels like. Practice imagining that on a regular basis, until that thought becomes second nature, and not whatever thought you used to think that gave you the problems.

Another mental trick is to imagine the benefit the audience will receive from your speech. How will it help them? How can they use the information? When you think in terms of this, you will be less likely to imagine them judging and scrutinizing you, and more likely to imagine them thankful to you for doing them favor by sharing your unique information with them.

The second way of extinguishing your public speaking anxiety once and for all is to simply speak as often as possible. Every time you think of speaking, and grow anxious, and then get out of speaking, it reinforces the thought that public speaking is dangerous. When you begin to speak in public as often as possible, anywhere were there are people within earshot that don’t know you, you will gain confidence. Anywhere you can do this will work. Talking to strangers in line at the supermarket, making an announcement at the dinner table at home, if you have a large family, volunteering at your church. Toastmaster is a great place to practice these skills in a friendly, supportive environment.

When you combine the mental tricks outlined above, and the habit of speaking as often as possible, any fear or anxiety you have associated with public speaking will quickly vanish, and your skills of selling and persuading will skyrocket, not to mention your self-confidence and self-esteem. Learning to feel comfortable while speaking in public can very well be one of the greatest, and cheapest, self improvement and self-development programs at your disposal.