7 Skills for Ongoing Sales Success

How the skills learned in NLP can be incorporated and applied in business…

When people hear NLP for the first time they tend to imagine some ‘new age’ fuzzy fluffy thing. NLP is a methodology. It is a group of skills and tools that we all use all of the time, just most of it is done unconsciously.

NLP methodolgy has been developed over years of studying very successful people and working out what they do, how they do it and then packaging it in such a way that we can do it too.

In order to facilitate a long term and steady sales increase you must have a clear understanding of your customers’ needs, thus enabling you to match your product to their needs seamlessly. By applying the skills learnt in NLP you are able to achieve the required understanding quickly and easily, and as a result you can reduce ‘sales’ resistance and achieve sales growth.

Select the Right Mood (1 – State Control)

If you want your customers to believe in you and your product/service, you need to present yourself in a positive, confident manner. If you are having a bad day and you take those emotions into the sales pitch, you are unlikely to clinch the deal.

You need to be remembered as the confident happy person not ‘that miserable guy!’ Your mood will, and does, make or break the sale. Just think who would you like to buy from?

Build Trust (2 – Rapport Building)

In general, people will buy from those who they like and trust. You may have the perfect product at just the right price, but if they don’t like you then they are unlikely to buy.

Paying attention to your customer and making them feel comfortable is an important step in being able to build and maintain the right communication which will result in the sale that you want.

Listen to your Customer (3 – Meta Model)

It may seem like a no-brainer, but really listening to your customer to find out what their needs, limitations, beliefs and desires are, is something that many people think they are doing. In fact they are constantly filling in blanks with their own interpretation of what the customer actually needs.

Being able to truly understand what your customer is after, requires you to be able to listen and clarify details from the customer’s perspective, rather than jumping to conclusions of your own.

The Clients View (4 – Representational Systems & 5 – Eye Accessing Cues)

Everybody has their own reality of the world, their own unique perspective. They see, hear and feel what goes on around them in a way that only they can truly understand.

By listening carefully to the wording they use and watching their eye movements you can pick up a general understanding of what is most important to them at that moment in time. Noticing whether it is the feel, the sight or the sound that they prefer allows you to seamlessly incorporate those factors in the relevant order as you are talking to them.

How does your client decide? (6 – Strategy Elicitation)

As you have gathered all the information above, you should also be able to work out what strategies your client uses.

Recognising the pattern your client uses to make a decision will enable you to more effectively adjust your sales pitch to answer any unconscious resistance they may have. If part of the clients strategy is to consult with his/her partner/boss/colleague and you exclude those people totally from your sales pitch, you are less likely to achieve your sale.

If you have recognised this you can invite them into the buying process at an early stage, saving you time and effort, and more importantly, confirming with your client that you understand their needs and are willing to accommodate them.

Persuasive Chatter (7 – Milton Model)

The art of persuasion requires you to be able to present the information you are trying to get across in a way that doesn’t meet with ‘sales’ resistance.

By taking what you have learnt from your client and incorporating that into your sales pitch with a certain level of ambiguity, you can encourage the customer to see the benefits for themselves, rather than you having to force-feed them your version of what you think they want, that may not suit them.

The experience then becomes a very personal and memorable one.