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NLP in Selling - at last some really cool ideasWhat has flying in an aeroplane to Iran got to do with overcoming the famous objection “that’s too expensive”. A lot in fact so let me begin. Before you start reading this article I’d like you to do something for me please. Next to the statements that appear below can you write down your first reaction. It doesn’t matter what that is, but it must be your initial thought. We’ll come back to this later in the article.
NLP is an enormous subject. It all began way back in the 1970’s and because of it’s viral nature, has spawned into many hundreds of applications today. Originally created by Bandler and Grinder, these two guys mastered a technique for modelling or copying what people did well so they could then teach this to anyone who chooses. Clever really, almost like a replication device you see on science fiction movies. Way back 30 years ago they used their new found technique to model psychiatrists and therapists and for many years focussed on these areas of use for NLP. However all was not lost in the sales area. Richard Bandler began to watch excellent sellers and published some wonderful books on Selling. Slightly heavy and they concentrate a lot on really subtle techniques. Tony Robbins rammed the subject into the mainstream and has taken sales applications to the next generation. Kerry Johnson is another good NLP and sales author. His books are also worth a read. The use of NLP in sales has matured recently and is being much more accepted by sales forces. I’ve coined the phrase Rapport Selling and use this widely to describe techniques that help sales using NLP. There’s a lot to it and this article will help you appreciate where it all begins. A whistle stop tour of what NLP is all about, some of the theories and how they can be used to make your selling more effective. We’ll be having a look at communicating and NLP and your ability to put yourself into the background and focus totally on your customer and their needs. Adapting your selling to suit them, having an understanding how they may think and act and taking your selling skills to the next level. Let’s start with the basics of traditional communication. I’m no
Luddite, but I want to get away from mobile phones, email, web cams
and the like and focus our attentions on face to face selling. So what do we use when selling to people? We use the 3 Vs – visual methods, vocal usage and verbal words to make some sense. We all use these three methods in our face to face meetings and lots of research has tried to categorise which is most important. The consensus puts visual first, vocal second and verbal – the words themselves – way down the pecking order. Which is actually very true. Visual or body language in any culture dominates selling. People are influenced by first impressions and the way we look and behave visually. I like to quote the 90:90 rule – during the first 90 seconds of meeting someone face to face you’ll develop an impression that will last the test of time, or at least 90% of that impression will last. In selling this is so important. Get it right in the first couple of minutes and the rest may well be plain sailing. Get it wrong and you’re on an upward struggle to regain the customer’s confidence. The vocal side shouldn’t be underestimated either. Just by the way we say something will determine how your client accepts the words. People’s voices bristle with tonality, pace and volume which all contribute to a message. When I get home from my business trip my wife will greet me at the front door and just by the way she says my name, I will know what kind of mood she’ll be in. My wife is brilliant at seeing whether I’m telling the truth just by the way I say things. Scary. The words themselves can be so misinterpreted. I recall a true story based in the 1950’s in London. On a smoggy night two likely lads had robbed a warehouse in the East End of London. Not particularly good at the robbing game they were soon tailed by a policeman who followed them up to the top of a warehouse building and cornered them successfully. Derek Bentley was reported to have said to his accomplice who had the gun to “let him have it”. I guess Chris, having watched too many westerns at the cinema, understood his good friend and promptly shot the policeman dead. Later in the Crown Court, the prosecution successfully tried and hung Derek for being the cause of the murder by influencing Chris to kill the policeman. The defence unsuccessfully tried to convince the jury that the words “let him have it” meant to give him the gun. Derek was hung shortly afterwards. Chris survived because he was a juvenile. Early this century Derek’s relations successfully had him posthumously pardoned, so maybe sense prevailed. So for salespeople like ourselves, we must remember that selling is not just about words, benefits, features and the like, but the way we say them, the way we look and act and deliver the words. The way we smile and build a rapport, the way we gain trust in the first 90 seconds. And this is a major cornerstone of what Rapport Selling is all about. We know that to sell to someone we must use all three methods –
visual, vocal and verbal – but the million dollar question is what
stops our message from getting through? Let go back to the little bit of work I asked you to do at the beginning of this article. What did you put down for red hair? Was it fiery, excitable, short tempered? What about someone who can’t look you in the eye? Was it sheepish, untrustworthy, or some other negative reaction. It doesn’t matter – the point is that all of us, including myself, have pre-conceptions that taint our opinions of these characteristics. These pre-conceptions evolve from our years of experiences, memories, beliefs, judgements, teachings and so dominate our everyday beliefs. As salespeople we need to know and understand these so we can adapt our selling to get through them. NLP revealed three filters – deletions, distortions and generalisations. A knowledge of these helps salespeople understand people more intimately than before and enables us to tighten up our sales techniques. Deletions happen all around us. Purely to make sense of the world around us we have to delete information. Right now I’m in an aeroplane taking off from London Heathrow airport and I’m being bombarded with signals and information that if I tried to focus on all of these my brain would probably explode. No to make sense of everything I’m only able to concentrate on about 7 signals, the rest are either ignored or put over to my autopilot. I can sense the laptop, my ears popping, my ideas in my brain, the smell of the in flight food being prepared, how uncomfortable I feel in my cramped seat. Everything else, the worry about the flight, the turbulence, my bodily functions and so on are all being ignored or placed into autopilot. NLP calls your autopilot your subconscious. That’s OK but it does conjure up images of hypnotists and like and some people have a negative reaction to that. Much of our world is on autopilot. Driving a car is virtually all
autopilot - I mean the actual controls of the car – the gears, the
clutch, the brakes, the steering. This leaves the road ahead and our
decision making ability totally at the front of our minds. This is
one of the reasons why mobile phones are so dangerous when driving
since much of our attention is taken on the conversation. Whether we
hold the phone or not, the focus on the conversation is dangerous.
Remember we only have the ability to work with about 7 signals. In selling ignore deletions at your peril. When meeting your customer, beware of all the distractions that might take up one of these 7 allowable signals. If there are too many, then you might be deleted. Perish the thought. Don’t overload the customer with too much information as you can quickly fill up their 7. In selling the phrase less is more really counts so make sure you understand their needs and only give them benefits that mean something to them. Don’t overload. Be careful of the length of your sales meetings. Remember people can only take so much in so rather have a couple of short meetings where your customer can easily digest everything rather than one long meeting. Here’s a neat tip I learnt here in Iran. The next time you want to ask your customer for referrals at the end of the sales meeting, try making your request for your client’s assistance whist you fiddle with your watch. Remove your watch from your wrist, fiddle with it and put it back on your wrist. I hear you asking why? Do it and note your customer’s reaction. They will focus on your watch and your words of request will go straight into their sub conscious and will be automatically translated into their own words. They will oblige, you wait. In a way you are hypnotising them into giving you names of their friends who might need your help. This is the basis of hypnotic suggestions used by stage hypnotists. It really works, try it. Without deletions there would be no ability for you to use other hypnotic selling techniques. Now you wouldn’t want this to escape you would you? We’ve got some great articles on this subject, just contact me. The second filter that prevents our sales messages getting
through are distortions. These are dangerous because we distort the
real meaning of a message to be totally what it wasn’t intended to
be. Right now I’m travelling to Tehran to help run a two day sales
conference. Now people distort the real intentions of the Iranian
people from the information we have on the TV and media. We see
demonstrations from mobs outside the British and American embassy on
the TV and we see their President giving rhetoric to the world’s
media. From this carefully selected news we distort the real
meaning. Deep down the Iranians or Persians as many prefer to be
known as, are a peaceful nation dedicated to their religion with a
love of family life and togetherness. Extremely friendly and
hospitable, young and excitable, the nation of Iran has so much to
offer the world. But we care to distort the information we’re
carefully given through the world’s media. The last and most useful filter for us to understand is generalisations. The world is full of these. When I asked you to note what your thoughts were with the red hair, close set eyes, you gave me generalisations which have grown within you due to your experiences, values and beliefs. You can’t stop people making generalisations, that’s life. People do it to help them understand the enormous amount of data thrust upon them everyday of their lives. Generalising just helps us tick over and move on. But for the Rapport Seller appreciating how people will generalise helps us to move the sale along. Knowing that people generalise helps us to probe deeper to find out people’s real needs. When we ask initial questions we get replies but these are often just generalisations that we need to probe on and dig deeper to get beyond the surface of the subject. “What’s important to you in the car that you buy?” might get a fairly scant first reply – “economy and a comfortable ride”. “What makes you say that?” is a great question to ask since it drills below the generalisation, and we might get a more thoughtful answer. “What are you looking for in your mortgage?” will probably give you something around “cheap” and this should be followed up with probes such as “do tell me, what does cheap mean to you?” or “I’m curious to know, what do you mean by cheap” Notice these probes are fronted with softeners as I call them. A few words which have a remarkable effect in softening the question. We must do this. Objection handling is made easier when we appreciate these generalisations. Sometimes if we’ve not tested the temperature beforehand and closed our customer too early, we get objections. Now often these are generalisations such as “I’ll think about it”, or “it’s too expensive”. The first reaction of our customer when forced is to throw up a generalisation about our product, a first defence mechanism to give them time or to throw us off the scent. Probe on these. Rapport Selling gives us a wonderful set of tools to help here called precision questions. One of my favourite is the “compared to what” question. For example, “thank you for bringing that up, I admire your honesty. Other of my clients feel the same way initially so I’m pleased you have mentioned it too. May I ask…in your own mind what are you comparing this cost to so you believe it to be expensive”. This will bring you a load of information. You see cost is merely a reflection of value. Whatever it is your customer is comparing the cost too has a lower value in their mind so we need to beef up our customer’s view of the value of whatever it is you’re selling. Whilst we’re on the subject of value, you should never close the
sale until the customer knows what your “Starbucks Value” is. Let me explain. Starbucks is probably the most famous chain of coffee shops in
the world – even here in Iran they have them. A typical cup of
Americano costs £2. From this there are four costs only. The raw
materials (coffee beans), the wholesale costs (distribution etc),
retail costs (the shop, the décor, wifi, profit margins etc) and the
one we want our customer to know all about…the Starbucks Experience
– the atmosphere, the friendly staff, the name. My last tip for you on generalisations is…if you want to appear intelligent wear glasses. This is absolutely true and will give people the impression that your IQ is higher than it really is. Now I hope you see how a plane journey to Iran has a lot to do
with overcoming client objections. I just hope we land safely, I
really hate that bit!
Paul is an international sales speaker, sales trainer, author and coach based in the UK.
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He specialises in rapport selling and rapport
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