What exactly is NLP Persuasion ?
Let’s look at a couple of definitions.
Persuasion is more or less described by Wikipedia as:
Persuasion is the process of guiding people toward the adoption of an idea, attitude, or action by rational and symbolic (though not always logical) means.
Now what is this NLP ?
NLP is an acronym for Neuro Linguistic Programming.
Now that’s a mouthful !
It is about how us humans program our neurology by the use of language (both verbal and non-verbal).
As one of the founders of NLP, Richard Bandler, has said:
“NLP is an attitude and methodology that leaves behind a trail of Techniques. The attitude is Curiosity and the methodology is Modelling.”
So, it wasn’t long before NLP was applied to excellent salespeople and modelling them gave rise to a trail of techniques known as NLP Persuasion.
Let’s look at some of those techniques.
Rapport
Let’s start from the very beginning of a sales discussion.
In order to sell to someone most of the time they have to be open in communicating with you.
The process of developing the lines of communication between people is a process of building Rapport and it is one of the core skills of NLP Persuasion.
I have previously written an article called Sales Rapport.
Language
Remember the second word in NLP is “linguistic”.
It operates in two ways in the sales process.
Firstly, we can understand a lot about our prospect by paying attention to the structure of the language they use.
Secondly, we can structure our language in terms of NLP Persuasion to have the maximum persuasive influence on our prospect.
Certain NLP language models are used to get a client clear about what they really want. I touched on this in Sales Questions.
You can use certain NLP language patterns to tell stories and make your language somewhat hypnotic. I covered one simple hypnotic language skill in my article Power Words.But this is far from an exhaustive study of NLP in language and persuasion.
Anchoring
We experience each moment we are alive in some sort of state.
We are either happy or sad or curious or bored or excited etc.
Many of these states just happen to us, so we think.
When you all of a sudden seem happy for no particular reason expect that Anchoring had something to do with it.
Anchoring is when the memory of a past event is revived and you respond by going into the state you were in during that past event.
NLP teaches us to use anchoring to manage both our state and the state of our prospect.
Imagine how much better you’d sell if you were in the right state and how much easier it would be to sell to a happy client.
Reframing
Reframing is another NLP Persuasion skill of great utility to a sales person.
It’s the art of taking a statement or a belief and looking at it from another perspective.
Used well it enables you to alter a prospects reality quite dramatically.
Metaprograms
Metaprograms are like high level filters on how we think and act.
Once you understand how to spot these filters and use them you will be able to speak in ways that your prospect will easily understand and in ways that will motivate them to buy.
NLP Persuasion can make a huge difference to your sales results.
Taught well, practiced often and used wisely they may increase your sales 300% or more.
Read through the articles referenced in this article and find out more about how to use these valuable skills.
Would you like to learn how to sell like a master. Contact Action Factory for a no obligation training needs analyses and let us show you what NLP can do for your organization. Action Factory offers a wide range of NLP sales training courses and NLP corporate training courses