NLP Techniques to Motivate a Sales Team

By Rintu Basu NLP Business, NLP Sales 6 Comments 5th October 2011

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Martin Yuille was working as a sales manager in a large call centre operation when he went through his NLP Practitioner Course. 

Dramatically increase your sales by applying NLP to your sales team

One of his primary applications and outcomes for the course was to be able to motivate his sales team to far greater results.  From his course Martin applied a variety of NLP Techniques and the results were absolutely astounding.

Results through NLP Techniques

Martin found that his team were taking more calls, converting more sales and were actually having more fun. He took his team from meeting sales targets to exceeding them and on occasion doubling them.  In the long run Martin also found that the attrition rate for his team had fallen whilst several team members went for and secured higher level jobs.

“The sales operation was based on outbound cold calling in a highly competitive industry.  The sales agents face a great deal of rejection.  The dialler is set on automatic so there is a constant throughput of calls and agents have little or no time to recompose themselves between calls.

As the call centre is an outsourcing operation the parent company is very demanding and is constantly looking for results.  My team were constantly under the threat of redundancy with the parent company threatening to take the project in-house if we didn’t reach sales targets.  Many of the agents considered the dialling lists poor quality and the sales targets unachievable.  As with a lot of call centre sales operations the turnover was high.

My intention on going on in NLP practitioner course was to turn this around.  Whilst on the course my whole focus was on how I apply this material to my team.  I left with lots of really great ideas and was raring to go.  I was really taken aback with the results that I got once I’d implemented these ideas.”

NLP Training applied to a Sales Team

The following is a précis of all of the ideas that Martin implemented.

NLP Identity, Values and Beliefs

Martin took the whole of his team into a meeting. He got them to build a cohesive identity of an ideal salesperson and the perfect sales team in that context. He then got them to discuss who they were, what was important to them and their beliefs in that context. Martin then spent time reframing and connecting their personal vision with the ideals that they had come up with.The results of this created a much stronger bond between the agents as well as a clearer sense of purpose and a dramatic change in behaviour.

NLP Anchoring to Change Emotions

Martin noticed that several agents, however resourceful before a call would go into an un-resourceful state when they made a call. Initially he took a few agents and anchored them to clicking a pen top for a confident, happy and resourceful state. Several of the agents grew exceptionally attached to those pens. After some thinking Martin took a different tac. He took the agents and anchored that confident happy and resourceful state to a different trigger. He anchored the state to the beep that came through on the headsets to signify a call coming through from the dialler. This meant that as soon as a call came through the agents were in a confident happy and resourceful state.

Anchoring is a complex subject and is not often taught well. If you want to find out more about it you would do as well as to have a look at this article where you can find out a lot more information and discover ways of becoming very skilled with NLP Anchoring Techniques.

Hypnotic Language Patterns in Sales

The final element of Martin’s work with his team involved scripting the introduction and training them in objection handling. Using NLP language patterns Martin changed the introductions to the call. He introduced a big benefit statement, an anticipation loop closely followed by a presuppositional question. This meant that the sales agents were actually getting further into a lot more calls.Martin also got his team to brainstorm a lot of the common objections and then he fed them NLP hypnotic language patterns to deal with each objection. Using some of the facilitation and training elements that he learnt on his NLP Practitioner Course Martin actually make the agents feel like they came up with the patterns themselves. This meant they had ownership over the issue and several agents started keeping a book of really effective phrases.

Using NLP Techniques for Sales Effectiveness

Going on a good NLP Practitioner Course will give you a whole load of techniques that you can use in many different ways. The real issue that is having an attitude and the methodology that will allow you to come up with the techniques you need for the context that you have.The results happened because Martin had the ability to take what he had learnt and apply them to the situation that he had. A good NLP Practitioner Course instead of giving you lots of techniques will show you how to apply a methodology that creates results.

Business NLP, not just Sales

In this application we looked at sales but the same techniques would work in many different areas. Imagine a customer service team; all the same elements above could be applied to them. How about a team of hairdressers? You could apply all the same techniques to any customer facing team. In fact consider a board of directors looking to affect a change within their organisation; you could apply all these elements to them and the areas that they might lead.The issue is not the techniques it is all about creating the flexibility of mind and the methodology. You then apply this to your situation and create the techniques to use. Training and developing the attitude and methodology as well as the technique is where a good NLP Practitioner Course differs from other courses.

Tags: Case Studies, Hypnosis, Influence, Managers, Persuasion