Here is the email:

What’s In It For Me?

There is one thing that these guys can do that will dramatically increase their results. If they would just look at this from the prospect’s perspective and write the email from that standpoint they would get a much better response.

Read the email and notice that it is just about the company, what they do, what they are seeking and how I can get in contact with them. None of this is speaking to me about my needs and how these guys can fix it for me.

If you are serious about persuasion then you are serious about seeing things from the other person’s perspective and willing to engage with them about that.

A Foundation Persuasion Process

What if you were to step into the head of the person you are trying to persuade and give them the message based on the befits to them? Here is my version of the email these guys were actually trying to send me:

To be fair I don’t like this method of selling and I personally would not respond to this version of the email either. But I am hoping that you see the world of difference between the two emails.

The real key to persuasive ability is to be able to get into the heads of your prospects and communicate with them from that standpoint. Persuasion Skills on Steroids is the course that will give you the tool to do that effectively. Click through and find out more here: 

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 an 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 some 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.

The Master Key to Covert Persuasion Skills

Without having control of the conversation it could go anywhere and then you are at the mercy of fate as to whether you hit your objectives or not.

Conversely by taking covert control of the conversation you can build massive amounts of rapport as well as making sure that the other person is at least pointed in the direction you want the conversation to go in. Here is the first ten minutes of a video lesson where I explain further.

The rest of the video explains in detail how to take complete covert control of the conversation. It includes how you can develop strong rapport, elicit a person’s deep unconscious values and then bind them to get what you want. In the forty minute video I give away the most powerful secrets of hypnotic conversation management. Before I tell you how you can get a copy completely free let us look at a few applications:

Dating

The video talks about this area specifically and imagine directing a person to talking about what has to be there for a perfect date and then arranging that for them.

Sales

How many more sales would you make if you could conversationally elicit the most important benefits your prospect needs and then link these to features from your product or service?

Management

Would your team be more motivated if you could facilitate them to understanding how their current project would fulfill them in a deep and meaningful way?

Parenting

How good would it be if you could really connect with your teenage son or daughter and help them make choices that are empowering?

This video is only forty minutes and it uses a context of dating, but in it I spill the beans on the whole hypnotic conversation management process and once you have the idea it is easy to shift the context. This video is just one of many that you can download and keep as part of the Advanced Persuasion Patterns course.

Deconstructing Common fallacies in NLP Rapport Building Techniques

Poor NLP Trainers will tell you to match and mirror people as a route to rapport. This has come about through the idea that when people are in deep rapport they tend to match and mirror each other’s body language. Spend a few moments people watching to realise the truth of the matter.

Match, Mirror, Pace and Lead

There are two key problems with this approach:

1. Matching and mirroring is a rapport indicator not a rapport generator (although if you have nothing else it is at least something to try).
2. The reason you are creating rapport is to lead people to the result you are trying to achieve.

For this reason it seems to make sense to develop a process where you can covertly take charge of a conversation and lead people to where you want them to go.

Yesterday I defined rapport as a process to increase the responsiveness of your client / subject / audience. I am hoping that you can now see the value of using a definition like this rather than the usual NLP woolly stuff about relationships, trust, harmony, building bridges or even the slightly more pragmatic but almost as useless matching and mirroring body language.

On the Advanced Persuasion Patterns Programme we look at ways of getting straight to leading the conversation in a way where people want to follow. This would include using:

• Charisma Patterns with an audience so they automatically hold you in high esteem
• Opening anticipation loops so people hang on your every word
• Presuppositional questioning to access and anchor their emotions
• A conversation management system that allows you subject / client / prospect the illusion of control whilst you direct the conversation wherever you need it to go

To find out more about Advanced Persuasion Patterns, the leading hypnotic persuasion skills programme on the internet you can click through this link.

How To Motivate Employees With Persuasive Techniques

It gives me the opportunity to unpack some really powerful things about how to motivate people in a commercial setting. So first, here is the email.

From: John

Sent: Tue 06/04/2010 22:59

Hi Rintu,Having read your posts recently and seeing how you use different aspects of persuasion to guide people into performing certain ways, I was wondering how you would tackle the following issue I currently face.

Here in Australia, industrial relations law have recently changed and we have taken the opportunity to update our employment agreements. We have already discussed various areas we would be covering in the agreements and have now given them to staff, asked them to read them and if they don’t understand anything or wish to clarify anything, then to please come to us and we can go through it so they feel comfortable with what the agreement is about.

To date, half have signed and half are yet to return them. I would like to talk to this half that have not yet signed them to see if they have any issues but would also like to talk in such a way that they want to sign them and feel comfortable to sign them. Therefore, I am thinking “What would make them want to sign the agreement and feel comfortable with it”.

As an example, one of the staff members considers himself on par with CFOs of big corporations so one of the things I was going to impress was that “you know, we all sign employment agreements, even in the big corporations and all successful CFOs have had to sign one at some stage and they all recognise that it is simply a step they take to get them higher up the ladder.” This is just one example however if you have any other thoughts or ideas, Rintu, I would love to hear them.

Regards

John

NLP Techniques and Perceptual Positions

John really has got the right idea here because he is looking through the eyes of the employees and finding out what motivates them. The idea he is using with this one employee is a big step towards getting this employee to want to sign. My assumption is that a CFO is still an employee of the company and therefore has to sign an employee agreement as well. If this is the case I would beef up the conversation telling the employee that the CFO has already signed theirs (obviously making sure the CFO has signed already).

For you NLP Jargon Junkies out there what John is using is a technique called perceptual positions and in this form is just about looking at the situation from the employees eyes. The key to motivation in this sort of context is about the quality of the questions you ask.

 NLP Questioning

In this example John has started with a great question. He has looked at this from the employee’s perspective and asked the question, “What is important to the employee?”

The answer he has got back is about being on par with the CFO. John has then linked what he wants the employee to do to what the employee wants i.e. signing the agreement is just like what all successful CFOs have had to do. John could continue doing this for all his employees that have not signed and it will give him some good results. This is the advantage of having a successful Persuasion Process.

Now let’s look at a few other questions and situations that might be worth looking at from the employee’s perspective:

What stops me from signing?

The answer to this might be anything from apathy through to being too busy to read it; they might fear the change or believe that their employment conditions are being eroded. If John senses any of these things might be what is going on with the employee(s) then dealing with some of the issues up front will help them at least discuss the issue. The one that is the most difficult to deal with is apathy, so let’s look at a question that can deal with that.

 What’s in it for me?

People are motivated towards what they want and away from things they don’t want. The pitch that needs to be made to the employees is the positive benefits of signing, or at least discussing it and the negative consequence of not doing these things. The important thing is to look at this from an individual’s perspective and tailor the benefits and consequences to them directly.

For example for one employee they may place some importance on being seen to be efficient and timely with their work. Obviously not dealing with their employee agreement is completely at odds with that self image. Another employee might be worried that their pay and conditions will be eroded with the new agreement, stressing the similarities between the old and new agreements would help them to sign.

Metaprogrammes and Values

Metaprogammes are personality profiling tools used in NLP. They can be used to quickly assess where a subject is coming from in any given context by analysing their language. Combining this with asking a question that elicits values such as, “What’s important to you about (x)?” is a very powerful tool.

John has gone a long way to using these tools without having to resort to NLP Jargon. If you want to explore these personality profiling, motivational and persuasion tools then you might want to consider The Advanced Persuasion Patterns Programme. This course is one of the most comprehensive download course you can get on NLP Persuasion Skills.