NLP in Sales and Marketing – think.feel.better

NLP for Sales and Marketing

One field in which NLP is especially relevant is that of sales and marketing
‘Neuro’ – understanding how we process information and meaning. ‘Linguistic’ – improving communication.
NLP can help those involved in sales to become more skilled at communicating. By helping to be better communicators, you can better identify clients’ needs and meet those needs more easily.
Through the emphasis on both verbal and non-verbal communication, you can learn principles that turn you into a more powerful, confident and flexible communicator.

How NLP can help with sales and marketing

NLP can help those involved in sales to become more skilled at communicating. By helping to be better communicators, you can better identify clients’ needs and meet those needs more easily. Through emphasis on both verbal and non-verbal communication, you can learn principles that turn you into a more powerful, confident and flexible communicator.

As an example, see if you can see the persuasive language in the Coca-Cola ad on the right ….

Look at the NLP Language in this advertisement from CocaCola

Sales Professionals Should Recognise The Benefits Of NLP

Understand your clients better
Understand yourself better

Being a good communicator (ie understanding others) and being aware of your own perceptions (ie understanding ourselves) are great life-skills. NLP can help salesforce and marketers increase their level of rapport with their customers through the improvement of connection and get more VALUE from sales and marketing interactions

Whilst NLP is clearly relevant to one-on-one sales interactions, it also is applicable to other areas of marketing, such as advertising. While it is easier to discern how to sell to a particular person when speaking to him or her individually, advertisers are faced with the more difficult task of targeting a mass of people at once. Consequently, many advertisers have overlooked how NLP might benefit marketing campaigns.

Marketers Should Recognise The Benefits Of NLP

The main difference in using NLP in sales vs. marketing is that salespeople are generally engaged in one-to-one interactions. They can assess whether their buyer prefers visual, auditory, or kinesthetic language, and lean into that preference.

On the other hand, marketing materials have to cater to many people with many different preferences. Since it’s rare to see any one emotional language bias among a type of buyer or target audience (if you assume the population is roughly split into thirds) marketers should instead try to hit all three bases with their messaging.

Of course, when targeting different groups of people, it is still important to be strategic. The mere presence of images or words in a marketing campaign will not be enough to cause people to want to buy your product. The key is to recognize which images or words will elicit the reaction you’re trying to achieve, depending on the type of customer you’re targeting.

A persons ‘state’ (emotional position) needs to be ready for the call to action… this creates a powerful motivation to buy..

Speak the language of your target market

Neuromarketing is the study of what is going on the human brain when people react to advertising, and a successful marketing campaigns recognise the power of how we all think differently (see image)

Learn how to speak your target markets language.
Identify if they are visual, kinesthetic, auditive or digital kinesthetic. (and align finding with your language)
Understand their subjective experiences make them feel & experience certain events.
Build rapport and thereby anticipation for your advice, solutions and products.

Evoking a gut reaction, Images, Faces, Colours, Names, People’s desire for belonging

Using NLP in Sales and Marketing

Assuming you’ve worked out your basic proposition and have an ideal customer list, you need to be clear about your customers’ buying cycle, the problems your service solves, and the value it can bring.

You then have to make contact with the appropriate customer decision makers and influencers. You then want to drive/nudge the sale forward towards a successful close. This involves helping your customer through their buying process.

Understanding their value sets, writing effective proposals, and negotiation are also important and can all benefit from NLP techniques.

Successful sales and delivery and helping your customers identify the value they’ve received will lead to case studies, referrals and testimonials leading to additional business.

CONTACT ME for more ideas on this

Example: Using NLP language to close a Sale

Assuming the sale discussion has followed a good decision support process and we know that investing our time in this opportunity is a good investment, we can ask questions like:

“What’s the next step to move the sale forward?”, “Where are we?” or
“Are you ready to commit, now? So I can sort all the administration out and you can move forward.”

NLP should not be used to ‘manipulate’ into making a decision. Sales closes are a bit like NLP techniques, the best practitioners weave them into the conversation so they’re only noticed in the context of doing what’s best for both parties. They’re useful, but how you use them if often more important than the words themselves. If you’re in the right state and have an appropriate belief set, almost whatever you do will work.

NLP areas to be aware of

awareness of body language of yourself and others
awareness of the intonation of yourself and others
use of time-related grammar
modal verbs / modal operators (would, should, could, etc) and how they affect the thinking of a client
embedded commands
embedded questions
rapport building
pacing and leading
awareness of emotional state and how to keep hold of that state

Additional resources

Want to learn more?

The Perfect Close

James Muir’s book ‘The Perfect Close’, demonstrates how that by simply asking just one closing question raised the percentage of successful sales from 25% to 61%. So we can’t assume sales will close themselves.
However James also suggest that beyond the first attempt there is often a negative correlation between closing frequency and sales success

Check it out

Blink

We make fast instinctive decisions.
All of us react to situations and make judgments at a subconscious level. Malcolm Gladwell explores this phenomenon in his best-seller, Blink. Marketers, whether they are salespeople or advertisers, would do well to increase their skills in non-verbal communication and in perceiving people’s presuppositions.

Check it out

Pre-suasion

Check it out

NLP for Sales and Marketing

How NLP can help with sales and marketing

Sales Professionals Should Recognise The Benefits Of NLP

Marketers Should Recognise The Benefits Of NLP

Speak the language of your target market

We all think in different ways