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 ….

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.
We all think in different ways
Evoking a gut reaction, Images, Faces, Colours, Names, People’s desire for belonging
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

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.

Pre-suasion
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.