NLP & Sales

Years ago I followed an NLP practitioners training provided by an "NLP couple", Charry and Leo Janse in the Netherlands. They didn't have their own training facilities as they were using hotels all over the country for their inspiring training sessions.

Together we made the plan to create an Acedemy for NLP in the Netherlands of which I was the co-founder. I've been following most of the NLP training courses they had available while in the meantime Charry and Leo trained my sales team to use NLP in sales situations.

We were using some very basic NLP presuppositions to make our sales team aware of the power of NLP thinking, like:

"Every behaviour has a positive intention".

This is true as far as the person exhibiting the behaviour is concerned. Let's assume a prospect does not want to buy from you (yet) and is using strong language to put you off. For you as a sales person that may sound unpleasant but you will have to keep in mind that the prospect perhaps had no other choice, at that very moment, than to let you know he is not interested because he has no budget this quarter.

In sales it is absolutely essential NOT to assume what the prospect means.
You must ask questions to find out what he/she is really up to. So you could ask a simple question like: "What do you really mean by what you just said?".

In that case you take control over the situation, so remember one of the most important phrases when you are in a selling situation:

"The Person Asking The Questions Controls The Conversation".