How will NLP help you in Your Next Sales Presentation

I want to tell you a story that might seem a bit long-winded, but holds one of the secrets to better customer service and higher sales -- without spending a penny.

I'm not talking about minor increases of 10% and 20% for your sales but MASSIVE increases of 50%, 100%, 200% and even 300%. Every industry is different, but time and again people have achieved these massive results, and I'm going to tell you how. But first, I have to set the stage ...

Out of college years ago, I ended up working for a prominent Wall Street firm. My job, as Director of Research, was to come up with all sorts of mathematical models - anything and everything that could be computerized - that could be turned into computerized systems that were automatically traded to make money in stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies. At that time, I was one of a handful of experts in the world in this field, though everyone does it today. The academics said it was nonsense and wouldn't work, but today almost everyone trades according to technical analysis, and I was one of the hidden granddaddies in this field developing proprietary systems that were traded automatically for billion dollar portfolios.

The whole idea behind this computerized portfolio trading was based on BACK-TESTING investment ideas I thought might work. In other words -- TESTING before TRADING. First I would come up with some theoretical idea of an investment method that might work in producing good BUY and SELL signals for precious metals, bonds, stocks, commodities or whatever, back-test that idea on past data to see if it indeed worked historically, and if it performed well in the past, we would then take the risk of trading it in the future. We'd incorporate it into our portfolio trading system that would generate automatic buy and sell signals that we would take in management of our funds.

The point?

We came up with ideas, TESTED them to see if they worked historically, and if they did work we made them an automatic component of our portfolio system. We never ASSUMED anything worked but TESTED all our ideas to see if they indeed produced superior trading returns in the past. It was all about coming up with ideas and then TESTING them. Testing, testing, TESTING. That's the moral of the story -- testing.

If the ideas worked, we started using them and tried to improve them here and there, bit by bit, to get even better investment results. Granted this is a different field than marketing and sales, but I want you to take away the lesson of testing. Superior marketing results are all about testing and adopting large and small improvements here and there in an incremental fashion.

(As an interesting aside, this testing has revealed several super secret investment systems that work going back 50-80 years and perform much better than buy-and-hold strategies over these incredibly long time periods. They've worked going into the future as well, so far. But this is a website about marketing, not investing. Go see Nelson Freeburg's www.FormulaResearch.com if you're interested in such things.)

Now all through those Wall Street years in investment research, I was an avid reader. Two books during that time struck me in particular: Ogilvy on Advertising was one of them, and the other was John T. Molloy's Dress for Success. I recommend them both still today, and here's why.

In Dress for Success, Molloy performed hundreds and hundreds of tests to see what colors and types of clothing styles people responded to BEST for sales situations and situations of trust and rapport. The book is a masterpiece of testing, simply amazing and definitely under appreciated.The field of persuasion and influence owes him a great debt for performing this type of research and publishing it. Are people influenced by certain colors and clothing styles you wear? You bet! Molloy codified these reactions, and the experts in the body language field owe him a debt as well for getting things started in this direction.

Molloy didn't just speculate or shoot from the hit claiming, "People will trust you more if you wear a button down Oxford white shirt," but performed dozens of tests to come up with the EXACT color and style that would produce the results he was interested in, and he analyzed how people responded to clothes people in terms of the sexes and all sorts of other groupings. One big hint: if you want people to trust you, wear blue.

Dress for Success, which became a bestseller, impressed the heck out of me because it, too, stressed the premise of TESTING for results to come up with a conclusion on the particular clothing you should wear to bring a response you want. The idea was testing once again, but the subject matter was CLOTHING. But my lesson to you was this idea of TESTING.

David Ogilvy, the famous advertiser who built the firm Ogilvy and Mather, was also a big fan of TESTING. He worked for George Gallup at his Audience Research Institute where he also learned the value of testing. He was so impressed with this insight that it's stressed throughout his books.

Ogilvy wrote that he especially admired Claude Hopkins, "Father of Modern Advertising," who wrote the famous work you should have in your library, Scientific Advertising This classic also stressed the idea of TESTING all your advertising and marketing ideas rather than simply assuming they will work. The entire DM emphasis and internet emphasis on split testing and Taguchi testing and so forth can be said to date back to the influence of this work.

So here we have the idea of testing once again, though in the field of ADVERTISING AND MARKETING.

Ogilvy wrote "Nobody, at any level, should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read Hopkins' Scientific Advertising seven times," which is why I updated Claude Hopkins' work with my own book, The Claude Hopkins Rare Ad Collection and Study Guide which you can find at ClaudeHopkinsAdvertising.com.

Ogilvy came to the conclusion, from working with Gallup, studying Hopkins and mastering the methods of direct marketing, that the only way to improve advertising results was not being creative but TESTING an idea, seeing if it increased sales and then incrementally improving it.

Once again, he didn't take the position that anything and everything goes in advertising but that SALES results matter, and you find out what works best by testing. Plain and simple, test to find out how best to sell, how best to market and present your goods and services and satisfy people's wants and needs and desires.

Rather than go into my forays into naturopathic and Chinese medicine, which also seconds this lesson on the importance of TESTING, I want to fast forward this dialogue and come to the topic of sales and advertising Today.

In many cases, I tell clients that for better SALES RESULTS they should methodically test which sentences they use in dealing with clients to find out which ones produce the best results. It's like finding out which type of guarantee produces the most sales, because it taps into what customers want MOST.

For instance, the following Killer sentence has tested best with many retailers in helping increase their sales.

When a potential customer comes into a store, a retailer or salesperson should not ask, "What are you looking for?" Rather, if they want to increase their sales and customer service, they should probably ask the following question (using these EXACT words): "What brings you into the store today?" or "What ad brings you into the store today?"

This sentence has tested best in establishing better rapport with customers, and ultimately increasing sales than any other sentence people have tried. It opens up customers to the opportunity of dialogue and enables salesmen to serve them better. Ultimately that results in higher sales than when people don't use THAT sentence, or some other sentence. Of course you have to test this yourself compared to what you or your staff are already saying, but you'll probably be pleasantly surprised to find that any other sentence doesn't lead to as favorable sales results as this one, or a versionof it that's tailored to your situation..

Try it and see, or simply tell this gem to your retail store buddies to help them out and wait to see if they buy you dinner as THANKS!

Finding this type of sentence that increases your sales results, and then teaching your staff to use it is called SALES SCRIPTING. Learning what to say and in the manner that is most agreeable to customers and conducive to sales is SALES SCRIPTING. When you go to McDonalds, order a hamburger and they ask "Large coke with that?" -- I guarantee whatever sentence they use has been tested to see which one increases up-sells the most. They've probably tested all sorts of possibilities such as "Would you like a soft drink with that?", "Large or small soda?", "Soda?", "Large Coke or small" and so on.

Finding those sentences for repetitive situations, and then teaching them to your staff to use is the process of sales scripting.

Elmer Wheeler, who wrote Tested Sentences that Sell in 1938, performed 10 years of such research testing 105,000 words and phrases on 19 million people, and wrote that there are no magic words but there is word magic. He urged that salesmen build a sales talk through testing, and stressed that how you say things can definitely have a profound result on your sales.

That's the key to sales scripting. If you just record the sales talks of your superstar salesmen, combine them together and add in NLP phraseology, and then turn those sales dialogues into scripts for your underachievers, you can revolutionize your sales results almost overnight. Start with the best of what's working in each piece of the sales process, put them all together, see if you can improve things and there you have your sales script.

Can changing the words you use have this power? Absolutely. You can pick up Ted Nicholas' Magic Words That Bring You Riches to see for yourself. If you're cold calling, check out the words recommended by Ari Galper.

One of the phrasing rules Wheeler came up with is that you should always phrase your words in such a way that you give customers a choice between something and something else. For instance, in helping restaurants he found that the phrase "Would you like red wine or white wine with your dinner?" doubled wine sales versus "Would you like wine with your meal, sir?" I've written a book for restaurant waiters and waitresses to help them increase their tips, and this is just one of the many secrets inside that you can dig out from the field of NLP and sales scripting. You can grab a copy of that book, for free, from Twice Your Tips.

Without doubt, the absolute master of the sales scripting process today is Dr. Donald Moines, who has studied thousands of salespeople and who specializes in writing sales scripts for financial services.

You can find his book Unlimited Selling Power at Amazon.com to get introduced to the field. Or you can give him a very hefty consulting fee and he might produce dynamite results for your business. Pick up Unlimited Selling Power by Donald Moines and Kenneth Lloyd if you want to find out more.

SALES SCRIPTING is actually commonsense selling where you know what words you should or should not use in selling to people or just approaching them in a sales situation. There's nothing devious, manipulative or hypnotic about it. It's basically diplomatic word usage....using the words that have a better effect (on average) than just a random conversation.

For instance, the following is also considered Sales Scripting or sales NLP word usage. If in your sales conversations (and marketing pieces) you replace the following words on the left with these on the right, you'll often find your selling situations running much smoother:

Cost or Price - Total Investment
Down Payment - Initial Investment
Contract - Agreement
Buy - Own
Sell or Sold - Enjoy Owning
Sign - Approve or Endorse
Pitch - Presentation or Demonstration
Deal - Package
Problem - Challenge
Objections - Areas of Concern
Cheaper - More Economical
Prospect - Future Client
Appointment - Visit


How to choose your words, or which words to use, is such important information for building better rapport with customers, and smoothing away their pre-purchase jitters, that I helped put together several books on this topic which you can find at www.TheWordsThatSell.com . Politicians make use of this sort of information all the time, just as they make use of polls and other research to see what people want and need. The specific reports I'm speaking of make use of psychological profiles, NLP, occupational studies, and tested sentences of what to say or not say when dealing with people of certain occupational groups. In other words, the right persuasion words to use when dealing with people in certain occupations.

There are specific reports on selling to, persuading, negotiating with, motivating, dealing with entrepreneurs, lawyers, doctors, engineers, CEO's, personnel directors, ... you name it....38 in all. It's powerful stuff, but not what I want to tell you about.

The topic, however, finally brings up the concept of NLP, or neuro-linguistic programming, which is what I've been leading up to. This whole article is about the words you should use - and how to find them -- to better bond with customers, increase rapport, find out what they REALLY want and thereby ultimately serve them better and increase your sales in the process.

If you sell a product or service for a living, you already know that it's hard to sell anything to anyone without first establishing rapport. Without first establishing rapport, people won't necessarily like you or trust you, and if they don't believe you or like you, they won't listen to what you have to say. Forget about sales in such a situation.

So how do you establish rapport?

The answer is through NLP, which teaches you how to bond with prospects in the quickest way possible so you can find out what they ULTIMATELY want. Kevin Hogan taught me the following tested NLP formula, or sales script, for quickly determining what clients or prospects want.

Sales is about ASKING questions, and you can QUICKLY find out what your customer is really after if you lead them through the following 4 questions:

1. First ask them, "What is most important to you about __ (ex. buying a car)?"
2. When they give you an answer, you should follow it up with this sentence, "How do you know when you have __ {whatever they just mentioned} (such as good gas mileage)?"
3. Lastly, after you've gotten this market intelligence, which is creating a "mind map" of the customer, you can then ask them, "If I could give you your highest value {whatever they just mentioned}, would you consider buying it from me, working with me, etc.?"
4. After you've gone through this process and found out what's important about the product or service they want to buy, and how they know when they get that value or characteristic, you can ask them, "In addition to that, is there anything else of importance to you in buying/owning __?" to elicit any other characteristics, benefits or features that are important to them.

This formula is GOLDEN. Memorize it, practice it, use it. It's basic NLP.

Another basic principle of NLP is that some people can be described as auditory thinkers, visual thinkers or kinesthetic thinkers. NLP teaches you how to quickly determine which type of representational system predominates in a person, after which you can start using words keyed to that representational system to better bond with a prospect.

For instance, with visual thinkers you can use words in your sales dialogue such as "see," "illustrate," "picture," "imagine," "show" or "colorful." When you are talking to auditory processors, you should pepper your sales script with phrases such as "listen," "talk it over," "hear," "resonate," "call," or "tune it." Kinesthetic thinkers can be approached with words such as "feel," "touch upon," "get a hold of," "heavy," "light," or "walk through." This is a whole art in itself, and complicated for people unless they practice this form of bonding.

Some people have NLP skills as a natural talent, and others have to learn it, but how do you learn NLP? By study and practice, study and practice. Even if you just start by memorizing sales closing lines, that's a form of mastering sales dialogue, i.e. sales scripting. If you learn the persuasion materials of Kevin Hogan at www.KevinHogan.com, and the cold caling scripting of Ari Galper, that's a step in the right direction as well.

So let's review...

One of the keys to increasing your sales is to find out what sentences WORK BEST by TESTING them and then implementing what you find. Copywriters do that in writing headlines, advertisement calls to action and sales letters and you should do that for what you SAY in sales situations as well. Sales scripting is basically copywriting testing for the spoken word. You create a new sales dialogue, test its "conversion rate," and if it's better than before you adopt it into your routine.

The biggest thing you can test, other than written advertising, is the exact words you use when talking directly to a customer. This field is called NLP or sales scripting, and to learn some of the best NLP ideas for bonding with customers and ultimately selling more, I'm directing you to Kevin Hogan who has done more to simplify this field than anyone else I know.

Lastly, pick up Donald Moines' book on amazon.com to help me feel I've done all I can to teach you about Sales scripting.