Starbucks’ “The Way I See It” campaign has been one of the best examples of “influence” I’ve seen. It’s another way for Starbucks to add to the experience and give someone one more thing to look forward to when they get their cup of coffee.

What are you doing to subtly influence others?

Clients love to set you up and get you to “do some groundwork” first before deciding on moving forward with you. They want to see a proposed strategy or outline first of the work you’ll do for them, or maybe have you “just do a preliminary plan” first.

Don’t fall for this trap. You’ll wind up doing work you should be getting paid for.

Instead, use the little used “Let’s Pretend” strategy, often taught by students of Sandler training.

Here’s an example of a prospect requesting you do some “groundwork” first:

Prospect: “I’m really impressed with what I’ve heard so far. I’d like to see a preliminary plan and strategy for the next six months, along with some costs and timeline for completion.”

Do not simply agree to this! Instead, play “Let’s Pretend.”

You: I’d be happy to work on a preliminary plan. Let’s pretend for a moment that when I come back with our preliminary plan, you are completely comfortable with our approach, the estimated costs are within your budget, and the completion dates meet your deadlines. What would happen at that point?”

In a matter of seconds you’ve done all the “groundwork” and the “preliminary plan” form them, at least virtually.  If the prospect isn’t wiling to make a committment to an action, you probably shouldn’t committ to doing the work. Unless you are charging for it.

Getting paid for your efforts isn’t something new.  It should be part of your strategy.

I was on a sales appointment today that lasted just over an hour.  I spoke for less than 10 minutes of it.

I asked a few questions, commented on a couple of things, and asked more questions.

The prospect answered the questions, elaborated on the answers and talked, and talked and talked. During this talking I uncovered his pain points, his areas of need, the consequences he’s facing if he doesn’t use our serve, how he makes decisions and his motivation strategies. For our next appointment, I’ll know exactly what I need to present and focus on.

NLP teaches you how to listen with fresh ears, to hear sentence structure and pay attention to sequence – not just what they are saying (content).

If prospects are interested in buying your product or service, they will usually tell you what it will take to close them. All you have to do is get them talking about their needs, shut up and listen, and then explain how your product or service fills their need.

How many times have you read this? Yet, it’s been my experience most salespeople don’t do this because they don’t have any good questions prepared and they don’t shut up.  Salespeople get too anxious and excited to share their product and service that they jump into the presentation.

What (good) questions are you asking your client prospects to get them to talk? What’s your ratio of listening to talking? What could you do to improve this?

What’s your best price?  What’s it going to cost?

What clients really want is extraordinary quality, service convenience, and value. They want to work with a salesperson who can save them time and make there life easier.

Yet many clients end up buying price, and do you know why?

Because they find it so difficult to find all that other stuff.

The single biggest reason a client will buy price is that far too often it is the only alternative that you leave them with.

There really isn’t just one governing body with a universal list of established competencies that one has to demonstrate in order to “earn certification” in NLP. There are several certifying organizations and they all have their own criteria for “NLP” certification.

This means there are many different levels of “NLP Practitioners” out there claiming different levels of expertise and competency on the subject.

Of course anyone can read a few books on NLP and then call themselves “practitioners” and even a “NLP trainer.” Why not?  Here is the shocker: Some of these people may actually be better NLP Trainers than those who have gone through many weeks, even months of NLP training with a certifying organization.

How could that be so? Because the real test of NLP is application in the real world. Using it to better your life and those around you and getting results.

In my case, I studied with Steve Andreas and his training team at NLP Comprehensive 15 years ago, and to this day there is much of what I learned during that training that has impacted my life and career.

I have since studied with NLP Co-Founder Richard Bandler and John LaValle and feel strongly they have the best set of standards for measuring a person’s competence in NLP and I’m confident they wouldn’t recommend someone who didn’t have skills. I also learned a great deal from Rex Steven Sikes, a master trainer and now performing mentalist. They provided the more advanced foundation for my NLP learning experience. Their certifying organization and one I recommend is the Society of NLP.

The rest came in applying NLP in the real world. In my case, in business and life.

But none of that training would matter if I didn’t use it. I’ve witnessed (too) many people who have studied NLP, attended all the training’s and yet still don’t advance in their skills or application of NLP to business and life.

As a business practitioner of NLP and Trainer, I’ve been training managers and salespeople each year how to improve using NLP methodology. From this comes a new attitude, new approach, and new techniques they apply to growing their business. This application of NLP has also kept if fresh for me. It’s helped me grow as a trainer and expand my knowledge base of NLP.

I believe there are MANY different levels of NLP Trainers out there (despite how much training or how many years of courses they’ve attended).  I’ve met some trainers (and watched NLP trainers on video) who claim they are “experts” on NLP but they bore the socks off of you in 5 minutes because they don’t know how to manage their own state.

I’ve met others who are passionate about what they are teaching, and have demonstrable knowledge of NLP in the words they use, and the state they are in when you are with them.

My recommendation is to train with a trainer who makes you feel good. A trainer who appears motivated and can motivate you. A good indication of their ability to be effective training you, is to take a look at how they’ve advanced their life (personally and professionally) using NLP – if they can do it, you can learn (model) it from them.

NLP places a lot of emphasis on values. Although the process of eliciting values is relatively simple, it does require some verbal dexterity to do it well, with rapport and grace.

When you are trying to uncover and reach people at deeper levels, rapport is required and maintaining rapport during “tough questions” is sometimes not the easiest art.

The process is simple and like many NLP patterns, are never only what they seem. There is alway more to it.

There’s really only one question to ask, but for variety you can create as many different versions of this question as possible.

So what’s the question?

Question to elicit values:  “What’s important to you about ________?”  or “What’s important to you in a ____________?”

When they answer, you can laterally chunk by asking “What else is important?” This will give you additional values.

You can also chunk down by asking, “What’s important to you about that?”

Another way to say it is, “What would that do for you?” or “What would you get out of that?”

This line of questioning will help you dig deeper, particularly when their answers are big chunks.

If the word chunks is grossing you out, chances are you haven’t studied a lot of NLP yet. Chunking refers to the level of detail (big chunks, little chunks).

I also like to end with the question, “Is there anything I’ve missed?” Customers will answer this, particularly when there has been something on their mind they haven’t got to tell you yet. This is when it’s unveiled.

On a future video, I’ll give examples of how this line of questioning sounds – because tone is everything in maintaining the rapport.

NLP was originally co-founded by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. While many years ago their partnership split and went different ways, they both still continue to train others in NLP. I’ve trained with Richard Bandler and highly recommend him and his partner John LaValle. His style is much different than Grinder’s as you will hear, see and feel in these videos responses.

NLP Co-Founder John Grinder answers the question, “What is NLP?”

NLP Co-Founder Richard Bandler answers the question, “What is NLP?”