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.

NLP is full of fancy jargon, and you need a glossary of terms when attending a NLP Practitioner Training just to make sense of it all. “Presuppositions” are no exception, even though most think they know what it means.

Presuppositions are simply the linguistic equivalent of what most people call assumptions. But with a little more art and science to it when used on purpose.

Whenever we are communicating, we use presuppositions that assume something is already true; every sentence we speak in our everyday life has a presupposition in it. In most cases, we tend not to consciously recognize what we have presupposed, and instead concentrate on what is directly stated. Thus, presuppositions are unconsciously accepted as being true and the listener will act as if they were true.

Naturally, that’s the powerful part.

Think of it like this. Every sentence you speak contains a noun and a verb, so, with each sentence you speak you actually presuppose that something exists (noun) in the past, present or future.  You also presuppose that some action did or did not take place, is or is not taking place, or will or will not take place.

Great salespeople know how to use this to their advantage.

Some of my favorite “presuppositional” categories are:

Cognitive qualifiers: “Surprisingly, interestingly, amazingly, fortunately, luckily, happily, curiously, uniquely, naturally, obviously, etc.”  Everything that follows this word is assumed true as the focus is on the word (the cognitive qualifier) that starts the sentence assuming it so.  For more info on Cognitive Qualifiers – click here.

Presuppositions that shift space (in the mind of your prospects): “Along side of that, stacked on top of that, in addition to that, adding to that, instead of that, in front of that, inside of that, outside of that, behind that, underneath that, between that, above all that, etc.”

Presuppositions that shift time (in the mind of your customers): “look back on, in the future, right now, before, once, look ahead, finally, after, long awaited, everlasting, accelerate, presently, yet, carry through, then, when, now, etc.”

Presuppositional words that say something is factual, actual, or the truth: “actually, genuinely, unquestionably, surely, certainly, proven, obviously, self evident, valid, absolute, clearly, surely, naturally, etc.”

Presuppositional words of power: Realize, aware, notice, discover, uncover.

Future posts will have some examples of these, but this should get you thinking and more importantly, creating.

The short answer is yes. Watching (and learning from) this video below, you will quickly see why he’s one of the most successful actors of our times. I invite all NLPer’s to listen to his language patterns, where his focus is, notice his physiology, and perhaps the most important thing to model is his attitude.

I state frequently in my blog, the gift that Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) gives us, is the skills to model successful people and their patterns. That is where NLP got it’s roots. Too many people think NLP is just about using the techniques and forget that it’s more than that. It’s an attitude towards discovering and learning how to achieve excellence. From that will come the methods, the techniques.

While most people know that movies such as “I am Legend”, “Ali”, “Hancock”, “The Pursuit of Happyness”, and “Hitch” helped make him one of the highest movie grossing actors, Entertainment Weekly recently named him one of the “Top 15 Entertainers of the Decade.”

Following a customer presentation gone south, have you ever found yourself saying things like, “They took me the wrong way,” or “They just didn’t understand what I was trying to say,” or “They didn’t get it,” or “The misinterpreted what I was meaning to say,” or “They were looking at it from the wrong perspective,” or “They misunderstood the presentation,” etc.?

My guess is from time to time, we’ve caught ourselves saying this and thought nothing of our own reaction.

One of the more valuable presuppositions taught in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is that the meaning of your communication is the response that you get.

If I asked you, do you like to be in control? What would your answer be?

My guess is your answer would be “yes.”

Most salespeople like to feel somewhat in control of their situation. If that is the case for you, why would you forfeit control to your customer by allowing the blame to go to them for misunderstanding you?

While it can be fun to point the finger or blame someone for “their misunderstanding” of what we were “trying” to communicate, it’s not useful for improving our communication.

If instead you adopt this empowering self-responsibility mindset of “the meaning of my communication is the response that I get”, you will find that it puts you in control of changing the outcomes.

I encourage you to approach each sales presentation, each customer encounter with this mindset, always asking what you could say different, how you could position your product in the way they will understand it best, based on how they buy, how they make decisions, and based on how they interpret the value best.

]]> http://nlpdaily.com/nlp-for-selling/feed 1 http://nlpdaily.com/we-cant-pay-attention-to-everythingbut-we-can-pay-attention-to-more http://nlpdaily.com/we-cant-pay-attention-to-everythingbut-we-can-pay-attention-to-more#comments Thu, 17 Dec 2009 21:12:39 +0000 Joe Soto http://nlpdaily.com/?p=271

While the concept of change blindness suggests we can’t pay attention to everything and all details, we can pay attention to more.

More meaning, what’s in front of you that means something of value in interpreting, understanding, and reading them.

NLP encourages us to pay attention to more and form (calibrate) meaning from what we hear, see and feel when communicating with each other. In all of my client training’s, the most popular topic is developing sensory acuity and developing our ability to notice things we may not have consciously or deliberately paid attention to before.

This video really gets interesting 1 min 30 seconds into it.  Would you notice if someone changed their shirt in the middle of a conversation with you? Would you notice if someone changed into another person, in the middle of a conversation with you? Are you sure? Enjoy, Joe

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) gives us amazing linguistic ingredients for crafting our language with purpose in front of each customer we approach.

What type of language shifts submodalities and uses presuppositions of TIME?

from now on, then, when, while, endless, everlasting, prolong, past, yet, stop, still, in the meantime, in the future, long waiting, look back, before, after, once, anytime now, now, finally, presently, elapse, accelerate, and the list goes on.

Example: “After you see the results, you’ll look back feeling even more confidence then you did when when the decision was made.

What type of language shifts submodalities and uses presuppositions of SPACE?

in front of, along side of, in place of, above, aside from, in addition to, below, increase, instead of, disappear from, between, closer, behind, bring forward, against, beside, bigger, blow over, across, in back of, bring together, add more, inside of, and the list goes on.

Example: What if you could see along side of every problem is a solution, in fact many solutions?

Resource Book: An Insiders Guide to Sub Modalities

Watch this video -- all of it. You will be shocked (and shouldn’t be) by what you see. And by what other people don’t. The concept of change blindness (not being aware of big changes right in front of our eyes) is fascinating. A big part of NLP study is learning how to pay attention and developing your sensory acuity skills. Some people have a long way to go as you will notice (I hope) in this video. Enjoy, Joe

Realizing there are a lot of “general” NLP Blogs on the Internet, I decided to start one specifically centered around applying NLP to business.

Joe Soto

I’ve been studying NLP since 1992.

When I learned of NLP I immediately went to the bookstore to find any books on the subject. I found two that looked strange but claimed to be about NLP. One was Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming by Richard Bandler and John Grinder and the other was Using Your Brain–For a Change: Neuro-Linguistic Programming by Richard Bandler. Both were edited by Steve Andreas as the material was taken from live workshops on NLP.

My sister happened to be visiting me during the time I purchased the books and I immediately walked her through one of the excercises in Using Your Brain For a Change. The excercise was the Swish Pattern. She told me she had a habit of over 30 years of biting her nails and she’s always wanted nice nails.

So I told her that I was going to help her overcome that habit. I had her close her eyes and I read the steps in the Swish Pattern to her. I didn’t know what to look for, I was clueless to calibration. I simply asked her how she felt afterwords and she said, “Great.”

With no formal training, and only steps outlined in an excercise in the book, I was able to help her achieve her desired outcome. It’s been 17 years since then and everything I see her she shows me her nails.

This was enough to convince me there was more to NLP than I had originally thought and it became the trigger point for my now 17 years of studying and applying NLP.

I’ve since studied under the direction of people like Richard Bandler, John LaValle and Steve Andreas, just to name a few. I earned my NLP Practitioner through NLP Comprehensive and my NLP Master Practitioner, NLP Trainer, and DHE (Design Human Engineering) certification throught the Society of NLP. 

My applications of NLP have been primarily in business and more specifically in management and sales.

It’s my hope to share these applications and insights I’ve learned over the years and to learn from the readers in return.

Enjoy,

Joe