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.

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.”

NLP opens up people’s ears and eyes to listen differently to how their words affect other people. It was Herbert Spencer who said, “How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.”

Don’t think of your car.  Whatever you do, don’t think of your car. Stop thinking of what your car looks like even.

By now, you are probably saying something like, “Well, stop saying the word ‘car’ and I’d stop thinking of it.”

Exactly.

Your mind MUST think of your car first in order to understand what NOT to think about.  Just the mention of a word causes your mind to think and picture the word, first for understanding of the sentence.

The word “NOT” can be the most dangerous word you ever use, or one of the most powerful words you ever use in a selling situation.

Ask yourself, are you using your “NOT’s” constructively and persuasively instead of in a way that gets in your way of success?

How often have you overheard a salesperson (or yourself) saying, “You don’t have to worry about that with us.”  Here are some other statements that hurt a salesperson’s success.

“You won’t have that problem with our customer service.”

In order for your customer just to understand that sentence, they have to imagine either 1) having that problem in the past with a past service provider and then they are linking that possibility to you or 2) having that problem with you in the future if they decide to buy from you.  While they’ll do it very quickly and unconsciously, remember, you are determining what representations they have inside their minds.

“We aren’t one of those companies that are here today and gone tomorrow.”

This time your prospect may go into their past experience just to reference a company like that in order to understand that sentence.  Then the prospect may say something like, “I dealt with a company like that before.”  And then if you are really stumbling, you’d say something like, “Well, we’re not like that”, which is essentially saying you are.

So how can we use the power of negation with our sales prospects?  Stay tuned for Part 2.