Neuro Lin­guis­tic Pro­gram­ming or NLP is based on the fact that all humans have the same basic neu­ro­log­i­cal system.

The neu­ro­log­i­cal sys­tem trans­mits infor­ma­tion that you receive from your envi­ron­ment through your senses to your body.

The envi­ron­ment in this sense means not only those things which are most obvi­ously exter­nal such as build­ings, or other peo­ple but also means your organs, such as your stom­ach or your eyes.

Your brain receives infor­ma­tion. This infor­ma­tion is processed and then mes­sages are trans­mit­ted to your organs. Not only this, but the infor­ma­tion that you receive will cause you to feel a cer­tain way. It can make you feel joy, laugh or cry.

NLP states that your abil­ity to do any­thing in life that you want to do, be that run a marathon or talk in front of a class, is depen­dent on how you respond to exter­nal fac­tors through your ner­vous system.

NLP is based around com­mu­ni­ca­tion. It is about how to com­mu­ni­cate more effec­tively with your­self and with others.

NLP And How To Prop­erly Uti­lize The Tech­niques To Make More Sales

The NLP prac­ti­tioner has a cer­tain approach when it comes to mak­ing sales. In essence the approach is about build­ing a rela­tion­ship first and then mak­ing a sale.

You should ask your­self, what is more prof­itable? Mak­ing one sale through hard sell­ing tech­niques, burn­ing your client out, and never sell­ing that per­son again. Or is a bet­ter approach to develop a rela­tion­ship with that per­son, find­ing out what they want and what their prob­lems are, and then pro­vid­ing a solu­tion to their problems.

By build­ing a rela­tion­ship with your clients you will be able to sell them your prod­ucts and ser­vices mul­ti­ple times. Over­all devel­op­ing rela­tion­ships and address­ing the actual needs of your cus­tomers is both more prof­itable and straight out less work.

The tech­niques that NLP can teach you, will help you to instantly cre­ate rap­port with the per­son that you are talk­ing to. This is a big plus because we tend to buy things from peo­ple that we like or that we feel are like us.

As a sales­per­son you will often encounter peo­ple who are quite dif­fer­ent to you. The fact is that not every­body thinks the same way you do. But that’s fine. You don’t even have to like the per­son you are talk­ing with to cre­ate rap­port if you use NLP. You also may only have a very small win­dow to sell some­thing to that client. This is where being able to cre­ate rap­port quickly is so impor­tant for sales.

Once you are in rap­port with some­one, you will then have the oppor­tu­nity to cul­ti­vate a rela­tion­ship with them. But the first step to sales is always to cre­ate a rapport.

Rap­port is essen­tially about cre­at­ing a two way con­nec­tion with some­body. It is about estab­lish­ing a gen­uine level of trust and respect between two people.

How To Cre­ate Rap­port With NLP

One of the best NLP tech­niques to cre­ate rap­port is known as match­ing and mir­ror­ing. This NLP tech­nique involves copy­ing someone’s behav­ior and val­ues in order to form rap­port with that person.

You have prob­a­bly seen plenty of exam­ples when peo­ple are not in rap­port. Watch for exam­ple a panel dis­cus­sion where one per­son holds con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal views and the other lib­eral. You will see that they are cer­tainly not in rap­port with each other. The way they talk will be dif­fer­ent, the pitch of their voice, their body lan­guage and of course their val­ues couldn’t be more different.

Then watch a cou­ple who are in love, and the way that they relate to each other.

There is an effort­less­ness to peo­ple who are in love in the way that they move in sync with each other. When one goes to hold the other per­sons hand, it is right there wait­ing for them. They talk eas­ily and com­fort­ably with the other per­son, and noth­ing seems forced.

The whole point of rap­port build­ing with NLP is that you don’t have to be in love with the other per­son in order to com­fort­ably engage with them. You only have to match and mir­ror their behav­ior. One of the best ways to match and mir­ror some­one is to first mir­ror their body lan­guage. While you don’t want to be obvi­ous about this. If the other per­son notices you mim­ic­k­ing them, then rap­port will def­i­nitely be broken.

You can push this fur­ther than you might imag­ine using NLP prop­erly.

Peo­ple don’t think much about their own body lan­guage. So if you observe them, and then start to sub­tly copy them, it is very unlikely that the other per­son will notice. Remem­ber the match­ing and mir­ror­ing tech­nique always begins with observation.

Once you have started to mir­ror their phys­i­cal behav­ior. Notice the tone of voice and speed at which they speak. This is very impor­tant because if you are a per­son who talks very loudly and your cus­tomer talks very qui­etly it is easy to upset them. It is up to you as the sales­per­son to adjust your behav­ior to theirs.

If this both­ers you, remem­ber that there is real power in this approach.

Would you rather be effec­tive and suc­cess­ful? Or act the way you always do and be unsuc­cess­ful? I would say that a suc­cess­ful sales­per­son will choose the for­mer every time.

So alter first the vol­ume you are speak­ing to match the other per­son. Then either speed up or slow down your speech so that you are speak­ing at the same speed as the other person.

Once you have estab­lished the same body lan­guage and speech pat­terns as the cus­tomer. Next you want to mir­ror their breathing.

There is some­thing very impor­tant about breath­ing that reaches us at a very prim­i­tive level. If you are breath­ing in time with some­one you are almost cer­tainly in rap­port with them. Along with this you want to match the other per­sons over­all energy lev­els. If the other per­son is highly ener­getic then you may need to up your own energy lev­els. Gen­er­ally with sales peo­ple it’s the other way around. You are a bun­dle of energy and the cus­tomer is more reserved.

Slow your­self down and oper­ate at the customer’s energy level.

The great thing is once you have cre­ated rap­port with some­one using these NLP tech­niques, you can start to lead the other person.You must make sure that you have actu­ally estab­lished rap­port before you begin lead­ing. Once you have that rap­port, you can start to con­trol the flow of the conversation.

Exper­i­ment with lead­ing by alter­ing your body move­ments and see if the other per­son fol­lows you. If not you may have to build fur­ther rap­port before you can lead.

Cre­at­ing rap­port with NLP is an excel­lent way to estab­lish a rela­tion­ship with some­one. Match­ing and mir­ror­ing is a pow­er­ful tech­nique you can use to speed up the process. Remem­ber how­ever that there are ways beyond NLP of cre­at­ing rap­port too.

Observe the words and phrases that the other per­son uses and try and build these into the con­ver­sa­tion. Also it is impor­tant to take a gen­uine inter­est in what the other per­son is say­ing. Try and under­stand things from their point of view. It is vital that you under­stand the client before they under­stand you.

One key to doing this is learn­ing how to pace. Pac­ing is about keep­ing in step with the other per­son. It is about really lis­ten­ing to them and see­ing where they are com­ing from. You need to be patient with peo­ple. Don’t try and force your opin­ion quickly upon them because it won’t be effective.

You also need to be respect­ful of your client’s time, their rela­tion­ships and their money.

Some Final Words On NLP

Using rap­port can help you to estab­lish a rela­tion­ship with any­one. This will greatly increase your chances of estab­lish­ing work­ing rela­tion­ships with many dif­fer­ent peo­ple and as a result increase your over­all sales.

Remem­ber to cre­ate a rela­tion­ship first, and then sell. The impact on your sales from using NLP prop­erly, can be mas­sive. Learn more…

About Rod­ney Brooks

Owner / Founder / CEO at eBiz Profit Media. Main­te­nance Mechanic / Elec­tri­cian / Indus­trial Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­trol Tech­ni­cian. Writer, Pub­lished Author and Entrepreneur.