NLP for Sales Managers

There are many benefits of NLP for Sales Managers, therefore I wanted to write this article in order to help Sales Leaders decide if it’s a worthwhile investment. I have worked within sales environments for approximately fourteen years and always had management responsibility during that time. NLP Training was an incredibly valuable investment for me however I didn’t understand the benefits of the investment at the point of booking, so I thought I could write an article to bring to life with NLP for Sales Managers.

I have seen NLP increase sales performance by 95%. It’s incredible what can be achieved when your team have empowering beliefs and advanced communication tools at their disposal. The job board Monster has written an example of a Sales Manager job description which shows the key skills and attributes that highly paid Sales Managers need. You can access their example job description here.

The great news is that NLP can help with nearly everything listed in the criteria. If you want to improve your skills and abilities as a Sales Manager, NLP can equip you with leading tools to significantly impact your personal and team performance. Forbes have an article highlighting the best qualities in a Manager. One of the descriptions they use is “positively contagious”. When you have NLP tools available to you, you will know how to get the best out of people and therefore optimise positivity which breeds success. You can read the Forbes article here.

What are the benefits of NLP for sales teams?

Extracting the right information

It’s widely understood that one of the essential sales principles is establishing need before presenting solution.In my experience, many sales professionals can fall short when establishing the need. As soon as they get some information, they can move on to the close, yet what matters is if they have the right information. NLP provides deeper questioning techniques that enables sales professionals to extract everything they need to know to win the customer.

NLP Strategies enables sales professionals to establish the three of four ways that the customer needs to receive the information in order to buy. This can be established through language and also through eye patterns during face to face sales meetings. To find out more about NLP Strategies you can read more here. NLP Values elicitation is another questioning technique that enhances the consultative quality of the sales process, understanding what is important to customers at the deepest level. To find out more about how to use language to extract customer values you can read more here. Using these powerful tools will improve conversion rate and speed up the turnaround time from enquiry to sale.

Adapt your communication to your customers

More and more sales teams are utilising NLP as a method of speaking the language that will most appeal to the customer. When you present information on your products or services using the language the customer enjoys most, their system will be lighting up as they hear what you have to offer. The NLP tool that’s used for this is NLP Predicates. We have representational systems that receive external information and make meaning of it internally, the internal response can alter significantly through each system. It is said that we all have a preferred system through which we like to receive information. NLP Predicates provides the different language that appeals to each system empowering us to become flexible and powerful communicators.
You can read more about NLP Predicates here.

Getting the mind-set right

Sales Managers are responsible for driving results and creating high performing teams.
In my experience of working with under-performers and elevating their success, the causes of under-performance are mostly in the mind-set. You can give sales professionals all the skills in the world, yet if their values are beliefs don’t set them up for success, they won’t believe they can use those skills effectively. NLP is extremely powerful for leaders, as it provides a set of tools and techniques to have a profound impact on motivation and engagement.

Using NLP, you can get to the root of the under-performance and provide transformational change, altering the perceptions, beliefs and emotional reactions.
When you cause this change to occur, your team can operate at their best without unnecessary blockages. They can go from strength to strength feeling resourceful, empowered and successful. There are a variety of NLP tools that help you develop winning mind-sets in your team, however the techniques which I have found most powerful for sales environments are:

NLP Anchoring, you can read more here.
NLP Reframing, you can discover more here.
NLP Meta Model, you can learn more about that here.

If you would like to understand more about how NLP helps performance management we have an article on this here.

I hope this article has helped you get an insight into NLP for Sales Managers, if you would like to find out about NLP courses you can access dates and pricing here.

NLP for Sales Managers, by Natalie Rea, HR Consultant and Master Practitioner of NLP