Everyone Has a Buying Strategy
One of the most useful techniques in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is the science of eliciting and using your prospect’s buying strategy, because a person’s buying strategy affects far more than just the way in which they decide to purchase an item in a shop. This technique is helpful when you are attending a job interview, communicating an idea, delivering a presentation, or trying to persuade someone to take any action.
Your buying strategy is the series of actions and events that need to happen to take you from the idea of ˜possibly’ purchasing any item, through all the research, investigation, trials, and discussion right up to the point where you actually complete the transaction and exchange money for the item. Some people have very complex multi-step buying strategies, others have quite simple ones, and the same strategy usually applies to any item, whether it is clothing, cars, software, holidays, or houses.
One of our students learned about buying strategies during her NLP Practitioner Training and decided to test it out at a meeting the following morning. She arrived at the cafe just after her prospect and noticed the new jacket on the back of his chair. By the time the waiter arrived to take their order she had elicited his buying strategy and by the time their food arrived he had already signed the contract to work with her. All she had done was to feed him her proposal according to his own buying strategy and his resistance crumbled.
Does NLP Take Magical Insight?
Not really. NLP simply uses the basic human desire we all share to be understood and spoken to in our own language. The ability to determine your prospect’s buying strategy is the critical difference between the excellent salesperson who continually exceeds their targets and the average salesperson who struggles every month and quarter to reach their targets.
At its heart, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is about building better relationships with others and helping them get what they want. It’s relatively simple to determine one person’s buying strategy and sell to them using their preferred sequence, and it’s not too hard to do the same thing for a small group of individuals who share a common purpose (eg. An organization’s board, or a committee) as long as you can determine their individual buying strategies, but what happens when you are speaking to a whole auditorium full of people, or a group of faceless people on the other end of a webinar?
Using Buying Strategy in a One-to-Many Presentation
In this scenario you are speaking to many individuals each of whom is making an independent buying decision and you are unlikely to have the chance to speak to them one-by-one. You could simply prepare your presentation, cover as many objections as possible, then ask for questions at the end, but that would be fatal! You might make some sales, but you are unlikely to get the massive stampede of sales or other ˜buy-in’ that you are hoping for.
Did you know that there is an essential structure to any successful presentation that speaks to all the different aspects of a buying decision? This framework is particularly important in a setting where you cannot tailor the presentation to specific individuals and it must address all the representational systems, the logic behind the decision, the emotional satisfaction that the outcome will deliver, the process through which you take both the prospect and the buyer, and several other important aspects.
In a one-to-many presentation you must clearly cover many types of buying strategy. The most successful stage presenters in the world (those who attract the highest sales figures or ideological agreement) as well as the most successful webinar presenters use NLP techniques whether they call them that or not.
I was talking with a student at a recent NLP course and he said, “As we went through the material, I suddenly realized how many of the people I most admire use NLP techniques even when they call them something different. In fact, as we started several topics I caught myself saying, ˜I already know this!’ But then we went to the next level of depth in each topic and I realized how much more there was to learn even after the pre-study material.” It’s true. These days most marketing courses advise students to create their own ˜catchy titles’ for concepts which already have names, and the superficial levels of NLP are amongst the techniques most commonly borrowed and taught. Motivational speakers, high performance trainers, and sales trainers are often using and teaching thinly disguised NLP techniques, sometimes without even knowing where they come from.
If you’re looking for a course that will help you to learn the theory of NLP in depth and then provide you with extensive practice at using the techniques and observing their effects, then the TJC Practitioner and Master Practitioner courses are incredibly thorough and taught by the pre-eminent trainers in the industry. These courses provide a solid preparation for usage in the real world and enable you to understand how different people respond and what to look for during your presentation. The next level is the Trainers’ Training course, which teaches you how to specifically structure your presentation for groups and influence an entire room or webinar.
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