When you think of marketing and sales, there is more than just making your product/service more attractive than your competitor. We already know it’s about making it appealing and building a reputation for quality and value in the market place so you make that sale. All these things are important of course, but the main issue here is to make sure your marketing is engaging and your sales people know how to talk to a customer. You would be surprised the number of large corporations that dish out marketing with little or no consideration for this important element. Even if the product/service is top notch, looks and sounds great etc. ….
Conversation/engagement with the customer is what makes the sale.
In these days of online everything, the engagement trail needs to start from the first encounter with your company. My father always said that first impressions count for a lot and he was absolutely right!
So lets bypass the usual stuff that you already know and delve a bit deeper into language, how people operate and their preferences. ……
People basically process information in 3 different ways. They are either ….Visual, Auditory or Kinesthetic(emotions). Taste and smell come into it a little but let’s keep this simple.
Visual people like strong colourful branding, glossy pictures and photographs, clear signposting, not too much text clumped together and strong visual words.
Auditory people like sound, can cope with wordy things, love catchphrases, mission statements and jingles. They like to read up on things and respond well to auditory words.
Kinesthetic people like to feel good, engage with their emotions and need to know what it will feel like to have this product/service. They respond well to lots of feeling words and emotional visuals.
(See word type examples below for each processing type)
Most people will lead with one of these main 3 and have another as a close second and the third will be there but just operating in the background. For example Visual and Kinesthetic with a little bit of Auditory or maybe Auditory and Visual with a little bit of Kinesthetic.
If your marketing people (who typically are quite visual/kinesthetic) are habitually producing material unconsciously geared to their own processing style, they will be losing one third of their audience by accident. All those strongly auditory people will not be offended of course, but they will scroll up, move along to the next supplier, go elsewhere because the language/information format will not match with their processing type, so they will unconsciously not engage!
In a nutshell, in order to create that engagement from the get go, it’s important to remember that all marketing material works at optimum when all 3 processing styles are included.
Let’s talk about face to face sales. How many times have you been speaking with a client/customer who seems ok, desperately needs what you are offering, and you can’t seem to get that conversation to flow. It’s all clunky and you can’t establish rapport properly.
We’ve all been there and it’s baffling, isn’t it?
These are the reasons ….
Firstly, it’s most likely because you have a different processing style to the other person as mentioned above.
The secret here is to check out what you personally do. (Just take a look at the lists below showing examples of the kind of words used in each processing type and you will know which list resonates with you the most). Remember you will naturally use one of the 3 processing types as a preference and another that’s a close second. Just add in some words that are of the third processing type, that you don’t fully resonate with, and you will be amazed the difference it makes.
For example. I am Visual/Kinesthetic so where this happens to me, I would just add in some Auditory language to the way I speak and check out the change.
Examples of Visual Words …
-
Colourful
-
Bright
-
Large
-
Glimpse
-
Bulky
-
Long
Examples of Auditory Words ..
-
Quiet
-
Discussion
-
Negotiate
-
Sound
-
Echo
-
Loud
Examples of Kinesthetic (Feeling) Words …
-
Sense
-
Meaning
-
Exciting
-
Useful
-
Inspire
-
Frustrated
Secondly, listen to the tonally marked words the client/customer is using and make sure you use them back in the conversation. This way the client/customer will feel understood, that you are on the same page, and they have been heard.
For example. Your client/customer might say “Its really important that I RESPOND quickly to my messages and provide EXCELLENT customer service”
Your conversation should include those exact words and not substitutes you might prefer. So don’t say….
“Reply” instead of “respond”
or
“really good” instead of “excellent”
It will show them that you don’t understand, you aren’t listening, and you don’t really see what they might need. Using the exact tonally marked words eg. RESPOND and EXCELLENT in this example, will make a huge difference!
All this language runs unconsciously of course, and this is where the NLP model makes marketing and sales super effective and ahead of the game.
Thirdly, lets talk Meta programs.
There are quite a few but I am going to talk about the ‘Towards and Away’ Meta Program that is the most common.
Do you ever notice that some people will tell you all about what they don’t want, and most of their conversation is about that. While others will be really clear about what they do want and what they are looking for.
This is because some people are running an ‘Away from pattern’, focusing on what they want to avoid happening again and others are not even giving that topic head space because it’s all about the goals and the next move, which would be the ‘Towards pattern’
So to match them in the way they operate, it’s about noticing that particular trend in their conversation and making sure you cover it in yours.
For example, you wouldn’t talk solely about all the amazing benefits of your product/service to an ‘away from’ person without peppering it with what it avoids. If you forget to do that they will disengage!
Likewise, you wouldn’t talk about all the problems your product/service avoids to a strongly ’towards’ person, it would just bomb!
These are just a few of the language models used in NLP.
In Conclusion …
Whilst there is so much more I could talk about, these are just a few of the language models used in NLP.
A little NLP knowledge makes all the difference and of course takes some practice. However, embracing just some of these language skills will make everything in your marketing and sales be much more effective.
Leave a Reply