Coffee's for Closers

19Selling with NLP

‘Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it’.

—Lou Holtz

What Is NLP?

It's only been around since 1970 and seems to appear more and more in sales. Many people have different interpretations of what NLP is, but it's an understanding of the mind. Let's first look at what the words ‘neuro linguistic programming’ actually mean:

1. Neuro (brain)
2. Linguistic (language)
3. Programming (patterns)

The difference – why are some people competent and others exceptional at doing something?

Most exceptional people are unaware of what makes them special, and this is called unconscious competence – NLP makes you aware of why you are exceptional.

Richard Bandler and John Grinder created it in the 1970s, and they discovered that people have three basic methods of perceiving the world around them: visual, auditory and kinaesthetic (VAK).

Please answer these 15 questions in a VAK survey I got from Kerry Johnson’s book Selling with NLP, and the answers to these will determine what your preferred method of communication is, as we all have one, even though we use all three.

Before taking the test myself, I knew I was a visual, I just didn't know it was labelled this way. I knew I was visual because whenever someone explains things to me, I automatically visualise it in my mind. If you ask me a question about my past, I will recollect some images of my past and would be able to recall specific details, such as the location, the colours, etc. Once I understood that ...