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This post is all about some basic principles and 5 ways to get your sales moving up. In NLP there are a number of what are called presuppositions. The meaning of the word ‘presuppose’ is to ‘assume beforehand; and these can represent some of the most powerful of language patterns. We all use them and they are built into the structure of the English language. It is almost impossible to utter a sentence of any consequence without making some kind of assumption - or use of presupposition.

If you use these presuppositions in your understanding of what makes your customers buy then you will certainly be able to get them moving in the right direction. Have a look at each one of these. A couple apply first to your way of thinking about things and they all affect the way your customer sees the world and his or her decision making. Today we will just hear them, maybe for the first time, but further down the track we can develop them into strategies and presuppositions that make a lot of sense.

1. The Map is Not The Territory
Every second of our lives, millions of bits of information from our world are streaming through our five senses of hearing, sight, taste, touch and smell. They stream into our minds, but only around 7 bits get consciously registered. NLP says that we cannot truly know the world as it is, not only because our awareness is limited, but even that tiny bit that gets in we experience through the conscious and unconscious filters that we have, like our beliefs, values and states.

Because everyone experiences the world differently, we say that the map is not the territory: I have a different experience of reality than you do, and it’s not about being any more right or wrong than you are. In NLP, we only ask if the current map you have is the most useful one for you right now and the one that can produce the best results for you. NLP doesn’t say that our beliefs are necessarily true, but we pre-suppose that they are. In NLP, whether a belief is true or not is not as important as whether or not it is useful.

When we accept the map is not the territory we can begin to understand better the different ways our customers think about things. We can also learn how to make any contact we have with them appeal to their senses. This will be covered when we talk about VAK rep systems.

2. There is No Failure Only Feedback
There is no such thing as success, failure, happiness, depression, or good taste.. These things are just convenient labels we attach to make sense of how we feel. Your subjective experience of failure or happiness is quite different from mine. All these feeling states are subjective processes, not things that we do. We don’t do happiness, we feel happiness. Failure is not a thing, like an apple is a thing.

This means that everything is feedback or a learning experience. In sales you will often face rejection, which if you see it as failure can be very depressing over a long period of time. There are ways to deal with this that we will cover in later posts.

3. The Meaning of Your Communication is the Response You Get
Do you remember a time when you were sure you were being totally clear in what you said or wrote, but the other person heard or understood something else? One way to deal with that is to assume (pres-suppose) it was their fault they didn’t get it. So that way nobody got anything.

Another way is to take responsibility and wonder how else you can say it so they will get it much better instead. By using this approach you become more responsive to feedback and flexible by adapting to change. The person who is most flexible in any situation is the one who will achieve what they want in life.

In marketing this is an essential message to understand and communication is at the heart of what we do.

4. Every Behaviour Has A Positive Intention
The most controversial and easily misunderstood of all the Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) presuppositions is that every behaviour has a positive intention. Every behaviour you, I and everyone else engages in, has a positive intention behind it, even destructive behaviours like abuse, violence, and drugs. Believe it or not, Hitler, Pol Pot and other historical tyrants did the things they did for positive intentions. Their behaviours had a positive intention, but it was only positive for them and their cohorts in a selfish way, and nobody else.

This is true of suspects and prospects who think of buying your product or service. Whether they buy or turn you down, now or in the future, their decision will have a positive intention.

5. People (Prospects) are Always Making The Best Choices They Have
A person always makes the best choice they can, given their map of the world. The choice may be self-defeating, bizarre or evil, but for them, it seems the best way forward. Give them a better choice in their map of the world and they will take it. Even better give them a superior map with more choices in it. That may be a difficult concept using only virtual communication, but with face to face it can be achieved over a period of time.

This is true for your prospects as they make a decision to buy. The other important factor in all decisions is timing and we will be looking at decision making in more detail as the journey continues.

I hope you can see from this framework that the way we talk with and expose prospects to our product is an important part in the process of buying. Their attitudes and opinions may start in one way and be influenced by what we say in making a decision. Doing that right is the best way to get your sales moving up.

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Tags:   behaviour · Communication · failure · nlp · response · sales · territory2 Comments