The Art Of Changing Meaning To Make More Successful Sales

The art of changing meaning to make more sales is what NLP reframing can do for your marketing. When you reframe an experience, or desire for a product you can make your feelings more positive and productive. Helping a client find a better frame will make him or her feel much better about doing what you recommend. Used in a sales context this can mean the difference between being turned away and making a sale.

If you think back to the post on presuppositions you will remember that a person always makes the best decision they can based on what they know at that time. The object of reframing is to change that context so that their decision is still the best one they can make, but based on a different set of assumptions.

Reframing is going on in the world all the time

Politicians are masters at reframing in order to produce a positive ‘spin’ on what they do or offer
Jokes are often based on a reframe where the humour comes from shifting to another point of view
Fairy tales are used to help children reframe and see different consequences
An excuse is a reframe to get you out of a bad situation

We will look at a number of ways of achieving this and through practice these will become a useful tool.

AS IF

Using the ‘as if’ frame is a way of shifting beliefs by exploring possibilities that would otherwise not been thought about. When you are working with a client, building rapport and helping them towards a positive decision for your product you could use the following ideas a nd ways forward. We can say

Lets do this as if …………. (something has changed)

TIME SHIFT

In this way you step forward 6 months to a time when the problem has been overcome and ask what was done to make this possible. So if your client has a situation your product can resolve, invite them to step forward and think about what they did to make this happen.

PERSON SHIFT

You pretend you are someone else and try to work out how they would see the situation. This can demonstrate how differently and perhaps positively another person could handle a problem or situation.

INFORMATION SHIFT

Now you ask yourself if you knew everything you needed to know to sort out a situation, what would that knowledge be and how would you handle it?

FUNCTION SHIFT

Your fairy godmother can now wave her magic wand and sort everything out to clear a bottleneck or resolve a difficulty. What would change to make this happen and how would it affect the outcome?

There are two main ways you can make a reframe work.

CONTENT REFRAMING

This is the process of making a negative experience into a positive one by changing the meaning of what has happened. Any event can have many meanings depending on where you are standing and how important it is to you. By focussing on a more useful meaning can be a way of steering around problems and objections.

Usually you will do this by asking a question

‘What else can this mean for you?’

‘How can we turn this to your advantage?’

CONTEXT REFRAMING

The way you or anyone else reacts to an experience or set of criteria will depend on the context in which you see it. Sometimes you will look back on an experience and say

‘That was the best thing that ever happened to me’

even though at the time it was something to be endured. In a different time or place, what feels unacceptable now may seem completely different and much more useful.

For a context you must ask yourself

‘Could there be another time or place where this would be beneficial?’

For example, if you were thinking about launching a new product or service when the economy was in recession you could context reframe by thinking about being much stronger by being started now and positioned well for the future. That may be quite relevant in today’s economic uncertainty.

We can learn context reframing to empower our clients and ourselves. It is possible to create resourceful meanings to all experiences by thinking about how they could be useful, helping us and others to reach goals.

VALUE REFRAMING

In brand management and marketing terms value reframing means giving a new value to a product/service by finding a new market/context.

STRUCTURE OF REFRAMING

The NLP technique of reframing a behaviour breaks down into 6 steps.

You must identify the behaviour you want to change in you or a client
If it is your behaviour try and locate why you are thinking this is the right thing to do
Look for a positive benefit from the behaviour because remember people make decisions for the right reasons
Try and think of other ways of dealing with things that will produce a positive result
Choose the best 3 alternative ways of dealing with it
Check to see if there are any conflicts in dealing with your chosen way forward.

Then just go ahead and adopt the new frame with its positive outcomes.

REACTIONS

When you use reframing on your clients there are a few rules you should be aware of

Make sure you have their rapport and trust before you attempt it
Just because you think what you are suggesting is the best reframe it does not necessarily fit into their map of the world.
By presenting your reframe as a metaphor or story it is more likely to have an effect than if you present it as a fact.
You cannot impose your reframe on someone else because it must come from within them to be useful and it is their choice that they want to make it.

Next week you can read a guest post from Jon McCulloch, an expert marketer and copywriter, when he rattles cages and raises eyebrows by what he says about NLP in copywriting. You will be sure to get the post if you have subscribed to the RSS Feed.

Reframing is a powerful tool when used in the right way. It can open doors and make good progress with clients. The art of changing meaning to make more sales is a skill you should develop and use in your business.