Selling With NLP

Author: Kerry L. Johnson
ISBN: 1857880471
Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing

When it comes to sales people there are two main types, those that believe in win/win selling and the ones who don’t get my money; and hopefully have bad things happen to them.

“Selling with NLP” (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) aims to provide salespeople with the skills required to increase rapport with their clients and help them understand the customers needs rather than just the wants. It does this by presenting a number of practical examples and anecdotes from within the sales process.

It’s coverage spans from the basics, working out your customers preference for having information presented in an visual, audio or kinesthetic style through to the different closing styles. I was quite surprised to find that this book provides a better introduction to NLP than most of the NLP books I’ve read do. While most books on NLP are too academic, this one provides enough real world relevance, especially if you are actually in sales, to keep the reader interested.

Unfortunately any tool can be used for either good or evil and so I approached this book from a different angle to most readers. After one too many meetings with salespeople from enterprise software companies who all used the same tired hooks and had been through the same basic training I decided to broaden my understanding of NLP when used in sales and ended up inadvertently enjoying this book. While it’s not the most interesting of reads it is well paced and clearly written. Although the tone of the text is a little too American it does present the principles of NLP and how they can improve your sales performance in an easy to digest way.

Summary: A decent book and a good, concise, introduction to some of the more important parts of NLP. 6/10