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What are the business benefits of NLP?

Chris Harrison - December 2007
©2007 PlanetNLP Ltd

Customers

The most important aspect of any business is its customers, and these days customers seem much more aware.

People do not take out a mortgage or pension product and then sit back for 25 years; Most don't even keep the same electricity supplier for more than a couple of years.

This means that businesses have to work much harder to gain and keep their customers.

With profit margins squeezed tight the difference between companies often comes down to the less tangible elements of the service provided.

It is not enough simply to get the sale, the customer must feel that they got a good deal with an organization they are happy dealing with.

And in business, your reputation usually only comes from one source.

That is satisfied customers.

And while it is true that all organizations make mistakes from time to time, whether you can keep a customer or not depends on how you deal with the issue.

A company that screws up but acknowledges the fact may find that they improve their relationship with the customer more than if they hadn't screwed up in the first place, as long as the customer is made to feel valued.

One of the most important elements for dealing with customers is listening and communicating in the right way.

For instance, if a customer says “I just don’t feel that this is the right car for me”, then responding with "but doesn't it look just great" is not going to resolve the issue.

This is due to the fact that she is talking about how she feels.

How can you possibly "see" what she means?

Read how to utilize sensory language for an explanation.

In fact, sales communication is an absolute minefield.

There there are many areas of communications that can be improved simply by learning about the kind of distinctions to make and words to listen out for.

I have covered a few of these in the How do I Improve my Sales with NLP article

Improving your ability to pay attention to other peoples language, in this and other ways, will help limit problems caused by miscommunication throughout your organization.

Another useful skill is rapport. Many customers will buy from you simply because they like you.

Learning about rapport will ensure this happens more often.

Your Employees

The same kinds of language and rapport building skills used with customers are very useful with other members of staff.

NLP also has many persuasion techniques that can be subtlety be used to move employees in the right direction, and its always useful to be able to motivate them

Dealing with yourself

As well as motivating your staff, learning how to motivate yourself can have a huge impact on your ability to work well for extended periods of time.

Using NLP to improve your confidence, presenting skills, and general tone of voice can have an amazing effect on the perception of you within the workplace, with the people you work with, and with your customers.

A company full of professional, motivated people has huge advantages.

Conclusions

The use of NLP within the Business environment is as limitless as the imagination of the practitioner. There are many possible NLP business benefits.

Many NLP companies offer two forms of the NLP business training; There is the standard NLP Practitioner course aimed at the therapist, then the Business Practitioner which is more about the persuasion and language skills.

For further information on using NLP within a business environment read How do I improve my sales with NLP.