Solutions Vault Book Review

The title, ‘Why People Don’t Buy Things’, written by Harry Washburn and Kim Wallace, caught our attention as it asked a different question about buying motives – a question we have not heard very often. While it is easy to look for the many reasons why a person DOES buy a product or service, this book sharply identifies the communication that turns a potential buyer into a lost sale. These communication turn-offs are not based just on language, they are connected to the type of buyer to whom one is selling. Through understanding of the buyer, and a focus on specific communication styles this books redefines how each conversation can be tailored to answer the unspoken questions of various types of buyers.

Three Buying Profiles: Three Languages
The following is an excerpt from the book found on pages 20 and 21.
This section introduces the three buying profiles that characterize to ‘whom’ we are selling a product or service.

“To build rapport and gain prospects’ trust and confidence, you need to “speak their language.” And to speak their language, you need to know what mode or profile they use to view the world. In the mid-1970’s at the University of California at Santa Cruz, researchers Richard Bandler and John Grinder discovered through an analysis of the practices of highly successful psychotherapists they people internally “represent” the world about them in one of three different profiles. The most successful therapists were instinctively communicating with their patients in the same profile their patients were using. Although these successful therapists had personal communicating styles of their own, they willingly abandoned these in favor of their patients’ styles. They intuitively used the same verbal and body language used by the patient. This built rapport and increased the patients’ trust and confidence in the therapist. As a result, the therapist was much more likely to produce positive changes in the patients behavior.

Bandler and Grinder called their system Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP, and it has become an important part of therapist training over the years. One of the most engagin books they’ve written about NLP (it’s actually a transcript of NLP training workshops they conducted) is Frogs Into Princes, published in 1979. NLP has since grown into a highly successful sales training technique, with an emphasis on specific ways to establish rapport and build trust and confidence with prospects in a variety of selling situations.

In this chapter we take the NLP approach further, by showing you how to very quickly and accurately identify prospects by one of three easily remembered buying profiles: the Commander profile, the Thinker profile, and the Visualizer profile. We’ll show you how to immediately identify these profiles by verbal language and eye movements, with further clues from your prospects’ body language and physical body type, the clothes they wear and how they wear them – even their office environments. Then we show you how to mirror their verbal and body language to rapidly establish rapport and build their trust and confidence in you. In following chapters we show you a completely new and very powerful way to use buying profiles. We will show you which categories of sales points will be more persuasive for each buying profile.

This excellent book goes beyond some the basics of building rapport, and dives into the messages we are sending, without knowing it, that are turning away even the most interested buyer. Through a five-step process the authors take the mystery out of the selling and align action with specific and observable behaviors. This book also does a great job of putting the sales person in control of one thing – themselves.

Selling is an art, and this books provides additional tools that make it a quick read with readily applied methods for connecting with every prospect in a personally relevant manner.

Inspired? Learn More Here ->

DARE TO BE GREAT!
Your LQ Team