Referring back to my last post on Intention you may have noticed that the language patterns were structured in the form of questions. A large part of our day-to-day thinking involves the activity of asking questions of ourselves, and can be a very effective way to direct our thinking, activate latent unconscious resources, and gain access to the more intuitive part of ones self. If you've ever heard someone say something like " The idea just popped into my mind", or " it came right out of the blue", when they were in the process of deciding something, you can be sure that it was preceded by a lot of thinking in the form of questions that for the most part was outside conscious awareness.
The strange thing is that we are already familiar with this style of thinking but we usually engage in it in negative and non-productive ways. Do any of these sound familiar:
* Why does this always happen to me ?
* Why can I never get anything right?
* How could I be so stupid?
When we ask ourselves these kinds of questions we always get an answer, and if we do it often enough, it erodes our self-esteem and our natural self-confidence gets extinguished.
Now I am going to give you another example of how to apply the strategy of using questions. Think of some situation or event coming up where you would like to influence someone, or some situation more effectively. It could be a sales call, an interview or asking the boss for a raise.. and when you have identified one consider it using the following steps..
* What specifically do I want to achieve? What outcome am I after?
* What does the other person want? If I don't know, then what may he possibly want?
* What is the least I will accept ?
* What problems could arise during the course of this process and how will I deal with them if they do?
* How will I bring this process to a conclusion?
Some of you may recognize this as a Sales Technique taught on many training programs, with Step 4 Dealing with Objections, and Step 5 Closing the Sale. This strategy works really well when you keep the steps in mind as a set of attention points, before as well as during the Sale.
The Selling process may be where this strategy is normally used, but you dont have to be negotiating big business deals in order to make use of this technique. I have also used this approach when in the buying position to negotiate deals and get significant reductions in the cost of items I have purchased. I remember once when I first began using these ideas I was negotiating for a friend who was buying a lovely but very over-priced electric guitar in a big music shop. Now, I had a good idea what the guitar was worth having played them for years, and I was looking for the best price I could get. I had spoken earlier to the salesman and recognized immediately that he was eager to please, and so when it came to the time to buy he was the natural choice to negotiate with. I approached the guy, told him we were interested in the guitar and asked him straight off what he could do. The Salesman went over to dicuss it with the Manager, they would whisper to each other, look over at me, then whisper some more, and then the Salesman would return and give me a price. It went back and forth a number of times like this, and each time he came back with a price I knew there was still room to manouver based on his body language and other non-verbal signals he was giving off. He went on to tell me this was a very special, famously branded guitar and that was why it was so expensive, and I had to remind him that it was just a piece of wood with strings and dials and that it was just gathering dust hanging on the shelf that it takes a great guitar player to make a guitar special.. in fact a great guitar player could make a banjo sound great.. (by the way I mean no offence to banjos).. also this was midweek and the guitars weren't exactly flying off the shelf. On it went like this a number of times and eventually it came to a decision time..so I made him an offer that was well below the price tag, but also leaving plenty of room for him to come back with a 'best price' somewhere in between, told him we were going to lunch and would be back later with cash, and he could think it over. I also let him know there were a number of other music shops in the area, and we would be taking a look in them just to get a little bit more leverage. When we returned after lunch he made an offer that was a massive reduction on the original asking price.. one that I must say surprised even me.
Now inside that story at all times I was conscious of the 5 Steps in the Strategy outlined above, as well as using number of other NLP/Persuasion techniques while continuing to adjust to feedback. This may not work every single time, however it pays dividends to have your homework done before you enter the persuasion process. Now more than ever, opportunities abound to get a better price on products and services, especially big ticket items. In the current economic climate, businesses are having to compete harder than ever and are usually more than willing to negotiate on price etc.
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