Managing great sales professionals involves three components. Sales managers need to know how to sell; how to create a model of a sales process so that it can be replicated or improved; and how to motivate top sales professionals. Each of these requires unusual skill in observing and analyzing human behaviour and offering feedback in ways that builds agreement.
Let's begin with the first of the components: knowing how to sell. It is deceptively straightforward; after all, most sales managers begin as competent sales professionals. They can sell. Does that mean that they know how they achieve results?
Studies suggest that human beings are quite bad at attributing our own success to factors that could be proven or replicated. As much as we might want to teach someone how we do what we do, often we simply do not know where the leverage points are in our own process.
One reason for this is that our most precious neurological resource is attention. Conscious attention is resource-intensive within the brain and is reserved for new or dangerous experience. Anything we can manage on 'automatic pilot' is done without conscious awareness. When a pattern of behaviour is effective, we stop being aware of it. We simply do it. This has enormous benefits in terms of human learning and behaviour. It also has the significant drawback of making us strangers to our own processes. It takes conscious attention - and even struggle - for us to become aware of what we do and how we achieve our results.
NLP provides processes for 'modeling' - for creating a conscious model of how an individual thinks and acts in order to consistently produce a particular result. These processes can be used for modeling oneself or for modeling other people. In general, they involve paying deliberate and detailed attention to multiple channels of behaviour and communication, replicating them, and then eliminating some of them to ascertain which are necessary in order to replicate the result.
It might sound dry as dust: in fact, NLP includes how people perceive the world through their senses and their emotions as part of how they achieve their results. Although this was distinctive when NLP began, it is now a standard belief in neuroscience that emotions and sensory experience are essential components of thought and decision making. Learning to be aware of one's own feelings and perceptions in a rigorous way is like turning up the volume or the brightness. The world suddenly becomes a much more vivid place.
Sales managers who practice NLP are more likely to model their own sales process with enough detail and accuracy that it can be replicated by their staff. That can be a huge advantage in terms of producing consistent results and consistent motivation. But it is only the beginning of the role modeling plays in sales management.
Far more importantly, sales managers become able to model the sales process of their top performers. They literally become able to see components of the process which are 'invisible' to those professionals themselves. They can become adept at identifying the leverage points that result in positive change for the top performers and for other members of the team. NLP practice allows sales managers to take best advantage of the best practices within their staff and to ensure that it is replicated consistently enough to maintain results even when there are changes in personnel or markets.
Finally, the ability to replicate models involves the ability to communicate and motivate. NLP modeling processes not only apply to skills: they also apply to the emotional developments which allow those skills to be used to best advantage. Managers skilled in modeling can learn to notice how people are making the decisions to be engaged, collaborative and successful. With this information, they can begin to communicate in ways that elicit those kinds of responses.
In practice, NLP trained managers are skilled at helping their staff be at their best: they build dynamic agreements using patterns of language, structure and nonverbal behaviour. These dynamic agreements allow sales professionals to perform at their best, to work effectively with colleagues and clients, and to feel great about what they are doing. NLP builds the agreements that build sales forces.
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