Duane Lakin - The Unfair Advantage: Sell with NLP!

D r. Duane Lakin is a psychologist and business consultant. A graduate of the University of Minnesota, Duane has over thirty years of experience serving business leaders as an industrial psychologist. Prior to that, he was a clinical psychologist and school consultant.

Since the mid-1980s, he has been looking at ways to make NLP (neurolinguistic programming) useful to sales people. Sales representatives have told him clearly that they are not interested in touchy-feely theories or complex analytical approaches to selling. Having worked for three decades in the business arena as a contributor to the hiring process for sales people, managers, and executives, he has seen ample proof that selling is hard enough without making it more difficult. At the same time, he has discovered that few sales people are trained in how to sell themselves and how to use language to increase their effectiveness.

His workshop, The Unfair AdvantageSell with NLP!, has been presented to representatives of over 750 companies in the U.S., U.K., Russia, Hungary, Italy, and Canada. His research and consulting in NLP applications to telemarketing are unique in the industry. He has trained managers from companies such as Xerox, PacBell, Andersen Consulting, American General, Cable and Wireless, Hewlett Packard, GE, and many others. He has written or contributed to articles in Selling Power, HR Magazine, Production and Inventory Management, and Sales and Marketing Excellence. He has also talked to many professional organizations on NLP as well as interviewing skills. He is a recipient of the TEC 200 and Vistage 100 Achievement Award designations for outstanding resource speakers to TEC (now called Vistage). He is also a member of the National Speakers Association.

This book, based on the workshop, is consistently the top rated book on NLP for sales. You can read the reviews at Amazon.com . It has been translated and published in Romanian, Polish and Spanish languages. An audio version of the original edition of the book is available as is a video of a live workshop.

Dr. Lakins new series of ten online (on-demand) advanced lessons can now be seen at www.SellWithNLP.com . Each lesson covers the skills needed to be more effective in each stage of a typical selling cycle from how to get invited to meet with a prospect to handling objections or matching a proposal to a client. The first lesson can be viewed at no charge. He has also launched a new series called The Ten-Minute Advantage that introduces one skill at a time in a short ten-minute on-line lesson.

Lakin Associates

25W484 Flint Creek Road

Wheaton, IL 60189-7373

630-871-2996

www.SellWithNLP.com

Public Workshops

Customized In-House Workshops

On-Line Workshop

This publication is the property of Lakin Associates and protected under the copyright laws in effect in 2012. It contains ideas and information that are considered to be of proprietary nature and interest to Lakin Associates. No reproduction or redistribution of the ideas and descriptions contained herein are authorized. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the author.

ISBN 978-0-9679162-4-8 (Revised Edition)

eBook ISBN: 978-0-9679162-5-5

www.SellWithNLP.com

T he Unfair Advantage: Sell with NLP! is not a book about NLP. It is a book for sales people who want to have an advantage in everything that they say, write and do.

This book is for sellers. It is for people who want to find an edge--an advantage in the field. Much of The Unfair Advantage: Sell with NLP! is based on NLP skills, which is why NLP is in the title. But NLP is much more and much less than what is seen in this book. The techniques and skills here have been fine-tuned by me for the last 30 years for only one purpose: to help sales professionals be more effective and successful.

All selling is personal. People do not buy from companies. People want to talk to people they trust. People buy from people. The person who can sell himself or herself most effectively has a distinct advantage. The Unfair Advantage: Sell with NLP! teaches you how to be more effective in selling YOU and controlling the selling process.

The Revised Edition has two new chapters: Handling Objections Without Losing Rapport and Mindsets (Metaprograms). There has also been some minor tweaking and an attempt to catch typing errors in the previous edition while making new ones in this one. The Revised Edition has also been reformatted to allow it to be printed as an e-book and to be sold for a lesser price. In this way, I hope to expand the audience and give more people an advantage.

I hope you find the Revised Edition helpful. If you already own the original book, unless you specifically want the e-book format, I would not recommend that you buy the Revised Edition. Instead, contact me, and I will send you the two new chapters.

Good reading and enjoy the advantage.

Duane Lakin, Ph.D.

Wheaton, IL

www.SellWithNLP.com

It goes likes this. Lets see now: Protect me from knowing what I dont need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I dont know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen. Thats it.

Theres another prayer that goes with it...It goes, Lord, Lord, Lord...Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. Amen. from Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams

The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange proteinit rejects it. P. B. Medawar

B ut this isnt what they taught us in marketing! This was the cry of a participant in a recent The Unfair Advantage workshop. She was having to come to grips with the fact that the world continues to change, and she must change her view of how to sell to that moving target. And so must you.

You are entering the era of the market niche of one. Instead of trying to focus on a broad marketplace, you must know how to sell to a specific individual, one who may be talking to you right now in Chicago or reading your ad in Poughkeepsie or Winnipeg. You must be prepared to respond to what is unique about every individual you meet every time you get an opportunity. Tried-and-true approaches that rely on rigid scripts or general marketing assumptions about customers are not flexible or powerful enough today to get the results you want. If you want the unfair advantage, you must learn to gather new information and use that information effectively.

Now more than ever, the customer has enormous control. The customer has access to more information than can possibly be processed. You must compete with all other possible activities and interests of the customer, not just with similar products or services. When someone can watch any of 500 television channels on a 24-hour basis, read instant news or stock reports from a computer screen, choose which ad to watch on television or which player on the football field the camera will follow during a game, or turn to a home shopping network and buy next weeks wardrobe, the concept of selling must change. The message you send to differentiate your product or to make you stand out as a sales person must be personal, flexible, inviting, and designed for one rather than for many. More than ever, you must sell YOU, and the message must get through the clutter and noise of all the other messages in the air.

The Unfair Advantage is the ability to sell YOU.

This book is the result of twenty years of practicing and teaching some basic principles of persuasive communication. During my career, the techniques I used to accomplish my goals were called several names, depending on what I was doing at the time: