NLP At Work : The Difference That Makes the Difference in Business

in some areas of your life or work, in order to use it in other

contexts. Let's suppose you are influential when dealing with

colleagues but don't have the same level of influence with

clients. You could model yourself in order to discover the

difference between the two, so that you can use your influence

in whatever context you choose.

One company that employed a telephone marketing team could

not understand why there was such inconsistency in the results

it was getting with some of its telemarketeers. With some clients

they were very successful and were able consistently to convert

a call into an appointment, but with others they struggled to get

past the first few minutes of the conversation. What the

company discovered when it modeled what was happening with

these calls was that the telemarketeers were building mental

images based on what they had heard from others in the

company about the different groups of people they had to call.

One of the biggest differences between the successful calls

and the unsuccessful ones was connected with the mental

image the caller had in their mind as they made the call. For

those that were most successful the caller imagined the recipient

of the call in a light room, brightly lit. The image was vivid and

in color and they imagined the other person as smiling. (This

was entirely in their mind as they never saw the people they

phoned.) For the ones that were unsuccessful the callers

typically imagined the recipient of the call as being in a dark

room, the image was defocused and gray in tone, and the

person had a serious expression on their face. All this before

they had even dialed the number!

By modeling the successful mental strategies they were able

to train the previously less successful marketeers in these

thinking techniques. The average conversion rate of call to

appointment increased significantly.

We achieve the results we do through the programs we run in

our minds and in our actions. Just as computer programs are a

sequence of codes, so personal programs are a sequence of

158 NLP AT WORK

Strategies