The Business Growth Blog by Rob Cuesta

You owe it to your customers to close

At a networking breakfast this morning I told the group at my table a short story about one of my clients. Like many professionals, he hates to sell. I observed one of his sales meetings, at his invitation, and I was shocked to see him go all the way through flawlessly, explaining his unique value propositions, clearly differentiating himself from his competitors, and using all the NLP skills I'd taught him to get the prospect to the brink of signing, and then he opened his mouth and uttered that awful, awful phrase "well, I expect you want to take this all away and think about it".

Do Your Targets Hear The Sizzle?

There's an old advertising adage that says "Sell the sizzle not the steak". In recent years, it's been distorted and misapplied by less scrupulous ad-men, to become "sell the sizzle, and forget the steak". marketers have taken products with little or no real value to the consumer and hyped them up just to increase the price. It's the basic premise behind the book "Never Mind the Sizzle...Where's the Sausage?" which I reviewed last year.

Of course, one of the common misconceptions people have about personal branding - and branding in general - is that it's ALL about the sizzle, so I thought this afternoon I'd look at the world of sizzle and steaks.

NLP, sales and the fine art of leveraging social media

Recently I’ve been thinking about how the world of selling has been turned around by social media.

Marketers have developed a number of models to describe the process that buyers go through internally before they make a purchase, and one of the most commonly cited is the ‘AIDA’ model:

·         We build AWARENESS of our product or service

·         We do something to spark the prospect’s INTEREST

·         As they find out more, they start to DESIRE our product or service

·         Finally they take ACTION by buying

It’s the same process whether we’re selling a lawnmower, offering legal advice, or asking someone to hire us. Social media have added a new layer to this, because we can now tap into what happens AFTER the sale:

Stories to build your career

I'm a great believer in the power of stories and metaphors as a communication medium. For marketing and job search, stories are an essential tool for illustrating your skills and your personality, as well as your experience, and effectively communicating your personal brand.

The main problem, though, is that many candidates struggle to make their stories engaging. Just how do you make the everyday minutiae of your job into a compelling tale that will keep the recruiter listening?   

Personal Branding and NLP

Inevitably, over the last few weeks I've been pondering on the links between Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Personal Branding. I've met people who believed the two were incompatible. If you think that NLP is about 'fixing' people then I suppose it would seem odd to compare it to Personal Branding, which is all about "authenticity" and "the real you".

If, on the other hand, you see NLP as a set of tools for developing greater understanding of yourself and of others, then it's application to Personal Branding becomes a lot more apparent.

NLP - blowing my own horn

OK, I finally got there. After almost 10 years of using NLP both professionally and personally I have been certified by the Tad James Company as a Trainer of NLP, so watch out here on the blog and on my website for announcements of upcoming training courses (or read the main post for a sneak preview of what's coming up).