Coaching, hypnotherapy and goal oriented programmes are used very successfully with individual sales people or groups to help accelerate a salesperson’s performance. Sales techniques can be reviewed to identify areas for improvement and new or enhanced behaviours can be implemented.
Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy and traditional Hypnotism can be highly effective in helping sales staff deliver business consistently with a high degree of predictability.
This works well for those who whilst being well trained, motivated and selling a good product are under-performing. It works with issues such as:
- Loss of focus or motivation
- Procrastination and task avoidance
- Reluctance to phone or call on prospects.
- Performance anxiety or fear of presentations.
- Over preparation for meetings.
- Stress caused by unrealistic demands for success.
- Lack of confidence with senior level customers
- Reduced self worth
Hypnosis Facilitated Selling
With ‘Hypnosis Facilitated Selling’ I use a variety of hypnosis based tools and techniques to assist sales people to deal with the above, meet or exceed their goals and achieve their ambitions.
One of these is a Goal Directed process during which goals and targets are identified and visualised, then these are integrated with the consistent activities necessary to achieve the goals. The combined result is then integrated with the immediate tasks required to get the whole process started.
I also routinely teach clients and groups self hypnosis, so that they can reinforce work done with me and for other purposes.
Client examples
1) This client experienced a 35% increase in activity rates (outbound calls, meetings and proposals) with an increase in closed business after only 6 sessions.
He was employed as a sales manager for a UK based software company. He had lost focus on his goals and as s result had become anxious and found himself engaged in doing tasks and activites which were irrelevant or inappropriate to the job of selling software.
The process included a review to try to identify the reasons for the problems he was experiencing and some initial hypnosis to overcome some general anxiety issues. The 3 step Goal Directed protocol was then used to identify and hypnotically instal and integrate his goal with appropriate regular activities and immediate tasks.
It also incorporated the teaching of techniques for relaxation and preparation for calls and presentations.
Finally the client was taught self hypnosis so that he could continue the work between sessions and after the programme had finished. As well as the improved performance the client also reported a much better mood and level of motivation.
2) A second example is that of a partner manager working for a large software company whose anxiety caused him to lose confidence in his abilities and fear for his job.
Whilst still focused on his work goals his perfectionism meant that whenever he felt he might miss his target he became distracted and would ignore the regular tasks required for his job and find other non-related things to do. This also caused problems with his peers and management.
Following a short course of 3 sessions of hypnosis, he was able to put his demand for perfection into perspective and regain his focus, motivation and ability to get the job done.
Summary observation
What is interesting about these cases is that both clients were experienced and well trained sales professionals who experienced these problems after years of success. For some reason over a period of time they lost focus and direction.
The resulting anxiety was damaging to their work performance as well as their general emotional and psychological health.