Can hypnosis make you a better sales person? The short answer is yes, but as you'll see in this post (and accompanying video), hypnosis is not mind control. It's just a tool for elegant communication. Like any tool, it can be misused. So please act ethically.
The Principles of Hypnosis Applied to Selling
Because hypnosis is not mind control, you can't just make someone do something based on magical words. But the key principles of hypnosis still apply.
Let's go through a few of these principles.
- Rapport: This should be obvious! Mike Mandel says "In the presence of rapport you can do the near miraculous with another person. In the absence of rapport nothing really works". People are much more likely to go along with ideas when they are in rapport with the person who presents the idea. Read: NLP Rapport – The Proverbial Glue To Honest Connection.
- The Mandel Triangle: You must ensure your communication is congruent, confident and delivered with intention. This is further explain here. If you're selling something that you truly believe delivers amazing value to the customer, it becomes very easy to deliver a congruent and confident message. It's easy to deeply believe the client will buy from you because it's in their best interest.
- Yes sets and compliance sets: Always get people to agree with simple things to establish a pattern of agreement. Then ask someone to do simple things, as per your instructions, in order to establish a pattern of obedience. See our post about yes sets and compliance sets for sales. This is particularly powerful when done in the presence of strong rapport.
- Use language to evoke useful emotions: Conversational hypnosis is all about using your words to elicit an emotion in another person before you offer a suggestion. In sales, the suggestion will be to buy something. What emotional state might be useful to elicit so that the other person wants to buy? We can deliver facts, tell stories, or ask questions that seed emotional states in others. Read: Conversational Hypnosis Techniques and Principles Made Easy.
Here's a fun video to explain all of this. After you watch it, we're offering you some simple language patterns below.
Simple Hypnotic Language Patterns
There are so many powerful language techniques you can use to increase your hypnotic power. Here are a few as outlined in the above video.
- The quotes technique: You can say anything to anybody if you're quoting somebody else. This is a fabulous way to directly say what you need to say, but package it as if someone else said it. This overcomes resistance. An old friend once said to us, "This is such a powerful technique!"
- The double bind: We also call this "the illusion of choice" because you're presenting someone with two options. Both choices result in something that you want to have happen.
- The presupposition: This means that some aspect of a sentence must be considered true for the sentence to make sense. If we ask you, "Where do you plan to install this new TV?", we are presupposing that you're going to buy it because that has to happen in order for you to install it.
- Embedded commands: This is a clever way to drop a command into a sentence. The idea is to mark out the command slightly differently such that the listener doesn't consciously notice, but gets the message unconsciously. We've got a separate blog post about embedded commands.
There are many more awesome hypnotic language patterns you can learn. We teach these inside of our flagship training, the Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy. It starts with a free trial.
AND we have something we call "hypnotic language in a box". It's an ordinary deck of playing cards with a twist. Each card teaches you a snippet of hypnotic language. We ship these all over the world and they come with free training videos. We also give away the PDF version of these cards to members of the Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy. Sign up here.
