Yet when you start to deal with the big players and big deals, sounding genuine and authentic is the *only* thing that works. All top sales professionals and wheeler-dealers know this.
Duane Lakin has come up with the first training and language system I have seen that will improve your effectiveness selling to anyone. I know because I've used his techniques with large-dollar sales and seen my results improve. I've also reviewed all the other sales trainers who use NLP as part of their method. Some are very good, but no one comes close to Duane in terms of a transparent, deceptively simple set of methods you can quickly learn and use.
One thing that's great about his book is he also shows you how to apply NLP to telemarketing and writing sales copy. I don't know of anyone else who's done that.
A lot of people interested in sales and NLP think something has to be flashy, complex and technically overwhelming to be any good. As someone who makes his living because of the results he gets, I can tell you that just the opposite is true. Fortunately, this book contains what you need to get better results and still come across like a human being. That's rare and extraordinarily valuable.
The book is one of the best I've read on the communication aspects of NLP. It doesn't go into the personal development/
therapeutic aspects of the field, but that's not it's objective.
It contains plenty of examples and exercises to help you learn the skills, and presents them in an easy-to-read style, unlike too many other NLP books, so you don't have to be an NLP dictionary to read it!
As well as covering face-to-face selling, it also includes chapters on presenting to groups, selling by direct mail, and through telemarketing. On a personal level, I've got alot of experience in call centres (indeed I'm based in one now, even though I work in ecommerce), so I found the section on NLP and telemarketing of particular interest. As far as I know, no-one else in NLP has written about this aspect of the sales process at all.
On top of the behavioural aspects of the sales communication process (language patterns, matching and mirroring, etc), Duane also writes about the psychological aspects - learning how your customer will give you clues about their thinking that makes it
easier to ensure that you present your idea to them in a way that makes sense to them. This makes it easier to close the sale.
Other sales books present a process for selling - do this, get this, offer this, get the signature. This book (and NLP in general, I think) go beyond that by saying that no matter what step-by-step process you use, there are certain underlying skills that will make you much more effective. By increasing these skills, not only does it make your sales procedure more effective, it also makes you more flexible in trying other approaches. This can only increase your ability as a salesperson.
All in all, this is an excellent book - easy on the brain (not too much jargon), easy on the eye (good quality presentation and layout), and easy to put into use.