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Guest post by: Christine Sutherland Become an Author

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In our sales training programs, we spend a great deal of time teaching our students how to detect and respond to specific motivation patterns that are known in NLP as “meta programs”. These little beauties are like a set of directions for the way we engage in the behaviour that we do, the way we make the choices that we do. And of course the choice to buy or not buy is one which is crucial to the success or otherwise of the sales professional, so one thing every sales professional must make it his/her business to know, are the meta programs.

Although all the meta programs are dead simple to grasp, we like to start with the “away from/towards” meta program because it’s just so darned obvious, and often it’s also the “clincher”!

Away From/Towards Meta Program

People who are motivated “away from” have their attention on the thing they wish to avoid. They make progress by moving away from problems, painful feelings, or situations of disadvantage. These people often plan well for contingencies!

People who are motivated “toward” have their attention on the benefit, gain or advantage of the thing they wish to acquire. Whilst they tend to be goal driven and are unlikely to procrastinate, they may not see the pitfalls along the way!

These are the extremes of “away from” and “toward”, and most of us are somewhere in between.

Case Study

Madeleine was a sales manager of a team of 8. Times were tough and the team was struggling, so Madeleine decided to “motivate” the team by offering bonuses for higher sales.

Consequently 2 members of Madeleine’s team actually got higher sales. 2 were unchanged, and 4 actually got worse! What happened?

The answer to this puzzle is easy once you understand that each of us is motivated away from pain and toward pleasure. However, we are motivated in different proportions of “toward” and “away” and individuals have a “critical point” along a continuum which is their prime motivating point. The 2 members who improved were almost entirely “toward” motivated, meaning that they were easily inspired by reward. The 2 who were unchanged actually needed to have a little “pain” built in.

Without that, their motivation “recipe” wasn’t quite right. The 4 who got worse would possibly have improved if no bonus were offered, but instead the consequences of failure were made very clear!

Are you wondering if you can be clever enough to quickly sum up your potential client’s motivation style when it comes to this particular meta program? I assure you that it’s very easy, and you might like to test this out with family and friends, just to prove to yourself how easy this is.

Make a list of people that you know, and spend a few minutes rattling through and deciding to yourself whether they are away from, toward, or something in between. Most people are amazed to discover how obvious it is once they give it even a modicum of thought!

I’ve seen people charging many thousands of dollars for this type of training – I hope this brief exercise will show you how quickly and easily you can learn and make use of meta programs like this one.

Make sure this important aspect of NLP is thoroughly addressed in any sales or communication training you undertake.

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