NLP offers a wonderful method for understanding the people around us and their preferred way of taking in information and decision making. We all came out of the womb with only our senses to guide us. VAK stands for visual (seeing), auditory (hearing), and kinesthetic (feeling). Simply put, we all make decisions on what we see, hear, and feel in different order. One of these senses usually becomes our dominant representational style from the time we are quite young and never changes.
My mom recently bought a car. She had been thinking and talking about it for a while, so I really wanted to understand her VAK process.
Spending a week in Kansas with her naturally brought out my inner sleuth. Once you learn about VAK, you can’t help but be curious about people’s style and family is a great place to practice. I now share with you some of my Columbo moments. My mother and I are two distinctly different representational styles, so here is an interaction we had on the front porch last night.
Mom: “It’s so quiet out here tonight, I can’t even hear any traffic. The birds are singing but I usually hear more traffic than this. I can’t even hear the trucks on the highway.”
Me: Not talking, just looking in the trees for the birds singing.
Mom: “It’s really quiet. Oh, I heard some geese, did you hear that? And I can hear someone flying one of those model planes.”
Me: “Close your eyes and you can hear the birds.”
You see, my mother is auditory and I am visual. It’s clear as a bell. As you read my words and follow this blog, you will find that I involuntarily use words and phrases that are visual like “see” and “clear as a bell”.
Clues to an auditory: Likes to talk, takes in information by hearing it, often is musical, repeats information, responds to sounds. Mom will hear a noise from anywhere and exclaim, “whats that?”.
Clues to a visual: Likes to see things, takes in information visually, often artistic, color can be important. I have to close my eyes and take away the visual to hear better. ( For instance, when I am prospecting on the phone, I shut my eyes so I can listen to the dialogue without the visual distraction).
In sales, we can use this information to understand how our clients want to be communicated to and how their decision process works.
Mom was thinking about a car. My brother called her and told her about a car he saw. Mom called her trustee and ask him what he thought about it. He told her he thought it would be a good car for her. She had already given the car a green light by ” hearing about it”. At this point she had never even seen the car.
She then when to look at it with her trustee, so that he could advise her.She also liked that if felt somewhat comfortable, although maybe not totally to her liking.
Her process was to hear about it, see it and feel it. Just seeing the car would not have been enough to bring about a decision. Test driving it to get a feel for it would not have been enough. The sale never would have happened if she had not ” heard” about the car first from a trusted party. Her buying pattern is just in this order.
As a sleuth yourself, simply ask people “How did you make your last big purchase?” Keep asking questions and look for the words they use to describe the experience. The understanding of their internal process will lead to a closer relationship, more rapport and greater ease in the sales process.