The following article by Mark Powell is taken from the MacMillan Education on-line teaching resource site.

Sensational Sales Speak

I am teaching a class of young sales reps and, so they inform me, the latest thing is neuro-linguistic programming. NLP? Didn't that die out with flares and Che Guevara?

According to NLP, much of selling is attending to the precise language your customers use. "Visuals" readily share their "views", but may not "see eye to eye". "Tonals" "sound you out" while wondering if you're "on the same wavelength". "Kinaesthetics" "feel" very strongly about issues, but may fail to "grasp the underlying concepts".

Armed with these insights into how your clients think, you can match their sensory preference by choosing similarly loaded language.

But is a client who says "I see what you mean" really more visual and less auditory than one who says "I hear what you are saying"? Aren't these just fixed expressions, idiomatic to the extent that the individual words are scarcely noticed, much less selected? I decided to put the theory to the test.

My business English corpus reveals that "I see what you mean" is 25 times more common in spoken British English than "I hear what you're saying", but the two are equally frequent in American English. If NLPers are right, it makes the Brits overwhelmingly visual. But they're also three times more kinaesthetic if their preference for "Do you follow me?" is anything to go by. Don't Americans have feelings?

It would be great if my students could judge linguistically whether to "show", "demonstrate" or simply "talk their customers through" a product spec. But, as I warned them, NLP could be "rather misleading". "There you are," said one of them, "I told you he was kinaesthetic."