How to improve your return on investment of learning NLP

It can be difficult to demonstrate the financial return of investments in soft skills training, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) being one of the top options available for learning these skills. Oddly enough, people often use exactly those skills to try to convince you that NLP isn’t the right choice and even use NLP to persuade you that you shouldn’t learn NLP. Anyway, it’s a lot more useful to consider the facts.
 
There are plenty of successful business examples of the use of NLP. When financial credit institution Diners Club increased the NLP skills of their customer service managers, they reduced their loss of clients with 67% and their clients spent on average 254% more. (Alder, 2002)
 
International companies like BMW, Fiat, Virgin, BT and many others invested in NLP training for their employees. In Belgium, shoe retailer Torfs, hair dressing chain Kreatos as well as paints producer, Boss Paints, are known advocates of applying NLP in various parts of their business. (De Standaard, 2016; Tertio; a.o.)
 
The effectiveness of applying NLP will be even greater when companies carefully plan how they will apply NLP in their business environment. Diners Club is a clear example of focusing the application of NLP on improving customer communication. BMW UK used NLP to model the behavior of their top 1% sales, so they could educate the rest of their sales staff on the successful strategies. American Express and Fiat used NLP to improve and spread formal and informal leadership throughout the company. They model successful leaders, teach their staff how to ask better questions, gain bigger insight in people, manage emotions and much more. (Alder, 2002)
 
The big question is this.
 
How do you make sure that we provide the pay-off to you and your company?
 
The answer is easy. Before you register for our course, ask yourself the following important questions.

• What is the problem you want to solve?
• What are your objectives for the course?
• How you will evaluate your return?
• Is our course is a match for your needs?

 
Trust me, courses are a lot more effective and a lot more fun with the right participants, so we don’t want people in our course who don’t belong here.
 
What problem am I trying to solve or what opportunity do I want to pursue when I attend this course? Is this a problem worth solving or an opportunity worth pursuing? What is the right solution this problem or opportunity? Are you (or the person you are sending to us) the right person to solve this problem?
 
What are the objectives that I want to achieve from this course?
Learning objectives: What do I want to learn?
Development objectives: How do I want to behave different after the course?
Application objectives: Where do I want to be able to apply what I’ve learned? What do I want to do differently with what I’ve learned?
Impact objectives: What new results do I want to achieve by applying what I’ve learned?
 
How will you evaluate your return on investment? What objectives will you evaluate and how will you evaluate this objective?
 
Now that you have answered these questions, is this course in alignment with your needs, your resources and your expectations?
 
Let’s use these questions to evaluate a typical example. Sophie has just been promoted from an expert role into a management role. At this moment things are looking great for her, but she feels unsure whether her people management skills are sufficient for the job. As people management has become an important part of her job, Sophie thinks this is a problem worth solving.
 
Sophie had several conversations with us, went through our information package in detail and set some key objectives for herself.
 
Learning objectives: gain better insight in people, increase communication and influencing skills, ask better questions
 
Reaction objectives: feel more confident as a manager of her team, management becomes easy instead of a daily struggle
 
Application objectives: having difficult conversations, improving presentations, better grip on day-to-day management situations, convince difficult people in a positive and constructive way
 
Impact objectives: more people get along with her and follow instructions, team meetings become more effective and efficient, team performance indicators improve
 
Fortunately, we could accommodate for Sophie’s needs and through our practitioner course she could attain her objectives and much more. Since Sophie attended the course, she got enlisted in the high potential program of her organization. The course not only changed her professional life for the better, it also positively changed the way she could manage her private-work balance. At the time of writing, both Sophie and her husband are expecting their first baby, another life changing experience.
 
So make sure that you thoroughly evaluate your reasons for booking on the course so that when you arrive on day one you’ll know exactly what your target is. One more thing … after all that analysis, make sure you also remember to enjoy the course.

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