Do You Remember NLP?

How neuro-linguistic programming became a fixture of sales training, what the science actually says, and what its legacy reveals about our profession.

If you worked in sales during the 1990s or 2000s, there’s a reasonable chance somebody taught you that the secret to influencing customers was to mirror their body language, match their preferred communication style or pay close attention to which direction their eyes moved when answering a question.

Apparently, if someone looked up and to the left, they were remembering something. Up and to the right, they were constructing an image. If they crossed their arms, you might need to adjust your posture, and if they used words such as “see”, “hear” or “feel”, you could supposedly establish a deeper connection by adopting the same language.

Welcome to the wonderful world of neuro-linguistic programming, better known as NLP.

For a period, NLP seemed to be everywhere. It appeared in sales training programmes, management development courses, coaching qualifications and motivational seminars. Practitioners promised to reveal the hidden mechanics of human communication, giving ordinary people the ability to understand, influence and sometimes even reprogramme the behaviour of others.

It was an attractive proposition, particularly for salespeople. After all, who wouldn’t want a better understanding of what makes customers tick, especially if that understanding could be converted into a competitive advantage?

But something rather interesting happened. Over time, NLP became less prominent in mainstream sales training, at least as an explicitly marketed methodology. While it continues to have practitioners and supporters, its more extraordinary claims have struggled to withstand scientific scrutiny.

Which raises an interesting question. What happened to NLP, and have we actually learned anything from its popularity?

Perhaps more importantly, could the sales training industry be making some of the same mistakes today?

Where did NLP come from?

Neuro-linguistic programming emerged in California during the early 1970s, principally through the work of Richard Bandler and John Grinder, with Frank Pucelik also playing an important role in its early development.

The original ambition was intriguing. Rather than studying why people struggled with communication or psychological difficulties, its developers wanted to understand what particularly effective communicators were doing differently.

They studied influential therapists, including Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir and Milton Erickson, attempting to identify patterns of language and behaviour that could be taught to others.

The underlying proposition was that excellence could be modelled. If someone consistently achieved exceptional results through communication, perhaps those results could be reproduced by identifying and replicating the behaviours responsible.

In principle, this was not an unreasonable ambition. Observing experts, identifying effective behaviours and helping others develop those behaviours remains an important part of learning and professional development.

The problem was what happened next.

Over time, NLP developed into a much broader collection of theories and techniques concerning human thought, language, emotion and behaviour. Its practitioners proposed relationships between sensory preferences, eye movements, internal mental processes and communication styles that went considerably beyond the original idea of observing effective communicators.

The terminology was impressive. Neuro referred to the nervous system, linguistic to language, and programming to the patterns through which people supposedly organised their experiences and responses.

To an audience unfamiliar with cognitive psychology or neuroscience, the name alone suggested a degree of scientific sophistication.

And, commercially, NLP had something else working in its favour. It offered a relatively simple explanation for something extraordinarily complicated.

Human behaviour could apparently be decoded, understood and influenced through a collection of learnable techniques. For organisations trying to improve sales performance, that was a particularly appealing message.

When salespeople discovered the secrets of the human mind

It’s not difficult to understand why NLP found an enthusiastic audience within sales.

Selling involves communication, trust, persuasion and decision-making. If somebody claims to have identified the psychological mechanisms underlying those behaviours, the potential commercial applications are obvious.

Consider the idea of representational systems.

NLP proposed that people process and communicate experiences through different sensory modalities, commonly visual, auditory and kinaesthetic. In some interpretations, individuals were believed to have preferred systems that could be identified through their language.

A customer who frequently said “I see what you mean” might supposedly be visually oriented, while someone who preferred “That sounds right” could be more auditory.

The salesperson’s job was to recognise these patterns and adapt their language accordingly.

Then there was mirroring and matching, the practice of subtly adopting another person’s posture, gestures, tone or speaking pace to establish rapport.

Anchoring offered another intriguing possibility. By associating a particular stimulus with an emotional state, practitioners suggested that people could learn to reproduce desirable feelings, such as confidence, when needed.

And of course, there were the eye movements.

Some versions of NLP suggested that the direction in which somebody looked could reveal whether they were recalling information, constructing images or processing particular types of thought. Certain practitioners extended those ideas into claims about detecting dishonesty.

Imagine being a salesperson who believed they could understand how a customer processed information, establish an almost automatic sense of rapport and identify inconsistencies in their answers simply by observing their behaviour.

It would feel like being handed the instruction manual for the human brain.

There was just one rather significant problem.

The existence of an appealing explanation is not evidence that the explanation is correct.

What did the science actually say?

One of the difficulties with evaluating NLP is that it is not a single, precisely defined intervention. It encompasses numerous techniques, theories and applications, making broad statements about its effectiveness inherently problematic.

Nevertheless, researchers have investigated several of its central claims, and the findings have generally been unflattering.

In 2010, psychologist Tomasz Witkowski published a review titled Thirty-Five Years of Research on Neuro-Linguistic Programming, examining the empirical evidence associated with the methodology.

From a database of 315 articles, Witkowski identified 63 studies published in journals meeting his selection criteria. Of the 33 studies examining NLP’s underlying principles, 18.2% produced supportive findings, 54.5% were unsupportive and 27.3% were inconclusive.

The review did not demonstrate that every technique associated with NLP was ineffective. What it did reveal was a substantial mismatch between the confidence with which NLP’s underlying principles were often presented and the evidence available to support them.

A separate systematic review published in the British Journal of General Practice in 2012 examined NLP interventions in healthcare.

Researchers screened 1,459 records and included ten experimental studies, five randomised controlled trials and five before-and-after studies.

Their conclusion was that there was little evidence NLP improved health-related outcomes, although they emphasised that the available research was limited in both quantity and quality.

That distinction matters. A lack of convincing evidence is not necessarily evidence that an intervention can never work. Equally, the absence of definitive disproof is hardly a compelling reason to make confident claims about its effectiveness.

The research concerned healthcare rather than commercial selling, so it cannot tell us directly whether NLP improves sales performance. It does, however, raise legitimate questions about the strength of the scientific foundations upon which many of its claims were built.

And then there was the question of eye movements.

In 2012, Professor Richard Wiseman and colleagues published research in PLOS ONE examining the assertion, promoted by some NLP practitioners, that particular eye movements could indicate whether somebody was lying.

Across three studies, researchers examined eye movements during truthful and deceptive statements, tested whether teaching participants the proposed patterns improved their ability to identify lies, and analysed footage involving high-stakes public appeals.

The findings failed to support the NLP-based predictions.

People’s eye movements did not reliably correspond with the patterns suggested by the theory, and teaching participants to recognise those patterns did not improve their ability to detect deception.

It is worth clarifying that NLP’s original eye-accessing ideas were not simply a lie detector, and not every practitioner endorsed that particular application. Nevertheless, the research challenged a claim that had become widely associated with the approach.

For anybody who spent years carefully monitoring the direction in which customers looked during discovery meetings, this may have come as something of a disappointment.

Although, given that most of those meetings now take place on video calls, perhaps the technique was destined for an early retirement anyway.

But didn’t some of it work?

This is where the conversation becomes more interesting, because dismissing every practice associated with NLP would be almost as intellectually careless as accepting the entire methodology without question.

Take rapport.

Few would dispute that establishing trust, demonstrating genuine interest and making another person feel understood can improve the quality of a conversation.

Similarly, adapting language to make an explanation more accessible is a perfectly sensible communication principle. If a customer uses particular terminology to describe their business problems, reflecting that terminology accurately can demonstrate understanding.

Carefully observing another person’s behaviour, asking clarifying questions and paying attention to changes in tone can also be useful.

But none of these observations establishes that NLP’s broader theoretical explanations are correct.

There is a fundamental difference between recognising that effective communication involves behavioural flexibility and claiming that people possess identifiable sensory programming that can be decoded and manipulated.

Likewise, an exercise associated with NLP might improve somebody’s confidence without demonstrating that the proposed neurological explanation behind the exercise is valid.

This is an important distinction because attractive methodologies frequently combine familiar, useful practices with more speculative explanations.

When participants experience something genuinely helpful, they may understandably become more receptive to the wider framework.

Imagine attending a sales training course that teaches you to listen more carefully, ask better questions and adapt your communication style. You subsequently notice an improvement in your conversations.

Was that improvement caused by NLP’s particular theories about human information processing, or by the fact that you started paying closer attention to your customers?

Without suitable evidence, we cannot confidently attribute the result to the theory.

And attribution is where the sales training industry has historically struggled.

Why were we so willing to believe it?

To understand NLP’s popularity, it’s worth considering the psychological appeal of the methodology itself.

One explanation is that human beings have a natural preference for coherent explanations. We like patterns, frameworks and models that help organise complicated information into something understandable.

Human communication is extraordinarily complex. It involves personality, culture, experience, emotion, attention, context and countless other variables.

NLP offered the possibility that much of this complexity could be understood through a relatively small number of techniques.

It promised certainty in an environment characterised by uncertainty.

For salespeople, that certainty was particularly valuable. A difficult conversation could become less intimidating if you believed there were recognisable behavioural signals that told you what your customer was thinking.

Another factor is confirmation bias.

Imagine being taught that visual thinkers frequently use phrases associated with seeing. During your next customer meeting, someone says, “I can see where you’re coming from.”

You recognise the phrase, remember your training and feel that the theory has been validated.

What you probably don’t do is systematically record every occasion when someone’s language fails to correspond with the predicted behaviour.

Over time, the successful examples become memorable while the contradictory evidence disappears into the background.

A third factor is authority.

NLP benefited from terminology that sounded scientific, alongside confident practitioners who were often skilled communicators themselves.

Of course, someone’s ability to deliver a compelling presentation does not establish the validity of the ideas contained within it.

But in a training environment, particularly one where participants are enthusiastic and engaged, those distinctions can become blurred.

The danger is that we begin confusing the quality of the learning experience with the credibility of the underlying methodology.

A charismatic trainer can make almost anything feel convincing for an afternoon.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll improve your performance on Monday morning.

Did NLP disappear, or did we just stop calling it NLP?

Although NLP remains active in coaching and personal development, it no longer appears to occupy the same position in mainstream sales training that it once did.

Yet several techniques associated with it remain familiar.

Salespeople are still encouraged to mirror customers, adjust their language, develop rapport and pay attention to non-verbal communication.

Some of these practices predate NLP, have been studied independently or can be justified without reference to its theoretical framework. Their continued use therefore shouldn’t automatically be interpreted as evidence that NLP survived under a different name.

Nevertheless, its influence raises an interesting question about how ideas travel through the sales training industry.

Once a technique becomes embedded in professional practice, its original justification can gradually disappear.

A trainer learns something from another trainer, incorporates it into a programme and eventually passes it on as established best practice.

Years later, nobody necessarily remembers where the idea came from or whether the original explanation was supported by evidence.

The technique survives because it sounds sensible, is easy to teach or resonates with participants.

That’s not automatically a problem. Plenty of useful professional practices emerge from observation and experience before they are formally evaluated.

It becomes problematic when a plausible idea is presented as an established scientific fact.

Which brings us to a more uncomfortable question.

What is today’s equivalent of NLP?

Looking back at NLP from a distance is relatively easy. We have decades of research to examine, and some of its more ambitious claims now seem rather extraordinary.

But judging yesterday’s fashionable ideas is considerably easier than evaluating today’s.

Consider the number of sales training programmes that promise to unlock the secrets of buyer psychology, rewire the brain for better performance or identify the precise behavioural characteristics of successful salespeople.

There are frameworks that divide people into personality categories, approaches that promise to identify buying preferences through language, and training products that invoke neuroscience to explain why their techniques supposedly work.

Some may contain genuinely useful insights. Others may be built upon assumptions that have received surprisingly little rigorous evaluation.

The existence of a colourful personality assessment or a compelling diagram of the brain does not, by itself, establish predictive validity.

Nor does the fact that a methodology is popular, widely adopted or supported by impressive customer testimonials.

And now we have artificial intelligence.

AI presents an extraordinary opportunity to improve how salespeople learn, practise and receive coaching. Organisations can increasingly analyse conversations, identify patterns in behaviour and provide feedback at a scale that would previously have been impossible.

But the same fundamental problem remains.

Just because a system can measure something doesn’t mean the thing being measured is important.

Imagine an AI coaching platform that evaluates the percentage of time a salesperson spends talking, the number of questions they ask, or how frequently they use particular phrases.

Those measurements may be useful indicators in certain circumstances. However, a conversation isn’t automatically effective because a salesperson meets an arbitrary talking-time threshold or asks a prescribed number of questions.

A salesperson could spend most of a meeting listening and still fail to uncover a single meaningful business problem.

Likewise, somebody could ask fifteen questions and learn considerably less than a colleague who asks five excellent ones.

If the underlying model of effective selling is flawed, artificial intelligence simply allows us to apply that model more consistently and at greater scale.

There is a risk that the industry replaces the apparent certainty of yesterday’s psychological techniques with the apparent certainty of today’s algorithms.

The technology has changed considerably. The responsibility to validate our assumptions has not.

The real problem isn’t NLP. It’s our relationship with evidence.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of NLP’s history is not that questionable ideas became popular, but how readily the sales training industry embraced them.

And it would be unfair to suggest this problem is unique to NLP.

Sales training has always been vulnerable to trends, particularly those promising simple solutions to complicated human challenges.

We are attracted to memorable frameworks, neatly packaged methodologies and stories about transformational results.

We like techniques that are easy to explain and straightforward to implement.

Unfortunately, the things that make an idea commercially attractive are not necessarily the things that make it scientifically credible.

Effective communication is difficult to measure. Behaviour change takes time. Sales performance is influenced by numerous variables, many of which sit outside the salesperson’s control.

Determining whether a particular intervention causes better performance requires substantially more effort than collecting positive feedback at the end of a workshop.

Yet much of the industry continues to measure training success through attendance, participant satisfaction and immediate reactions.

Those measures tell us something about the experience, but comparatively little about whether people have become more capable.

If we genuinely want to develop salespeople, we need to become more interested in what happens after the training than what happens during it.

There is useful research to build upon.

In 2010, Simone Kauffeld and Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock published a field study comparing spaced and concentrated sales training among 64 bank employees.

The researchers found that spaced training produced improvements in the quality of learning transfer, self-reported sales competence and selected performance indicators compared with the concentrated approach.

It was a relatively small, quasi-experimental study, so its findings should not be treated as universal proof. Nevertheless, it offers a practical example of examining how training design influences behaviour and performance rather than relying exclusively on how participants felt about the experience.

A broader 2010 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Management, covering 89 empirical studies, also identified relationships between training transfer and factors including learner motivation and supportive working environments.

In other words, there are legitimate reasons to pay attention to how people learn, how behaviours are reinforced and what happens when they return to their jobs.

These aren’t necessarily as exciting as promising to unlock the subconscious mind of a customer, but they provide a more defensible foundation for developing professional capability.

What should sales leaders take from this?

The lesson from NLP isn’t that organisations should avoid introducing new methodologies or disregard ideas that haven’t yet been extensively researched.

That would be unreasonable, particularly in a profession where commercial environments change faster than academic research can always respond.

Instead, sales leaders should become more discerning about the claims being made by training providers.

If somebody promises to transform sales performance through a particular framework, it’s reasonable to ask what evidence supports that claim.

If a technique is presented as scientifically validated, ask which research established its effectiveness, whether the findings have been replicated and whether they apply to the context in which the technique is being taught.

And if a training intervention promises behaviour change, there should be some credible attempt to measure whether that change actually occurs.

This doesn’t require every sales leader to become a research scientist.

It simply requires a degree of intellectual curiosity and a willingness to challenge explanations that seem a little too convenient.

It also requires training providers, ourselves included, to acknowledge uncertainty.

Some techniques are supported by strong evidence. Others have encouraging but limited research behind them. Many are based primarily on professional experience and practical observation.

There is nothing inherently wrong with using experience to inform training, provided we are transparent about the distinction.

The problem arises when opinion is presented as fact, or when an appealing theory becomes more important than the observable results it is supposed to produce.

Have we actually learned anything?

Looking back, NLP is a fascinating chapter in the history of professional development.

It emerged from a genuine interest in understanding exceptional communicators, developed into an ambitious collection of theories about human behaviour and became commercially influential despite substantial weaknesses in the evidence supporting its underlying claims.

Its popularity tells us something important about the relationship between sales training and psychology.

We are understandably fascinated by anything that promises to make human behaviour more predictable.

We want to understand why customers make decisions, why conversations succeed or fail, and how we can become more effective at influencing outcomes.

But human behaviour rarely lends itself to the simple explanations we would prefer.

Good salespeople are not effective because they possess a secret psychological code for unlocking their customers’ minds. They’re effective because they develop a sophisticated understanding of the people and organisations they work with, ask thoughtful questions, exercise sound judgment and adapt intelligently to different situations.

And developing those capabilities requires considerably more than learning an interesting technique during a workshop.

The next time somebody introduces a revolutionary new methodology, backed by impressive terminology and extraordinary promises, it might be worth remembering NLP.

Not because every new idea should be treated with suspicion, but because enthusiasm and evidence are two very different things.

The most useful question isn’t whether a methodology sounds convincing. It’s whether we have good reason to believe it works.

And perhaps, after fifty years of trying to understand the psychology of selling, that’s a lesson our profession should have learned by now.