Kenrick Cleveland is a world-renowned persuasion strategist and master of influence with a career spanning over 45 years. Widely regarded as the “master architect of modern influence psychology”, Cleveland has pioneered many of the techniques and frameworks that define persuasive communication today. He’s even earned the nickname “The World’s Greatest Persuader” among his thousands of students worldwide. From integrating Ericksonian hypnosis into sales conversations to inventing new ways to “program” persuasive skills into the subconscious, Kenrick Cleveland’s story is one of constant innovation and impact in the field of influence.
In this article, we’ll dive into Kenrick Cleveland’s background, his breakthrough achievements, and how he became a pioneer of modern persuasion. We’ll also show you where to start applying these ideas right now inside the Store.
Kenrick Cleveland at a Glance: Key Achievements
Why His Work Matters
- 45+ Years of Mastery: Over four decades teaching and refining the art and science of persuasion.
- Historic $1 Billion Success: Led one of the largest NLP-based sales trainings ever, credited with generating an extra $1 billion in revenue for a banking client in just one year.
- NLP Business Pioneer: Personally enlisted by Richard Bandler (co-founder of NLP) to create the first Business NLP Practitioner courses – and the only person authorized to teach them at the time.
- Innovator of Learning Tech: Inventor of Neuro-Imprinting Technology™, a method using guided theta-state sessions to accelerate learning of persuasion skills by imprinting them into the subconscious.
- Groundbreaking Frameworks: Pioneer of “DreamState Selling” and other worldview-based persuasion frameworks that align communication with the audience’s values, beliefs, and identity.
- Trusted by Industry Titans: Sought-after advisor to top marketers and leaders – praised by legends like Jay Abraham, Gary Bencivenga, and Rich Schefren for his unparalleled influence strategies.
Store Overview: Where to Start
Top Picks
- DreamState Selling: The structured, adaptive framework for high-commitment conversations.
- Neuro-Imprinting Sessions: Guided theta-state audio to install persuasion patterns faster.
- Business NLP Training: Practical, business-ready applications of NLP for sales and leadership.
- Season Pass: All-access to everything created this year, plus live sessions.
- Coaching and Toolkits: Live coaching, templates, and practice tools to accelerate results.
Early Breakthroughs in NLP and Sales Persuasion
Roots in NLP and Ericksonian Hypnosis
Kenrick Cleveland’s journey in influence began in the late 1970s, at a time when Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) was emerging. Fascinated by the power of language and the mind, Cleveland immersed himself in learning from the best. He even trained in clinical hypnosis under Carol Erickson, the daughter of famed hypnotherapist Milton Erickson, which helped shape his unique approach to NLP and persuasion. By blending Ericksonian hypnosis techniques with sales psychology, Cleveland was formulating a new kind of persuasive communication that went far beyond gimmicks.
The $1 Billion Banking Breakthrough
His first major breakthrough came in his late twenties. Kenrick was retained to design and deliver a high-stakes training for a savings and loan company converting into a bank. This wasn’t just any corporate training – it was one of the biggest sales influence trainings ever conducted under the auspices of NLP, and it was overseen by none other than Dr. Richard Bandler, co-creator of NLP. Cleveland’s task was to equip the bank’s team with advanced persuasion skills to win new business in their transition. The results were stunning: in the first year after the training, the company credited Kenrick’s methods with bringing in an extra $1 billion in revenue. (Yes, that’s “billion” with a capital B!)
Authoring Business NLP
This success catapulted Kenrick Cleveland into the top ranks of the influence field. Impressed by Cleveland’s mastery, Richard Bandler asked Kenrick to create the official Business Practitioner and Business Master Practitioner NLP training programs – making Kenrick the only person authorized to teach and certify those specialized NLP courses at that time. In other words, Cleveland was literally writing the book on how NLP could be applied to business and sales. He is often credited as one of the first to adapt NLP techniques for sales persuasion, paving the way for an entire subfield of business NLP.
Momentum into the 30s
By his early 30s, Kenrick Cleveland had already achieved feats that most could only dream of. But this was just the beginning of a career defined by continual innovation in how we influence others.
Pioneering the Field of Business and Sales Influence
Beyond Scripts: Psychology and Human Connection
Following his early triumphs, Kenrick Cleveland spent the next few decades pioneering the field of business and sales persuasion. He proved himself as a master salesman in his own right – breaking sales records repeatedly wherever he went – and simultaneously as an exceptional teacher of persuasion. While many sales trainers of the era focused on rote scripts or high-pressure tactics, Cleveland’s approach delved much deeper into psychology and human connection.
Cross-Disciplinary Mastery
A hallmark of Kenrick’s method has always been blending disciplines. He continued to train extensively in hypnosis (eventually accumulating even more training hours in hypnotic technique than in NLP) and studied psychology, neuroscience, and anything that could enhance his understanding of influence. By cross-pollinating these fields, Cleveland kept developing new strategies miles ahead of conventional sales techniques. This cross-disciplinary mastery is what fueled the “adaptive, worldview-based frameworks” he’s known for – systems that adapt to the way people really think and feel.
Courses That Shaped a Generation
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Kenrick Cleveland created and taught a series of influential courses that gained him a loyal following. He authored numerous home-study programs and seminars – from early offerings like Maximum Persuasion (a comprehensive persuasion course on how to “talk anyone into giving you anything, anytime”) to his later Persuasion Factor training series – all designed to make advanced influence techniques accessible and effective. In total, he has written dozens of courses and books on persuasion (many of which are available on Amazon today). These works cover everything from the nuances of language and rapport, to mindset and personal success psychology. Thousands of students, entrepreneurs, sales professionals, and even other persuasion experts have studied Kenrick’s materials to elevate their skills.
Neuro-Imprinting Technology™
What set Cleveland apart in all these teachings was his use of cutting-edge learning technologies. Not content with traditional lectures, he pioneered ways to help students internalize persuasion skills at a subconscious level. His proprietary Neuro-Imprinting Technology™ is a prime example. This method uses guided audio sessions – often in a relaxed, meditative (theta brainwave) state – to “program” key persuasion patterns directly into one’s mind. It’s like installing new software into your brain that makes persuasive communication feel as natural as breathing. By leveraging such techniques, Cleveland made it easier and faster for people to absorb complex influence skills and turn them into automatic habits. This innovation in training methodology earned Kenrick a reputation as an educational pioneer, not just a persuasion expert.
Consulting and Cross-Industry Impact
All the while, Kenrick Cleveland remained an active consultant and coach for high-level clients. Many companies and individuals who applied his methods saw remarkable returns. (One oft-cited example: a regional bank attributed a $1 billion growth to his training, as mentioned earlier, and countless other businesses have added millions in sales by following his strategies.) His influence extended into multiple industries – from finance and real estate, to marketing, coaching, and even personal development – any field where the ability to persuade and communicate effectively is a game-changer.
What the Titans Say
By the 2010s, Kenrick Cleveland had firmly established himself as the authority in persuasive influence. In the words of legendary marketer Jay Abraham, “Kenrick E. Cleveland embodies the most powerful, effective, and masterful techniques of persuasion and influence that have ever been taught.” Top copywriter Gary Bencivenga said that “anyone whose living depends in any way on persuading others… should learn and master what Kenrick has to teach about the art and science of persuasion.” And strategic business coach Rich Schefren adds, “Kenrick tops my shortlist of people I’ll reach out to when I need advice on persuading others… His arsenal of skills and strategies has increased my bank account by millions of dollars.” Such praise from industry giants underscores the unique impact Kenrick Cleveland has had. He’s the expert that the experts turn to when they want to up their influence game.
Innovating Influence: From “Tricks” to Genuine Connection
Connective Communication: Meeting People in Their Worldview
Despite his long list of achievements, Kenrick Cleveland is far from the stereotype of a slick “sales guru.” In fact, he has been a vocal critic of shallow persuasion tricks and high-pressure tactics. At the core of Cleveland’s philosophy is a focus on authentic connection and ethical influence. As he often emphasizes, persuasion isn’t about manipulation or coercion – it’s about understanding people at a deep level, aligning with their values, and communicating in a way that genuinely resonates.
Framing, Rapport, and Values
Cleveland’s strategies center on what he calls “Connective Communication” – essentially, meeting people within their own worldview. Rather than forcing your ideas on someone, you learn to step into their shoes, see the world through their eyes, and guide them to new perspectives that benefit you and them. This approach was revolutionary compared to the old-school “hard sell.” Kenrick showed that you can achieve incredible persuasive power without resorting to deceit or pressure, simply by respecting how the other person’s mind works and adapting to it.
Multi-Layered Influence Models
This ethos of genuine, win-win influence is reflected in the advanced frameworks Kenrick Cleveland developed. For instance, his teachings on framing conversations, building deep rapport, eliciting core values, and even shaping someone’s internal “story” of a situation, all aim to create alignment between the persuader and the audience. By using tools like strategic storytelling, embedded suggestions (drawn from hypnosis), and carefully crafted questions, Cleveland’s methods lead people to conclude on their own that a certain decision or point of view is right – a far more potent effect than any overt sales pitch.
Layers of Worldview
One of Cleveland’s signature insights is that persuasion operates on multiple layers of a person’s psychology – from their conscious thoughts down to their subconscious beliefs. He teaches that truly effective influence engages all these layers: logic and emotion, conscious intention and unconscious motivation. This holistic understanding is why his frameworks often diagram out the “layers of worldview” – thoughts, emotions, actions, beliefs, values, roles, and identity – showing how each layer can be targeted and aligned. By ensuring your message harmonizes with a person’s values and identity (the deepest layers), you create near-unstoppable influence because the change feels internally congruent to them.
Signature Techniques: Belief Chaining and Nested Loops
Kenrick’s innovative techniques like “belief chaining” (linking a series of beliefs to lead someone to a new conclusion) or “nested loops” (a storytelling technique to embed messages, often used in hypnosis) have now become standard tools in many persuaders’ arsenals. He popularized and perfected these methods in business contexts long before they were common elsewhere. Indeed, many of today’s persuasion and sales “hacks” trace back to Cleveland’s early work, even if people don’t always realize the origin. As one Reddit user noted, Kenrick Cleveland “created a pretty good program called Maximum Persuasion which gave him some followers” and built a reputation for powerful language patterns. He has truly been a trend-setter, “pioneering the cutting edge miles ahead while others follow yesteryear’s playbook,” as one bio aptly put it.
Influence With Integrity
Through all his innovations, Kenrick has stayed true to a guiding principle: leave people better off than you found them. As he teaches, the goal of influence is not to manipulate for selfish gain, but to create positive outcomes for all parties – whether you’re closing a business deal or helping someone change a limiting belief. This integrity is part of why he’s so respected in the field. “It’s not about little tricks, tactics, and hacks… It’s about genuinely connecting with others and building the world better than you found it,” Cleveland’s team explains when describing his life’s work.
DreamState Influence: The Culmination of a Lifelong Quest
What Is DreamState?
After decades of refining his craft, Kenrick Cleveland has in recent years unveiled what can be described as the capstone of his career: the DreamState Influence frameworks. DreamState is the banner under which Kenrick has unified his lifetime of persuasion knowledge into a cohesive system for the modern world. It represents his latest breakthrough – a synthesis of everything he’s learned about influence, updated with fresh insights for the 2020s.
The Domino Model of Commitment
The flagship of this new series is DreamState Selling. True to its name, DreamState Selling is about entering the “dream state” of your prospect – in other words, stepping into their inner world (their dreams, fears, values, and worldview) to guide them to a decision. The framework provides a structured yet adaptive roadmap for persuasive conversations, especially in sales or any scenario where you need someone’s commitment. Cleveland has designed DreamState Selling as a step-by-step process, one so natural and intuitive that he compares it to “stacking dominoes and letting them fall into a sale.” In fact, “DreamState Selling is a structured, step-by-step sales framework designed to help you get deeper commitment from higher quality clients… with a process as simple as stacking dominoes and letting them fall into a sale,” explains Cleveland’s team. Each “domino” in the sequence represents a psychological set-point – such as establishing the right frame, sparking the prospect’s intrinsic motivation, or aligning the solution with their core values – and when all are in place, the outcome (the sale or agreement) unfolds almost effortlessly.
Adaptive, Worldview-Based Selling
What makes DreamState Selling especially powerful is its adaptive, worldview-based nature. It’s not a one-size script; it’s a framework that teaches you to dynamically adapt your approach based on the person in front of you. Using Kenrick’s method, you learn to quickly profile the other person’s worldview – how they see themselves, what they value, what language resonates with them – and then you tailor each step of the conversation to that profile. The result is deep rapport and influence at a level most people have never experienced. Clients feel uniquely understood (because they are), and thus they lower their defenses and open up to new possibilities. In essence, DreamState Selling operationalizes Kenrick’s core philosophy: meet people in their reality first, then lead them to a better one.
Inner Mastery for Outer Influence
Beyond selling, Kenrick’s DreamState approach extends to personal development and “inner mastery.” One of his other new frameworks is often referred to as DreamState Inner Mastery (also mentioned as Success Scaling in some materials). This side of the coin focuses on influencing oneself – conquering internal barriers, mastering one’s emotional states, and essentially persuading the only audience we speak to 24/7: ourselves. Cleveland has long taught that to effectively lead others, you must first lead yourself. DreamState Inner Mastery gives professionals the tools to break through their own mental roadblocks and elevate their confidence from the inside out. It’s a structured process for what Kenrick calls “Breakthrough Personal Growth”, applying the same persuasion psychology inward to rewrite self-sabotaging “stories” and replace them with empowering ones.
Platform: The Persuasion Academy
To deliver these cutting-edge programs, Kenrick Cleveland co-founded a new platform called The Persuasion Academy (formerly known as The Power Ark before evolving into the comprehensive training platform where everything lives today). Together with his business partner Jackson Burnham – dubbed “The Synthesizer” for his role in distilling Kenrick’s vast knowledge into digestible content – Kenrick launched The Persuasion Academy as a modern online hub for influence mastery. Through this platform, students can access live coaching, on-demand courses, and even AI-powered tools to practice persuasive communication. It’s all part of Cleveland’s mission to “turn the world’s most powerful psychological frameworks into your hidden advantage” with interactive training and technology.
The Season Pass Model
One notable offering is the All-Access Season Pass, a membership that gives Kenrick’s students full access to everything he creates for an entire year. This “DreamState Season Pass” (as it’s informally called) ensures that devoted followers can get immediate access to the entire library of programs – from classic courses to the newest releases – and even participate in new live trainings throughout the year. In essence, it’s a way to stay on the leading edge of persuasion alongside Kenrick, never missing out on his latest breakthroughs. Given how fast the field of influence can evolve (with new research, technology, and social changes), this model allows Kenrick to continuously update and equip his students with the most up-to-date strategies. Members even have options for personal mentorship (for instance, a VIP tier with private coaching sessions with Kenrick himself). The Season Pass reflects Cleveland’s commitment to ongoing growth – he’s essentially saying “Join me for a year, and you’ll get everything I develop in real-time.” For serious students of influence, it’s an opportunity to learn directly from the pioneer as he keeps breaking new ground.
Legacy and Impact of Kenrick Cleveland
Training the Trainers
Kenrick Cleveland’s influence on the world of persuasion is hard to overstate. Over his long career, he has trained tens of thousands of people – entrepreneurs, sales professionals, negotiators, coaches, and leaders from all walks of life – helping them communicate more effectively and achieve their goals through ethical influence. Many of his students have themselves gone on to become successful consultants and trainers, further spreading the techniques they learned from Kenrick. In this way, his impact is exponential: he hasn’t just persuaded people directly; he’s taught the teachers and influenced the influencers.
Shifting Business Paradigms
Cleveland’s thought leadership also shifted how businesses approach sales and marketing. Concepts like using NLP in sales copy, employing storytelling and hypnotic language in marketing, or customizing a sales approach to a client’s personality and values – all these are now common best practices, but Kenrick was implementing and teaching them decades ago. It’s no surprise that “titans study his techniques, masters follow his every move” in the industry. He has been the trendsetter, continually a few steps ahead of the curve.
Professionalizing Persuasion
Another aspect of Kenrick’s legacy is the professionalization of persuasion training. Before people like Kenrick Cleveland, “persuasion” as a field was often fragmented – some bits in psychology, some in sales training, some in self-help seminars – and often carried a connotation of manipulative “mind tricks.” Cleveland elevated the field by grounding it in psychology and ethics, and by developing comprehensive curricula that treat influence as a skill set to be learned systematically. He brought rigor to teaching persuasion, complete with models, principles, and even measurable results (like that $1B increase). This helped transform the reputation of influence training into something respectable and immensely valuable to professionals.
Always On the Frontier
Through his current work with DreamState Influence and The Persuasion Academy, Kenrick Cleveland is ensuring that his legacy is not just preserved but actively evolved. Even after 45+ years, he shows no signs of slowing down. If anything, his creative output has accelerated – now incorporating AI tools and interactive media into persuasion training – showing that he remains hungry to push the boundaries of what can be done. “To this day, Kenrick continues to reinvent and refine what the word ‘Persuasion’ means,” his team notes. This perpetual drive to improve is a hallmark of Cleveland’s career and one reason he retains an almost legendary status.
Human Impact
In the eyes of his students and those who know his work, Kenrick Cleveland is more than a persuasion expert; he’s a mentor and visionary who has changed countless lives. Many recall how his techniques not only helped them sell more or win negotiations, but also improved their personal confidence and relationships. By learning to see things from others’ perspectives, people report becoming better listeners, better partners, and more empathetic communicators overall. This humanistic side of Kenrick’s influence – helping people connect more authentically – may be his most enduring contribution.
Conclusion
Who is Kenrick Cleveland? He is, in sum, a true pioneer of modern influence: a master teacher, an innovator, and a thought leader who has shaped the art of persuasion for nearly half a century. From his early days breaking new ground with NLP in the business world, to his latest DreamState frameworks that synthesize a lifetime of wisdom, Cleveland’s story is a testament to the power of never-ending improvement in one’s craft. He has proven that influence, when practiced at the highest level, is not about manipulation but about understanding – about forging connections and helping others arrive at beneficial decisions willingly.
Kenrick Cleveland’s journey – his relentless curiosity, his breakthroughs and innovations, and the success of his students – has solidified his reputation as one of the most important figures in the field of persuasion and influence. Whether you’re encountering his name for the first time, or you’ve seen his teachings circulating online, one thing is clear: Kenrick Cleveland’s impact on the world of influence is here to stay. And for anyone eager to master the art of persuasion today, your next step lives in one place: the Store.