Way of the Wolf: Straight Line Selling: Master the Art of Persuasion, Influence, and Success

You see, people don’t buy on logic; they buy on emotion, and then justify their decision with logic. The logical mind is analytical by nature, so the more information you give it the more information it wants to know. In consequence, if you get your prospect to a high level of logical certainty, they’ll say, “It sounds great, let me think about it . . .” or “Let me do a bit more research and I’ll call you back.”

However, if you skip making the logical case and focus strictly on creating emotional certainty, it won’t do the trick either, because the logical mind serves as a human bullshit detector. It stops us from being swept away by our emotions if things don’t add up logically. In consequence, if you want to close at the highest level, then you’re going to have to create both types of certainty—logical and emotional—which is precisely what you’ll be doing as you move your prospect down the straight line, from the open to the close. (More on this later—lots more!)

So let me sum things up for you, one last time, before we take the next step forward.

Plain and simple, if you’ve been able to move your prospect to a very high level of certainty (both types of certainty!) for each of the Three Tens, then you have an excellent shot of closing them. Conversely, if even one of the Three Tens has not been lined up, then you have no shot of closing them at all.

However, to be clear, when I say no shot, I don’t mean that the prospect will hit you with an outright no. In fact, when you’re following the principles of the Straight Line System, you will almost never hear the word no, except at the very beginning of the sale, when you’re first introducing yourself or when you’re qualifying the prospect.

At those points in the sale, you will hear the word no; and that’s absolutely fine. In fact, it’s an important aspect of the Straight Line System, as one of its cornerstone philosophies is that we do not make a full-blown sales presentation to someone who is not interested in buying what we’re selling.

Instead, we want to weed these people out as quickly as possible, during the intelligence-gathering phase. (More on that later.) Remember, it’s not the job of salespeople to turn nos into yeses; it’s simply not what they do. Instead, we turn “Let me think about it” into a yes, and “Let me call you back” into a yes, and “I need to speak to my wife” into a yes, and “It’s a bad time of year” into a yes.

In traditional sales parlance, we refer to these various statements as “objections,” and they come up mostly in the back end of the sale, after you’ve asked for the order for the first time.

In reality, though, the actual meaning of any particular objection has very little to do with what it states on the surface.

You see, at the end of the day, objections are merely smoke screens for uncertainty for one or all of the Three Tens.

In other words, if you ask for the order and your prospect is not high enough on the certainty scale, then they’ll throw out a smoke screen in the form of one of the common objections, as opposed to coming clean with you, which would mean revealing specifically which of the Three Tens was holding them back.

Now, there are some exceptions to this, which I’ll get to a bit later, but my point is that, more than 95 percent of the time, the common objections are merely ploys on the part of the prospect, who would rather bow out of the sale gracefully than have to look the salesperson in the eye and confront them about their lack of certainty concerning the Three Tens.

For example, it’s far less confrontational to say, “Let me think about it” or “It’s a bad time of year,” to someone who’s just spent the last ten minutes telling you how wonderful a product is than to say, “I don’t trust you” or “I think your product stinks” or “I don’t like your company” or “I can’t afford it right now” or “Your product seems kind of great, but I’m not 1000 percent sure of that, and I simply can’t afford to risk being wrong and have my spouse chasing me around the house screaming: ‘I told you so! I told you so!’ ”

So, to avoid the possibility of a head-on confrontation, the prospect conjures up a little white lie, a special lie, a lie that gives the salesperson just enough false hope to make them think that there is a shot of getting a callback by ending the encounter now, without pressing the prospect any further.

To that end, the prospect will often start off their objection with a quick one-liner about how much they like your product.

For example, the prospect might start with something like, “It sounds pretty good, Jim,” or “It seems really interesting, Jim,” and then follow it up with, “I just need to speak to my wife first. How about I give you a call back tomorrow?”