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

2 You must engage in massive intelligence gathering, while you simultaneously build massive rapport with your prospect.

3 You must smoothly transition into a Straight Line presentation, so you can begin the process of building absolute certainty for each of the Three Tens.

“So, again, during the front half of the sale, you first take immediate control of the sale; then you use that control to gather massive intelligence, which entails asking highly specific questions, which I’ll map out for you in advance, to make sure that you’ve gathered all the intelligence you need—and I’m going to circle back to this later, because, starting tomorrow, you’re going to be asking a lot more questions than you used to.

“And next, as you’re gathering all this intelligence, you’re going to do it in a way that allows you to build massive rapport with your prospect at the same time, which is absolutely crucial, by the way, because the questions you’ll be asking him are going to get more and more invasive as you move along.

“And then, after you ask for the order for the first time, which happens right around here, while you’re still close to the beginning”—I pointed to a spot on the line about a third of the way towards the close, and punctuated it by drawing a big, thick black dot—“that’s where the back-half of the sale begins, when you get hit with your first objection. So, obviously, this whole front-half-back-half-business is merely a figure of speech.” I shrugged.

“I mean, I can teach a frickin’ monkey to read from a script and ask for the order; so don’t think that you’ve accomplished anything amazing because you made it through the front half of the sale; it’s the back half of the sale where the real selling begins! This is when you finally get the chance to roll up your sleeves and get down to cases—meaning, to get to the bottom of what’s really holding your prospect back, which is certainly not the objection they gave you; that’s merely a smoke screen for uncertainty!

“And the objection could be any one of these.” I grabbed the top right edge of the whiteboard and flipped the board over, revealing the fourteen common objections.

“They want to think about it or call you back or talk to their wife or do some research or it’s a bad time of year; it doesn’t matter which one they give you. In the end, they’re all basically the same; they’re smoke screens for uncertainty! In other words, your prospect still isn’t certain enough to say yes, which means you’ve still got some selling left to do.” I paused for a moment and flipped the board back over, to reveal my drawing of the Straight Line.

“That’s what’s going on,” I repeated. “Every word, every phrase, every question you ask, every tonality you use; every single one of them should have the same ultimate goal in mind, which is to increase the prospect’s level of certainty as much as humanly possible, so that by the time you get to the close, he’s feeling so incredibly certain that he almost has to say yes. That’s your goal.

“In fact, think of this as goal-oriented communication,” I continued, spitting out the phrase at literally the same instant it popped into my mind. “Every word that comes out of your mouth is feeding into one single goal, which is to increase your prospect’s level of certainty to the highest possible level, as you’re moving him down the straight line towards the close. Here—let me draw it out for you on the board.

“Imagine a continuum of certainty between one and ten,” I said confidently. As I began turning back to the whiteboard, I saw one of the Strattonite’s hands shoot up. It was Colton Green.

Colton Green was an eighteen-year-old Irishman, with a beefy skull, a budding drinker’s nose, and an IQ just above the level of an idiot. A nincompoop among nincompoops! But a lovable nincompoop, nonetheless.

With a dead smile: “Green?”

“What’s a continuum?” he asked.

The rest of the Strattonites chuckled at Colton’s idiocy, which was rather ironic, I thought, considering that most of them were idiots too. But, as it turned out, the usual deterrents to success, such as idiocy and stupidity, were about to become completely irrelevant inside the four walls of Stratton’s boardroom.