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

“Exactly,” I’d continue. “Most people feel that way; and they actually have every right to . . . because they’re not special! They don’t have any special skill or talent or ability that sets them apart from everyone else; they have no edge, no advantage that they can use to separate themselves from the pack, nothing they can use to get rich.

“And, by the way, I hate to say it, but that includes pretty much every one of you in this room.” Then I’d quickly add the punch line. “Or at least it used to.

“See, I don’t know if you guys actually get this, so let me make it crystal clear for you: you are not the same person who walked into this boardroom on your first day. In fact, you’re not even close to being the same person! The Straight Line System has changed you! It’s made you an infinitely more effective human being than you’ve ever been in your entire life—because you now own a skill that sets you apart from pretty much everyone else on the planet: you have the ability to close the deal, to influence and persuade at the highest possible level, to the point where you can close anyone who’s closable.

“And since you didn’t own this skill before, anything negative that happened to you in the past has absolutely no bearing on the future. Do you understand that? Do you see the power in that? Do you guys realize that every last one of you has turned yourself into a force of nature? Someone who can create any vision for the future they want and then go out and achieve it. The simple fact is that the ability to close the deal is the single most important distinction, bar none, when it comes to achieving wealth and success, and you guys literally own that skill at the highest level. And if you think I’m making this shit up or even exaggerating, then go ask any rich person and they’ll tell you, straight away, that without the ability to close the deal, it is really hard to make money; and once you do have that ability, then everything becomes easy.

“In fact, that’s why I can point to any person in this room who’s been here for more than a few months, and he’ll tell you some ridiculous success story that no one outside of this room would even believe, because the success is so extreme that they can’t even wrap their arms around it . . . ,” and on and on I would go, day in and day out, once in the morning, before the market opened, and then again in the afternoon, after it closed. I kept pounding the Strattonites with a twice-daily combination of skills training and motivation; and with each passing day the success stories grew crazier and crazier.

By the end of year one, top producers were earning over $250,000 a month, and their success seemed to be almost contagious. Even par had climbed to $100,000 a month, and the attrition rate was basically zero. In other words, if you made it into the boardroom, then you were almost guaranteed to succeed. All you had to do was take a quick look around you, in any direction, and there was massive success everywhere.

For a new trainee, this was more than sufficient to quash any doubts about the power and effectiveness of the Straight Line System. In fact, after a few months of teaching it, I had devised a paint-by-number training curriculum that was so easy to follow that it was virtually foolproof.

Five Core Elements of the Straight Line System

At the heart of the system are five core elements. To this very day, they’re exactly the same as the day I created them, and they serve as the backbone of the entire system.

As you may have guessed, I’ve already touched on the first three elements, namely, the all-important Three Tens:

1 The prospect must love your product.

2 The prospect must trust and connect with you.

3 The prospect must trust and connect with your company.

In essence, as you move your prospect down the straight line, everything you say should be specifically designed to increase your prospect’s level of certainty for at least one of the three elements—with your ultimate goal being to move all three of them to as close to a 10 as possible, at which point you’re going to ask for the order and hopefully close the deal.

However, that being said, what you need to remember here is that this is not the type of process that happens all at once. In fact, in the vast majority of cases, you’re going to have to ask for the order at least two or three times before you have any chance of your prospect saying yes.