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

Now, when you finish the main body of your sales presentation, you’ve reached a point on the Straight Line where you are going to ask for the order for the first time and wait for a response—and then the back half of the sale begins, which gets triggered when the prospect hits you with the first objection. Alternatively, this is the point in the sale where you’ll find out if you have a lay-down on your hands, in which case the prospect will simply say yes, and you can close the deal without having to address any objections.

But, as I said before, these lay-down sales are few and far between. Most of the time, prospects are going to hit you with at least one or two objections, although usually it’s more like three of four.

IN ORDER TO MOVE FORWARD THE PROSPECT NEEDS A HIGH LEVEL OF CERTAINTY

But, either way, since these objections are actually smoke screens for uncertainty, the salesperson has to be prepared to not only answer them in a way that satisfies the prospect but also make a follow-up presentation that picks up right where the initial presentation left off—with a goal of increasing the prospect’s level of certainty for the Three Tens even further, and with an ultimate goal of getting the prospect as close as possible to a “10, 10, 10,” both logically and emotionally, which gives the salesperson the best possible chance of closing the deal. The Straight Line technique that we use to accomplish this is called looping.

Looping is a simple yet highly effective objection-handling strategy that allows a salesperson to take each individual objection and use it as an opportunity to further increase a prospect’s level of certainty, without breaking rapport, and then seamlessly transition into a close.

In many ways, the art of looping is the so-called “secret sauce” to the Straight Line System (or at least to the back half of it)—as it allows a salesperson to increase a prospect’s level of certainty in small increments, as opposed to all at once.

In other words, each objection creates the opportunity to loop; and each loop results in a further increase to a prospect’s level of certainty; and as each loop is completed, the prospects find themselves that much farther down the line, and that much closer to the close.

While looping is a very simple process, there is one particular scenario that keeps coming up again and again, and unless a salesperson is prepared for it, it tends to drive them up the wall.

For the most part, this scenario rears its ugly head after you’ve run two or three loops, and you’ve raised your prospect’s level of certainty to a point where they’re so absolutely certain that you can actually hear it both in their tone of voice and the actual words they say.

In short, the prospect has made it crystal clear to you through their words, their tonality, and, if you’re in person, their body language that they are absolutely certain about all of the Three Tens; yet, for some inexplicable reason, they are still not buying.

There’s actually a very logical reason for this, and it has to do with an invisible force that holds sway over every sales encounter—dictating how far down the line a salesperson has to take any particular prospect before they finally say yes; or, put another way, at what collective level of certainty does any particular prospect need to be at before he or she says yes?

You see, at the end of the day, not all prospects are created equal. There are some who are very tough to sell to; others who are very easy to sell to; and still others who are right in the middle, being neither tough nor easy. When you dig beneath the surface, it turns out that what separates all these potential buyers from one another is the sum of the individual beliefs they have about buying, about making decisions in general, and about trusting other people, especially those who are trying to sell them things.

Together, the sum of all these beliefs, and all the experiences that have contributed to the formation of these beliefs, creates a defined “threshold of certainty” that a prospect must cross over before he or she feels comfortable enough to buy.

We call this level of certainty a person’s action threshold, and it comprises the fourth core element of the Straight Line System. By way of definition, we refer to people who are very easy to sell to as having a low action threshold; and we refer to people who are very difficult to sell to as having a high action threshold.

Now, that’s all fine and dandy, but what makes this concept so absolutely crucial to a salesperson’s success is a remarkable discovery I made that proved to be the linchpin strategy that allowed people with very little natural sales ability to close at the same level as a natural born salesperson, namely: that a prospect’s action threshold is malleable; it is not set in stone.