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

Practically speaking, the implications of this are staggering. After all, if you can lower a person’s action threshold, then you can turn some of the toughest buyers into easy buyers—which is something that we do with great effect in the latter stages of the sale, and that sets up the possibility of being able to close anyone who is closeable.

However, when you’re out in the field, you’re going to find some extraordinarily tough customers. I’m talking about prospects who still won’t buy from you, even after you’ve raised their level of certainty as much as humanly possible, and then lowered their action threshold and asked for the order again.

So, for these ultra-tough nuts to crack, we now turn to the fifth core element of the Straight Line System: the pain threshold.

You see, at the end of the day, pain is the most powerful motivator of all—causing human beings to quickly move away from whatever they believe is the source of their pain, and to move towards whatever they believe will resolve their pain. In essence, pain creates urgency, which makes it the perfect vehicle for closing these tougher sales.

To that end it’s absolutely crucial that you take the time to uncover precisely what your prospect’s pain is and where it comes from. Once I have that information, I can then position my product as a remedy for their pain, and then verbally paint a picture for them of the future—showing how much better they are going to feel as a result of using my product, which has taken away all their pain and has them feeling pleasure again.

In addition, by saving this powerful human motivator for last, it gives us the ability to make that one final push—taking a prospect who needs our product and wants our product and can truly benefit from our product—and creating just enough pain to push them across their action threshold and get them to buy.

So, there you have it:

THE FIVE CORE ELEMENTS OF THE STRAIGHT LINE SYSTEM

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.

4 Lower the action threshold.

5 Raise the pain threshold.

Each of these core elements serves its own unique purpose, while paving the way for everything that comes after it.

My favorite metaphor to explain this process is how a professional safecracker goes about plying his trade, like in the movie The Italian Job. If you haven’t seen it, here’s the skinny:

Donald Sutherland plays one of those old-fashioned safecrackers, who puts his ear to the tumbler and listens for each click. Upon hearing the first one, he spins the tumbler in the opposite direction and waits for the next one, and then the next one, and then the next one after that. Finally, when he’s gotten a click for each number in the combination, he’ll pull down the handle to try and open the safe and—voilà!—if he’s identified each number correctly, the safe will open.

In a manner of speaking, that’s precisely what you’re doing when you’re moving a prospect down the Straight Line. Essentially, you’re cracking the code to his or her buying combination, and you’re doing it the same way every single time.

And here’s what we know about the “safe” of the human brain, when it comes to making a buying decision: there are only five numbers in the combination; that’s it!

The first number is a prospect’s level of certainty about your product; the second number is their level of certainty about you; the third number is their level of certainty about your company; the fourth number addresses their action threshold; and the fifth number addresses their pain threshold.

That’s all there is: five basic numbers to crack.

Now, in terms of how we spin the tumbler, well . . . that’s what the next 200 pages of this book are about. In that regard, I guess it’s fair to say that this book is basically a universal safecracker’s manual for the human mind.

Will it crack every single buying combination?

No, not every one; and that’s a good thing.

After all, not everyone is closable, at least not on every occasion, and sometimes it turns out, due to ethical reasons, a prospect shouldn’t be closed. That said, however, what the Straight Line System can do, once you become reasonably proficient at it, is get you to a point where you can close anyone who’s closable.

In other words, if someone doesn’t buy from you, then you’ll know that it wasn’t because you did something wrong. You won’t walk away from a sale saying to yourself, “Too bad JB wasn’t here; he would’ve closed him!”