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

The bottom line is that you have four seconds until someone rips you apart, compartmentalizes you, judges each piece, and then puts you back together again based on how you were perceived. And if those three aforementioned things—being sharp as a tack, enthusiastic as hell, and an expert in your field—haven’t been established firmly in your prospect’s mind, then you have basically no chance of closing them.

Now, why is that?

Well, think about it for a second: do you really want to do business with a novice? When you go buy a car or a stock or a computer, who do you want guiding you through the process, a novice or an expert? An expert, of course!

In fact, we’ve been conditioned since we were yea big to seek out experts to help us solve our problems and eliminate our pain. When we were sick, our parents took us to a very special person called a doctor, who wore a white lab coat and had a stethoscope around their neck; and we were awestruck, at first, at how even our own parents deferred to this person—until they told us why. This person, they explained, had been through countless years of schooling, during which they learned everything there was to know about making sick people feel better. These people were even taught how to dress and how to act and how to talk so people would have confidence in them at a single glance, which is why you started to feel better just by being in their presence. This person had earned the right to be called a doctor, because they were a true expert in their field.

But, of course, this was only the beginning of our conditioning. As we grew older, the parade of experts continued.

If we were struggling in school, our parents might hire us a tutor; if we wanted to master a certain sport, they’d hire us a coach. And when we entered adulthood, we picked up right where our parents left off, and to this very day we continue to seek out experts and teach our children to do the same.

Think about it for a moment.

Who do you think Scarlett Johansson wants styling her hair on the day of the Oscars? Is she going to seek out some pimple-faced kid who’s fresh out of beauty school, or is she going to track down the world’s foremost stylist, who’s been making celebrities look fabulous for the last twenty years?

And who do you think Jordan Spieth or Jason Day will turn to if they’re in a slump: a local pro at a municipal course or a world-famous swing doctor who’s written books on the subject and who’s worked with other famous professionals for at least twenty years?

The simple fact is that we all want to deal with pros or experts, and we also want to deal with people who are sharp and on the ball, and who are enthusiastic about what they do. Experts have a certain way of talking that literally commands respect. They say things like “Listen, Bill, you need to trust me on this. I’ve been doing this for fifteen years, and I know exactly what you need.”

Novices, on the other hand, tend to speak in far less definite terms, and their limited grasp on the deeper nuances of their product and their particular industry becomes more and more apparent as they move a prospect farther down the Straight Line and enter the looping phase, and are forced to “free-form”—meaning, they run out of scripted material and are forced to make things up on the fly in an effort to push their prospect’s level of certainty above their action threshold so they’ll buy.

My point here is that how you are perceived will carry through to every part of the sale, but it starts in the first four seconds. If you screw that up and make a negative first impression, then you basically have no chance of closing the deal.

Interestingly, the first time I said this was close to thirty years ago, on that very Tuesday evening when I invented the Straight Line System. I told the Strattonites that evening that they had precisely four seconds to make that all-important first impression.

However, as it turns out, I was actually wrong.

In 2013, a professor at Harvard University published a study on this exact topic—the importance of first impressions—and what the study found was that it wasn’t four seconds until a prospect made the initial judgment; it was actually five seconds. So I have to apologize for being off by one second.

Apologies aside, what the study also found was that if you make a negative first impression, it takes eight subsequent positive impressions to erase that one negative first impression. Frankly, I don’t know about you, but in all my years in sales, and with all the products I’ve sold, I can’t think of one industry where, if I screwed up the first meeting, I got eight subsequent chances to redeem myself. It simply doesn’t happen.

That’s why it is absolutely mandatory to establish those three crucial elements in the first four seconds of the conversation, every single time. Otherwise, you’re toast.