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

In fact, I can see all their points—the points of the millions upon millions of people who have attended my Straight Line seminars all over the world, and who have cocked their heads to the side and narrowed their eyes skeptically when I got up onstage and said, with absolute certainty, that every sale is the same.

After all, it seems like a rather far-fetched notion, doesn’t it?

I mean, even if you put aside the obvious points that I listed above, how could every sale possibly be the same? Take the countless number of goods and services for sale in the global marketplace: they too are all different. Take the personal financial situations of your prospects: they’re all different too. And take the unique sets of preconceived notions that each prospect brings with them into the sale—not just about your product but also about you, about trusting salespeople in general, and about the decision-making process itself as it relates to buying. Again, they’re all different.

Indeed, when you take all the apparent differences that can pop up in a sale at any time, it comes as no surprise that only a tiny percentage of the population feels comfortable at the thought of entering a situation that requires sales and influence. The rest of the world actively shies away from it—despite knowing how absolutely crucial it is to the achievement of wealth and success.

Even worse, among those very select few who do feel comfortable, only a tiny percentage of them will ever attain the status of being a top producer. The rest will plod along somewhere in the middle, stuck in the muck and mire of mediocrity and averagism. They’ll earn just enough to keep “selling” worthwhile (after all, even a decent salesperson will make more money closing sales than in a non–sales related job), but they’ll never experience the financial freedom of being a top producer. It will always remain just out of reach.

It’s a sad reality, for sure, but such is the plight of any salesperson who believes that every sale is different—a discovery that hit me like an atomic bomb and led directly to the creation of the Straight Line System.

My discovery didn’t come about slowly. It came all at once, during an emergency sales training session I held in Stratton’s original boardroom. At the time, I had only twelve brokers working for me, and, at this particular moment—precisely 7:15 p.m. on that very Tuesday evening—they were sitting directly across from me and wearing those confused, skeptical expressions that I would come to know so well.

As the story goes, exactly four weeks prior to that, I had stumbled upon an untapped niche in the retail stock market, which was selling five-dollar stocks to the richest 1 percent of Americans. For whatever reason, no one on Wall Street had ever tried it before; and when I tested the idea myself, the results were so incredible that I decided to completely reinvent the firm.

At the time, Stratton was selling penny stocks to average moms-and-pops, and we were having massive success since the day the firm opened. In fact, by the end of our third month, the average broker—or Strattonite, as they liked to call themselves—was already earning more than $12,000 in monthly commission, and one of them was earning more than triple that.

That broker was none other than Danny Porush, my future junior partner, who would end up being immortalized on the silver screen by a slimmed down, buck-toothed version of Jonah Hill, who loosely portrayed him in the movie The Wolf of Wall Street.

Whatever the case, Danny was the first person I’d ever taught how to sell penny stocks, and as luck would have it, he turned out to be a born salesperson, like me. At the time, we both worked at a small penny stock firm called the Investor Center, and Danny was my assistant. When I left to open Stratton, I brought Danny with me and he’d been my right-hand man ever since.

In fact, it was Danny who wrote that first massive buy ticket with a wealthy investor, on the fifth day of the test. His commission on this one single trade was $72,000, an amount so incomprehensibly large that if I hadn’t seen it for myself, I wouldn’t have believed it. To give you some perspective, it was over a hundred times greater than the average commission on a penny stock trade. It was nothing short of a total game-changer.