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

You see, when you’re a born salesperson, you don’t have to consciously decide which of the ten core influencing tonalities you need to apply to your words in order to take control of your prospect’s inner monologue and stop it from narrating against you. Your unconscious mind provides this service for you automatically, and gets it right every single time.

As if by magic, if at any point during the sale it behooves you to sound absolutely certain or utterly sincere, or caring and sympathetic or perfectly reasonable, or any of the ten core tonalities that drive human influence, then that very tonality will get layered on top of your words, without you having to even think about it. It simply just happens.

On the flip side, though, when you’re not a born salesperson, a literally ginormous group that includes over 99 percent of the population, then a breakdown in your internal communication occurs. Specifically, your conscious and unconscious minds fail to link up in a way that allows for the unimpeded exchange of information between the two.

In consequence, your outgoing communication ends up becoming a watered-down version of what you’d originally intended—lacking the richness and vibrancy that you thought you had expressed through the use of tonality and body language.

You see, unbeknownst to you, the tonality that you thought you had applied had somehow been blocked or impeded from completing its journey out of your mouth, to accompany your words, which, for their part, faced no blockage or impediment at all.

In other words, the absence of tonality—or, far more frequently, the presence of only a trace amount of tonality in your outgoing communication—was not a conscious choice you made; rather, you were a victim of a subpar internal communication platform that made you “tone deaf,” as the phrase goes.

At the very instant that your words were escaping your lips and you heard them with your own ears, you were tricked by your unconscious mind into thinking that you sounded perfect, which is to say, that you sounded just the way you had intended to sound.

Yet, in reality, attributes like certainty, confidence, passion, enthusiasm, urgency, empathy, clarity, and other subjective qualities that characterize a well-told story or well-explained concept got lost in translation—victims of a one-two punch at the formidable hands of nature and nurture, which sent you into adulthood with an internal communication platform that waters down your outgoing messages by allowing your words to flow freely, while it impedes the tonality you’ve applied.

Now, insofar as how this impacts your ability to close, on the most basic level—meaning, when you use tonality in the traditional sense, as opposed to taking control of your prospect’s inner monologue—you can draw a straight line back to the emotional component of the Three Tens to see the carnage. You see, in the absence of the right tonality, your ability to move your prospect emotionally is severely limited and your ability to close is also limited accordingly.

Remember, it’s your words that move a prospect logically, and it’s your tonality that moves your prospect emotionally. And, in addition to that, we can also use tonality at a much higher level to take control of our prospect’s inner monologue and stop it from narrating against us. In fact, it’s time to get specific about that.

Let’s go back to the example of the well-mannered Mr. Smith and his telemarketing nemesis, Bill Peterson, from the Acme Travel Company. The only difference is that, this time, Bill Peterson is going to be armed with the tactics and strategies of the Straight Line System—starting with the simplest of all rules, which states that a salesperson should never address their prospect in an overly formal manner; instead, the salesperson should address the prospect in the way they would respectfully address a friend.

So, instead of saying, “Hi, my name is Bill Peterson, from the Acme Travel Company. I’m looking for Mr. John Smith. Is he home?”—which is the equivalent of death—the salesperson should simply say, in a very upbeat tone: “Hi, is John there?”

Now, when I say, “a very upbeat tone,” I’m referring to one of the ten core influencing tonalities, called the “I care” or “I really want to know” tonality. By applying this sort of upbeat, enthusiastic tonality, while virtually all other salespeople are saying the same words in a perfunctory manner, not only do I immediately stand out from the rest of the pack, but I also begin the process of taking control of my prospect’s inner dialog.