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

In essence, this is about being fully engaged and showing great interest in speaking to your prospect. In other cases—like when you say “how are you”—it goes a long way toward establishing instant rapport with someone and establishing yourself as a person who cares and really wants to know how they’re doing.

This tonality creates an unconscious psychological connection, because we naturally feel closer to people who express a sincere caring for our well-being.

Now, in this particular case, the additional words Mr. Smith heard after “Hi, is John there?” were: “I really want to know! I’m not like the rest of the salesmen who ask you that, just to get it out of the way. I genuinely want to speak to him!”

Now, to be clear, there is a sweet spot here, insofar as just how much peppiness and upbeatness you can layer onto your words until you start to sound disingenuous. In other words, you don’t want to say it like Tony the Tiger says, “It’s grrrrrreat!” I mean, you’d sound like a complete idiot if you did that. You want to be upbeat enough to get your point across, but not so over the top that you sound ridiculous.

Remember, tonality is the secret weapon of influence, because it’s an unspoken language. Your prospect hears words without you having to say them, and gets influenced without even knowing.

So how does Mr. Smith respond?

At the same time he’s hearing the additional words from Bill Peterson’s amped-up greeting and trying to process their meaning, he says, “Yeah, this is John,” to which Bill Peterson immediately breaks out his second core influencing tonality, which is called phrasing a declarative as a question, and he applies it in the following words:

“Hi, my name is Bill Peterson, calling from Acme Travel Company in Beverly Hills, California. How are you today?”

Now, notice how each one of those three thoughts is a declaration:

1 Hi, my name is Bill Peterson,

2 calling from Acme Travel Company

3 in Beverly Hills, California

Now, clearly each of those three thoughts is a declarative statement, not a question. However, by phrasing them as questions, you’ve tapped into the power of three separate human desires simultaneously:

1 To not be perceived as being out of the loop

2 To remember people we’ve met before

3 To appear generally agreeable

Now watch what happens to the punctuation when Bill Peterson phrases those declaratives as questions:

“Hi, my name is Bill Peterson? Calling from Acme Travel Company? In Beverly Hills, California? How are you today?”

By phrasing each of these three statements as questions, back to back, you infer what’s called a microagreement, and the additional words Mr. Smith hears are: “Right? Right? You’ve heard of us, right?”

Here’s another example, from my personal life:

My daughter was the best salesperson when she was little. She’d say, “Daddy, we’re going to the toy store, right? You said so, right?” If you’ve ever heard kids do that—you know that they naturally know how to use this tonality. Now, when my daughter would do this, naturally I’d go into my head and start searching my memory, thinking, “I don’t know. Did I?” But she’d already moved the conversation forward and was headed out the door to go to the toy store before I could stop and really think about it. Using this tonality before I knew what was happening, she’d Straight-Lined me into the car, to the store, and into buying her the toy she wanted.

This is a tonality you want to use sparingly, but it’s incredibly powerful in gaining agreement with your prospect. You can either phrase your statement as a question or, in some contexts, just use the exact words as you raise your voice again, again, and again, to which your prospect will hear: “Right? Right? Right?”

When Bill phrases his name as a question, Mr. Smith’s inner monologue starts saying, “Wait a second! Am I supposed to know who this person is? I better hedge my bets and sound like I do!”

What happens in that very instant, when you phrase a regular statement as a question, is that it sends your prospect’s brain into search mode, as the prospect tries to figure out whether or not they should know the person who’s calling. And again, due to the conscious mind’s limited processing power, as long as your prospect remains in search mode, their internal monologue is paralyzed from working against you.