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

Now, to be clear, as powerful as this concept is, you shouldn’t delude yourself into thinking that just because you phrased a declarative as a question, your prospect is now going to buy from you. That’s simply not how tonality works. Rather, it keeps the prospect in the game—by stopping their inner monologue from narrating against you—thereby, opening up the possibility for further influence by you, which will come in the form of your next sentence.

In fact, at this point in the sale, that’s precisely how I want you to be thinking about things: word by word and sentence by sentence.

I want you to make sure that each word you’ve chosen is the absolute best one possible given your desired outcome (more on this later in the chapter on scripting), and that the tonality you’ve applied allows you to maintain control of your prospect’s inner monologue and, as a result, the sales encounter.

In this particular instance, the next group of words you’re going to say—aka, your next language pattern, in Straight Line parlance—is going to explain the precise reason why you called the prospect today.

In other words, you didn’t just call the prospect out of the blue. You didn’t call yesterday, you didn’t call tomorrow, and you didn’t call next week; you called right now, and there’s a very specific reason for it.

We call this reason a justifier, inasmuch as it creates a justification for your reaching out to the prospect. I’ll go through this in more detail in Chapter 10 (which goes into detail on prospecting), but for now all you need to understand is that when you use a justifier correctly, it will dramatically increase the compliance rate for whatever request you’re making. In this case, the request that Bill Peterson is going to make will be for permission to ask Mr. Smith a series questions, so he can begin the intelligence-gathering process. However, for now, let’s just focus on the justifier itself and the tonality that Bill is going to apply to it—namely, the tonality of mystery and intrigue.

Bill says, “Now, John, the reason for the call today is that we’ve been reaching out to a select group of homeowners in your area to offer them . . . ,” and then he’ll go on to explain whatever that offer happens to be. It could be a marketing special, where Mr. Smith is going to get free airfare or a free night in a hotel; or it could be the chance to join a vacation club or travel club, or anything else that offers a perceived benefit to Mr. Smith.

The way you create mystery and intrigue with this tonality is by lowering your voice to just above a whisper and then hanging on the R in the word “reason” for an extra fraction of a second.^I

In addition, because you lower your voice to just above a whisper, the reason takes on the properties of a secret, creating a sense of urgency and scarcity, which takes us now to our fourth core influencing tonality, namely: scarcity.

In sales, we use the word “scarcity” to describe a prospect’s natural inclination to want more and more of what he or she perceives there to be less and less of. In other words, when a person finds out that something they desire is in short supply—or scarce—it makes them desire that something even more.

All told, there are actually three types of scarcity.

The first type is called verbal scarcity.

Verbal scarcity is a state of scarcity created strictly by the use of words. Let’s switch examples now (and say goodbye to Mr. Smith and Bill Peterson), and let’s assume that you’re a BMW salesman and a prospect walks into your dealership looking to buy a black 750iL with black leather interior. And say you wanted to create verbal scarcity about the model and color of car that prospect wanted.

You could say something like “We only have one black-on-black 750iL left on the floor, and it’s going to be three months until our next shipment comes in.” Pretty straightforward, right?

In essence, by explaining to the prospect that the car he wants is in short supply, the salesperson increases the likelihood that the prospect will buy the car now, to avoid the possibility of missing out.

In sales, we refer to this process as creating urgency, and it’s an integral part of persuading your customer to buy now, as opposed to sometime in the future. In consequence, you should always try to create at least some degree of urgency right before you ask for the order, as it will dramatically increase the likelihood of your prospect saying yes.

Now, if the salesperson wanted to increase that likelihood even further, then they could layer the tonality for scarcity on top of the words said.

We call this second type of scarcity tonal scarcity.