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

To this very day, I’ll never forget the look on Danny’s face when he walked into my office holding that golden buy ticket; and I’ll also never forget looking out into the boardroom myself, a few moments later, after I’d regained my composure, and seeing my entire future unfold right before my eyes. In that very instant, I knew that this would be the last day that Stratton ever sold penny stocks to anyone. What with the massive financial firepower that a wealthy investor could bring to bear, it simply didn’t make sense to cold-call average moms-and-pops ever again. It was as simple as that.

All that was left to do was to teach the Strattonites how to close rich people, and the rest, as they say, would be history.

Unfortunately, as they also say, “Easier said than done!”

As it turned out, training a bunch of barely post-adolescent nincompoops to go toe-to-toe with America’s wealthiest investors was far more challenging than I could have ever possibly anticipated. In fact, it turned out to be totally fucking impossible.

After four weeks of cold-calling, the Strattonites hadn’t closed a single new account. Not even one! Even worse, because it was my idea to make the switch, the brokers were holding me personally responsible for their current state of misery.

In essence, they had gone from earning $12,000 a month to making zero dollars a month, and I had run out of ideas on how to train them. And make no mistake: I had tried everything.

After failing miserably with my own system, I read through countless books on sales, listened to tapes, attended local seminars; I even flew clear across the country to Los Angeles, California, to attend a three-day sales seminar that was purported to have the world’s greatest sales trainers all under one roof.

But, again, I came up empty-handed.

Disturbing as it was, after one full month of intelligence gathering, the most valuable piece of intelligence that I’d been able to gather was that my own system of training was far more advanced than anything else out there; and if that wasn’t cutting it, where was I to go from there? I was starting to think that maybe it was just impossible.

Perhaps the Strattonites were simply constitutionally incapable of closing rich people. They were too young and too uneducated to be taken seriously by them. Yet how would that explain the massive success that Danny and I were still having as we continued to dial through our leads? My personal closing rate had climbed to over 50 percent by now, and Danny’s was in the low thirties.

How could we all be dialing through the same leads, using the same script, pitching the same stock, and yet getting such dramatically different results? It was enough to make a person insane; or, even worse, to make them jump ship.

By the end of week four, the Strattonites had basically given up. They were desperate to go back to the world of penny stocks and were teetering on the edge of mutiny.

So there I was, at the front of the boardroom, desperate for a breakthrough. What I was about to realize, however, was that I’d actually just made one.

Looking back at that moment now, standing before the brokers and trying to explain how every sale is the same, I would have never guessed how close I was to inventing the world’s most powerful sales training system.

You see, when I said that every sale is the same, what I meant that night, and what turned out to be one of the most profound ideas I’ve ever had, is that despite all those aforementioned differences—individual needs, objections, values, pain points—despite all that stuff, the same three key elements must still line up in any prospect’s mind before you have a shot at closing them.

Let me repeat that: the reason every sale is the same is because, despite all that individual stuff, the same three key elements still have to line up in any prospect’s mind before you have a shot at closing them.

And it doesn’t matter what you’re selling or how you’re selling it; how much it costs or how much money the prospect has; and whether it’s tangible or intangible, over the phone or in person. If in a single moment in time, you can create these three crucial elements in a prospect’s mind, then you’ve got an excellent shot of closing. Conversely, if even one of them is missing, you have basically no shot at all.

The Three Tens

We call these three core elements the Three Tens—with the context being a prospect’s current state of certainty on a scale from one to ten.

For example, if a prospect is currently at a “ten” on the certainty scale, then it means he or she is in a state of absolute certainty at that moment. Conversely, if the prospect’s currently at a “one,” then they are in a state of absolute uncertainty at that moment.