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

Just then the door swung open and Danny walked into the office, wearing a $2,000 suit and a cynical expression. “You almost done with this?” he asked.

“Almost,” I replied, “but I’m actually glad you popped in. Your timing is perfect. I need you to do something for me.”

“What’s that?” he answers cautiously.

“I want you to sell me this pen!” I declared, grabbing another pen off my desktop and extending my hand towards him.

Danny shot me a look. “You want me to sell you a pen. Seriously?”

“Yeah,” I fired back. “Show the kid how it’s done. Sell me this pen.”

“Fine, I’ll sell it to you,” he muttered, grabbing the pen and taking a moment to examine it. Then, all at once, he completely changed his demeanor and flashed me a warm smile and said, in a respectful tone: “So, tell me, Jordan, how long have you been in the market for a pen?”

“I’m not in,” I replied. “I don’t use pens.”

“Really? Well, then you can have your lousy pen back,” he snapped, tossing the pen back onto my desktop.

Then he looked at the kid and said, “I don’t sell things to people who don’t need them. I leave that to novices, like you.”

While the moral of the story seems plainly obvious, there’s actually a lot more going on here than meets the eye. So let me take things one at a time, starting with the obvious:

Firstly, it should be crystal clear to you by now that trying to sell something to someone who doesn’t need it or want it is a fool’s errand and a total waste of time.

A Straight Line salesperson, and for that matter any professional salesperson, would never consider shooting from the hip like that. Instead, they would sift through their prospects as quickly and efficiently as possible, separating out the ones who were interested from the ones who weren’t.

In general sales parlance, this sifting process is referred to as “qualifying a prospect,” and the primary method by which a prospect gets qualified is by answering a series of questions that get posed to the prospect by the salesperson.

All in all, it’s a cut-and-dried, no-frills process that’s utilitarian in nature and gets straight to the point. If upon answering your questions, it turns out that the prospect needs what you’re selling, and can afford to pay for it, then they are qualified. It’s as simple as that.

And then you use the Straight Line System, where the word “qualifying” is never to be uttered under penalty of . . . well, not death, but, at least, shame.

Here, we refer to this process as “Straight Line prospecting,” and the primary method by which we do our sifting is through gathering intelligence.

Now, if you recall, I touched on this topic at the end of Chapter 2, when I presented you with a flashback from the night when I first invented the Straight Line System.

When you gather intelligence, I explained, you want to know everything there is to know about your prospect, so long as it’s relevant to closing the sale—including their needs, beliefs, values, hierarchy of values (meaning, the relative importance of each value), their past experiences with similar products, past experiences with other salespeople, personal financial situation (insofar as affording your product), and both their primary and their secondary pain points.

On top of that, what I also explained that night—and what I want to reemphasize now and dig into more deeply—was the fact that your ability to gather intelligence will be directly related to how powerful a first impression you made on your prospect during those first four seconds.

In other words, the only way that your prospects will answer your questions honestly and forthrightly is if they perceive you as being a true expert in your field, and a person whose confidence and eloquence and bottled enthusiasm has left them no doubt whatsoever that you’re definitely a person worth listening to, someone who can help them achieve their goals and resolve their pain.

Without that, there’s simply no reason for your prospects to waste their time opening up to you or risk the embarrassment or loss of confidentiality that could result from it. So instead, they’ll only give you perfunctory answers to your questions or, more likely, they’ll try to take control of the sale themselves, causing things to spiral out of control.

I’ve seen it happen a thousand times:

A novice salesperson tries to qualify a prospect, only to have the prospect answer their questions with questions of their own, until the whole thing has devolved into chaos. It’s a perfect example of the Iron Mike Tyson metaphor I used at the end of Chapter 2. The only difference is that instead of getting barraged by devastating punches, you’re getting barraged with devastating questions—devastating in the sense that they’ll cause you to veer off the Straight Line and go spiraling off to Pluto or, even worse, Your-anus.