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

Conversely, when you are in control, the barrage stops. Realizing that they are in the presence of an expert in their respective field, the prospect feels compelled to defer to you, and allows you to ask as many questions as you deem necessary, without interruption.

Now, this latter point is absolutely crucial, because in the absence of interruptions, questions can now be asked in a manner and sequence that not only promotes a smooth, mutually productive intelligence-gathering session but also enhances your ability to build rapport. But I’m jumping ahead now.

Straight Line prospecting has more moving parts than any other step in the syntax, so the most effective way to teach it to you is to start with the big picture first.

Let me zoom out for a moment and give you a quick overview of the relationship between marketing and sales—insofar as how they work hand in hand with one another to turn a company’s goods and services into cash—and how Straight Line prospecting serves as the bridge between the two.

In essence, you have marketing on one side of the equation, and sales on the other. The objective of marketing is to:

1Research the marketplace to identify the best prospective buyers—prospects, for short—for a particular product.

2Develop a cost-effective strategy that gets the company’s message in front of as many of these prospects as possible.

3Embed the message with some sort ofofferorhookor call to action that prompts as many of these prospects as possible to enter the company’s sales funnel.

4Coordinate with the sales department to ensure a seamless handoff of the funnel, so prospects can be turned into customers.

Now, in today’s world, there are two types of marketing.

First, we have offline marketing, which includes everything that takes place off the Internet—TV and radio ads, newspaper ads, magazine ads, billboard ads, direct mail, telemarketing, network marketing, educational marketing, door-knocking campaigns, etc. And, second, we have online marketing, which includes everything that takes place on the Internet—Google ads, Facebook ads, Twitter ads, YouTube ads, banner ads, landing pages, opt-ins, retargeting campaigns, email blasts, affiliate marketing, SEO campaigns, and much, much more.

Now, as I said, whichever marketing modality a company decides to use, the ultimate objective is always the same: to bring as many qualified buyers as possible into the company’s sales funnel, so they can then be handed off to the sales department and turned into customers.

Pretty straightforward, right?

Actually, not quite.

You see, no matter how carefully you target your marketing campaign, there is no possible way that every prospect who enters your sales funnel will end up being a qualified buyer. In fact, in most cases, if even half of those prospects turn out to be qualified buyers, then you’re doing great.

In essence, this is what Straight Line prospecting is all about: sifting through prospects who enter your sales funnel to eliminate the ones who don’t qualify to buy your product—thereby avoiding wasting your time making a full-blown sales presentation to them.

To that end, in any given marketing campaign, there are four categories of buyers who will enter your sales funnel. We call these the four buying archetypes.

The first archetype is called buyers in heat.

These are basically your best, most motivated buyers. These prospects want your product, need your product, can benefit from your product, can afford your product, and, most importantly, they’re prepared to make a buying decision right now.

Like all legitimate buyers, buyers in heat have a certain pain they’re looking to resolve; however, what separates them from the rest of the pack is that they’ve already made the decision to do something about it now. In other words, they’re done waiting; they’re ready to act. They’ve gotten to the point where they are simply no longer willing to tolerate the pain that comes from an unresolved need, so they’ve decided to get proactive.

The only downside to this group of ready-made buyers is that there aren’t that many of them. Depending on what industry you’re in and how targeted your marketing campaign was, you’ll find that somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the total prospects that enter your sales funnel will fall into this category; the rest will be spread among the other three.