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

The second buying archetype is called buyers in power.

These are your second best group of buyers. The primary difference between the first two archetypes is that buyers in power aren’t consciously feeling any major pain from their unfilled need, which causes them to lack the same level of urgency as buyers in heat.

In other words, while buyers in power have every intention of buying the type of product you’re selling, their lack of urgency makes them feel like they’re in a position of power, so they’re not going to pull the trigger until they’re done shopping around and have made themselves absolutely certain that they’ve found the best solution to their problem.

Nonetheless, these are still excellent prospects (and there are also a heck of a lot more of them than buyers in heat!). On average, somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the total prospects that enter your sales funnel will end up falling into this category.

At the end of the day, it’s the prospects from these two categories—buyers in heat and buyers in power—who will make it past the intelligence-gathering phase and continue their journey down the Straight Line. The prospects from the remaining two buying archetypes need to be weeded out as quickly as possible, especially those who fall into the third archetype:

The dreaded lookie-loos.

Also known as “tire-kickers,” the lookie-loos are the most dangerous prospects that will enter your sales funnel. What makes them so destructive is that they disguise themselves as buyers in power—acting as if they’re genuinely interested in buying your product—while they actually have no intention of doing so. In consequence, they continue their journey down the Straight Line, as opposed to getting weeded out during the intelligence-gathering phase as they’re supposed to be.

The resulting damage occurs on two levels:

First (and most obviously), it causes a massive amount of time to be wasted as you end up making full-blown sales presentations to prospects who have no intention of buying. And second (and even more damaging) is the confusion and negativity it creates as a novice salesperson tries to figure out why their closing rate is so low. “Is there something wrong with me?” the salesperson wonders. Is it their pitch? Is the salesperson not making a strong enough logical case? Emotional case? Or maybe the salesperson is screwing up at the very end, during the objection-handling phase? After all, the prospects remain interested the whole way through—giving the salesperson buy signal after buy signal to the very end—and then they don’t buy.

You see the problem here?

Having no idea that between 30 and 40 percent of their sales funnel is filled with professional time wasters (disguised as buyers in power), salespeople end up spending the bulk of their time making sales presentations to prospects who have no intention of buying.

The good news is that identifying them isn’t very difficult.

There are four telltale signs that will alert you to the fact that you’re having your time wasted by a lookie-loo:

1They tend to ask lots of questions that they seem to already know the answers to.

2They make it a point tokick the tiresof whatever it is you’re selling, almost to the point ofover-kicking them.

3They let out a large number ofooosandaahsandyups, to reinforce the sense that they’re genuinely interested.

4When asked about their finances, they either become boisterously overconfident or unnecessarily vague.

Again, I can’t overestimate the importance of being hypervigilant when it comes to identifying and weeding out the lookie-loos as quickly as possible. You’ll end up avoiding a lot of pain over the long run.

Now, this takes us to the fourth and final buying archetype, which I refer to as the mistakes, or “the people who were dragged there.” In essence, these are people who never belonged in your sales funnel in the first place. Either they clicked on the wrong website, showed up at your place of business by mistake, or they were simply dragged into your sales funnel by someone else.

Whatever the case, the common thread among all the mistakes is that they had no desire to enter your sales funnel in the first place, so you have basically no chance of closing them.

So, in summary, the three main goals of Straight Line prospecting are as follows:

1Identify the lookie-loos and the mistakes and remove them from your sales funnel as quickly as possible.