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

7Are you self-employed or do you work for someone else?

Notice how these questions make perfect sense in this order.

In fact, not only does each question pave the way for the ones that come after it, but also each of your prospect’s responses will begin to paint a picture of a certain aspect of their life that you can fill in with more and more detail by asking follow-up questions based on their responses.

Just make sure that when you ask your follow-up questions you exhaust each line of questioning before you move on to the next one. And don’t ping-pong back and forth between your prepared questions and your follow-up questions, as it will break the logical flow.

Remember, at this point in the sale, it’s extremely rare that any one mistake will be damaging enough to cause a one-punch knockout; rather, it will be like death from a thousand cuts.

In other words, each one of your mistakes or incongruencies—whether it’s asking a question out of the logical sequence, attaching the wrong tonality to it, getting overly invasive before you’ve earned the right to, or forgetting to actively listen to your prospect’s responses—will slowly but surely eat away at the rapport you’ve worked so hard to create while also undermining your position as an expert, until you reach the point where one more mistake is enough to act as the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Rule #8: Make mental notes; don’t resolve their pain.

When you’re qualifying a prospect, all you should be doing is asking questions and making mental notes based on their responses. You do not want to try to resolve their pain at this point. In fact, if anything, you want to amplify that pain.

Remember, pain serves as a warning signal that there’s something wrong in their life—something that they need to take action to fix—so if you take them out of pain before you make your presentation, then you’re actually doing them a huge disservice.

In other words, when a prospect reveals their pain to you, you don’t want to jump the gun and say, “Oh great! There’s no need to worry now! My product is going to take away all your pain, so there’s no longer any reason to feel bad anymore. Just sit back and relax while I explain everything to you.”

If you do that, then you’re shooting yourself in the foot in a massive way. You see, by applying a temporary balm to their pain, you’re transforming your prospect from being a buyer in heat to being a buyer in power, which is the exact opposite of what you want to be doing.

Instead, you want to amplify their pain by asking them a series of follow-up questions that actually future pace it—forcing them to experience the reality of being in even greater pain at some point down the road if they don’t take action now to resolve it.

This will ensure that your prospect not only understands the ramifications of not taking action to resolve their pain, but also feels those ramifications in their gut.

Rule #9: Always end with a powerful transition.

The purpose of a transition is to move those prospects who are going to continue their journey down the Straight Line to the next step in the sales process, which is when you make your Straight Line sales presentation.

In addition, this is also where you’re going to eliminate the lookie-loos and the mistakes, as well as any buyers in heat and buyers in power who aren’t quite right for your product.

You see, the simple fact is that not every buyer in power and buyer in heat should be taken farther down the Straight Line. For example, if your product is not a good fit for them, then you have a moral obligation to tell them that—to explain that you can’t help them, and that they really shouldn’t be buying.

You should say something along the lines of:

“Well, John, based on everything you just told me, this program isn’t a particularly good fit for you. I’m really sorry about that, but I don’t want to sell you something that you’re not going to be thrilled with.” And if you happen to know of another company that can help them, then you should direct them there. Of course, you’re not morally obligated to do this, but it’s definitely the right thing to do.

Remember, today’s unqualified prospect can be tomorrow’s perfectly qualified prospect, and the amount of goodwill you establish by sending them somewhere else is incalculable. In fact, I’ve had situations where I did just that, and before I could even leave the table, the prospect started calling their friends to try to drum up business for me; and I’ve also had situations where a year later I got a call out of the blue from someone I did that for, and now that person was ready to buy.