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

Now, in terms of the literally countless benefits created by a well-written Straight Line script, I could spend two or three chapters writing about that alone; let’s go through the most important benefits first, with a focus on how they work in conjunction with the rest of the Straight Line System to get you to the point where you can close anyone who’s closable.

1 I know this is an obvious one, but I had to include the crucial benefit of the sale being able to drag on for as long as necessary, without there being the slightest risk that a salesperson will start saying stupid shit.

2 You can figure out what tonalities you’re going to apply beforehand, which ensures that not only will you sound totally awesome but you’ll be able to take control of your prospect’s inner monologue and stop it from narrating against you.

3 You can now be sure that, no matter how nervous you are or how much of a novice you might be, when you open your mouth to speak, the best possible words are going to come out every single time.

4 Since your conscious mind no longer has to worry about coming up with the proper words to say, you can now focus the bulk of your attention on how your prospect is reacting to what you say. This will significantly enhance your ability to gauge where your prospect currently is on the certainty scale, as well as alert you to any slip in rapport—as a result of something that you said to your prospect that they disagreed with, or that rubbed them the wrong way.

5 It allows you to build the perfect airtight logical case for each of the Three Tens, while ensuring that you follow every Straight Line presentation rule, which, collectively, have been proven to maximize prospect engagement and increase your closing rate (I’ll be going through those shortly).

6 It allows a company’s management to systemize its sales force by ensuring that the salespeople are saying exactly the same thing to their prospects, regardless of what region they’re in and whether they’re selling inside the office or out in the field. This type of uniformity is absolutely crucial when it comes to growing and expanding a company’s sales force, and it’s the responsibility of the company’s sales manager to enforce this.

7 It reduces regulatory problems by preventing a salesperson from exaggerating or making outright false statements. You see, more often than not, a salesperson doesn’t purposely lie to a prospect or try to deceive them; the salesperson simply runs out of intelligent things to say, at which point they start saying stupid shit. The problem is that there are actually two varieties of stupid shit: the first variety consists of stupid shit that’s truthful and accurate, and the second variety consists of stupid shit that is not truthful or accurate, which is to say it’s against the laws of God and man, the latter of which can be extremely unforgiving, if you’re in a regulated industry.

Again, these are just a few of the many, many benefits that are automatically enjoyed by any salesperson who uses a Straight Line script that follows the eight basic rules for constructing them.

But, still, in spite of that, and in spite of the countless challenges that consistently pop up when any salesperson, other than a natural-born closer, enters a sales encounter without having the benefit of knowing what they are going to say before they have to say it, there is still an inordinately large number of salespeople who have a major negative anchor toward the use of scripts.

Ranging in severity from a mild bout of nausea to a full-blown case of anaphylactic shock, their negative responses are based on three concerns: first, they think that using a script will make them sound wooden and inauthentic (or scripted, as the phrase goes); second, they think that their prospects will figure out that they’re reading from a script and consider it disingenuous or the telltale sign of a novice; and third, they think that using a script is unethical or it lacks integrity, because of the contrived nature of a script.

On the surface, some of those arguments do seem to make a bit of sense. I mean, if someone were to hand me a script that was written in a way that would make me sound wooden or inauthentic, then I’d be the first one to toss it in the garbage or, better yet, light the thing on fire and then stomp on it a few times for good measure.

In fact, I did that very thing, eight years ago, in the offices of a London-based financial services firm that had hired me to teach their sales force the Straight Line System. At the time, they employed twenty salesmen whose performance was so dismal that the CEO referred to them as the Bad News Bears of the financial services industry.