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

At the heart of the problem was a horrific telemarketing script that had been written by the company’s sales manager, a thirty-something dilettante whose own sales ability seemed to begin and end with the line of bullshit he’d been able sell the CEO regarding his ability to manage a sales force.

In any event, the script was about three times the size of a standard piece of letter paper, and virtually every inch of it was covered in writing. The words had been chunked into short paragraphs, about thirty of them in all, and the paragraphs were arranged in a series of concentric circles that were connected by arrows of varying lengths and thicknesses.

Within ten seconds, I was 100 percent certain this particular script was the biggest piece of shit I’d ever had the displeasure of laying my eyes on. (And that’s saying a lot when you consider how awful the average non–Straight Line script is.)

Anyway, right before we broke for lunch, I called the entire sales force into the training room, including the sales manager, and without any warning or lead-in, I held up the offending item and said, in a tone laced with venom:

“You see this script? This is the biggest piece of shit I’ve ever read through in my entire life! In fact, it’s so bad that it’s been sucking the life out of you guys, like a killer zombie.” I shrugged my shoulders. “That’s why it needs to be permanently destroyed, with no chance of resurrection. Anyone here know how to permanently kill a zombie?”

“With fire,” declared a salesman. “You gotta burn it!”

“Exactly,” I replied. “That’s why I brought this.” And I reached into a shopping bag that was sitting on the floor beside me and pulled out a handheld blowtorch that was normally used for firing up a cigar, and I held it up for public inspection.

“There will be no resurrection!” I sputtered, and without saying another word, I held the blowtorch to the edge of the script and pressed the ignition button and set the script ablaze.

With great pride, I declared, “A script needs to be a perfect straight line, not a circular piece of smeg—”

I was cut off in mid-sentence by the sight of the flame being unnaturally squelched out. Apparently, the paper had been treated with some kind of fire-resistant coating. “Can you believe this shit?” I muttered. “This script is so cold that it won’t even catch fire!” With that, I threw the script on the floor and began jumping up and down on it, as the entire room clapped and cheered in approval—or, should I say, the entire room sans the sales manager.

Sensing his impending doom, he had slipped out of the training session while I was trying to torch his script, and he was never seen or heard from again. But nobody cared—least of all the company’s CEO, who watched in awe as his sales soared by more than 700 percent the following month. It was a truly shocking result, he remarked in a handwritten thank-you note I received from him shortly thereafter. In addition to the note, there was also a hefty bonus check inside the envelope, with a yellow Post-it attached to it. It said:

J,

You deserve every penny of this! Just make sure Ol’ Mel gets his cut, too!

GS

The “Ol’ Mel” he was referring to was none other than Mel Gibson, of Braveheart fame; and the specific context he was referring to was a metaphor I had used to explain the relationship between an expertly written Straight Line script and mastering the art of reading that script without sounding like you were reading it.

“Now, I assume you guys have all seen the movie Braveheart,” I said to his sales force. “Well, you know that scene where the ragtag Scottish army is standing there dressed in their torn-up kilts, holding their pitchforks and axes, and across the field is the massive army of English redcoats, who are standing in perfect formation with their archers and heavy horses and the infantry, who are all holding longswords, and it’s obvious that the Scots are about to get their asses kicked. You guys all know the scene I’m talking about, right?”

They all nodded their heads.

“Great. And then Mel Gibson comes riding up on his horse, with his face all painted blue, and he breaks into that famous speech, where he says, ‘Sons of Scotland, you stand here today in the face of three hundred years of oppression and tyranny and blah-blah-blah’ . . . and he goes on and on, with all this incredibly motivating stuff—talking about how their entire lives have come down to this one moment, and how they have only one shot at freedom; and, just like that, they go charging full steam ahead at the English army and they wipe them out in a matter of minutes.

“It’s an incredible scene,” I said confidently. “But let me ask you one important question: You think Ol’ Mel winged it?