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

When you’re writing your script, you should ask yourself, with every single sentence: “Is everything I’m saying 100 percent accurate? Am I coming from a place of integrity? Am I coming from a place of ethics?

“Or am I starting to exaggerate the facts? Am I misleading people? Am I making any material omissions of fact?”

I’m the first one to admit that I wrote some scripts back in the early days that I’m not particularly proud of. It’s not that they were full of lies, but there were some serious omissions of fact, which ended up painting a very skewed picture of things.

So, please, for your own sake, I want you to make sure that your scripts are not only 100 percent accurate but also come from a place of ethics and integrity—meaning, you need to have a zero tolerance policy in place when it comes to things like lying and exaggerating and misleading and omitting, or anything else that wouldn’t pass the so-called smell test.

In addition, for those of you who are in management, or if you’re an owner of the company, always remember that if you hand your sales force a script that’s riddled with lies and exaggerations, they will most certainly know it—and the consequences will be disastrous.

For starters, passing out an unethical script is tantamount to giving your sales force corporate approval to go out and rape and pillage the village. You see, as your salespeople are out there banging away on the phone or knocking on doors in the field, they’re lying and exaggerating or omitting key facts every time they make a sales presentation, and it will quickly seep into your entire corporate culture and poison it.

In fact, before long, your sales force will spiral completely out of control—making up bolder and bolder lies and wilder and wilder exaggerations with each passing day, as they become more and more desensitized to their own lack of ethics, which started with you!

The bottom line is that you can’t be half-pregnant when it comes to ethics, so any notion you have that you can hand out a deceitful script and not have it ultimately destroy your entire corporate culture is foolish. Your scripts need to be accurate, compliant, and reflective of your corporate culture, which is one of ethics and integrity.

And they also need to be sexy as all hell!

Remember, these things are not mutually exclusive: your script can be sexy and compelling and still 100 percent ethical.

To sum it up, your script should be the truth well told.

Seventh, remember the overarching equation of energy in, benefits out.

The moment before a prospect makes a buying decision, they run a lightning-fast equation through their mind that weighs the difference between the total amount of energy they’ll have to expend, in order to go through the closing process and receive your product, against the total value of all the amazing benefits you’ve promised them, both immediately and in the future.

To that end, if the value of the expected benefits exceeds the total projected energy expenditure, then the prospect’s brain will issue an all clear sign and they can then decide whether or not they want to buy. Conversely, if the value of the expected benefits is less than the projected energy expenditure, then a red flag goes up, eliminating any chance of the prospect buying until you’ve satisfied the equation.

The name of this equation is energy in, benefits out, and it comes into play each time you ask for the order—including when you respond to buy signals during the back half of the sale.

This principle doesn’t even register with the prospect’s conscious mind until a microsecond after you’ve asked for the order, at which point it springs into action—instructing their inner monologue to pose a simple, yet very pointed question, namely: At the end of the day, is it really worth it?

In other words, from a sober, logical perspective, is the sum total of all the benefits I expect to receive greater than the sum total of all the energy I’ll have to expend in order to receive them?

Now, what you need to understand here is that although a positive outcome to this equation doesn’t necessarily mean that your prospect will buy, a negative outcome to this equation means that they definitely won’t buy. This is not forever, but until you get another chance to ask for the order again, at which point you’ll adhere to a set of simple yet extremely effective principles that will ensure you end up on the right side of this equation.

Let me quickly lay these principles out for you, using our trusted subjects Bill Peterson and John Smith as examples.