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

Let’s say you’ve already asked for the order for the first time and you’re in the middle of running a looping pattern, and your prospect suddenly asks, “What was the price on that again?” To which you reply, “Oh, it’s only three thousand dollars,” and you say no more.

Alas, you just committed sales hara-kiri.

Why?

Simply put, you’ve just created a scenario where there’s $3,000 worth of energy going in and zero benefits coming out, not because those benefits don’t exist—in point of fact, they do—but because you simply forgot to remind the prospect of them at the same time you asked them to tap into their energy reserves.

In other words, the fact that you laid out the benefits three or four minutes ago when you asked for the order for the first time has no bearing on the energy in, benefits out equation a few minutes later, when your prospect gave you a buy signal.

Put another way, human beings have extremely short memories when it comes to the balancing effect of benefits. In consequence, you need to restate those benefits again, albeit more quickly and succinctly, but you still need to state them every time you bring up the expenditure of energy.

To that end, the proper way to have responded to the buy signal “What was the price on that again?” is as follows:

“It’s a cash outlay of only three thousand dollars, and let me quickly tell you exactly what you’re going to get for that: you’re going to get [benefit #1] and [benefit #2] and [benefit #3], and again, like I said before, getting started is very, very simple, so believe me, if you do even half as well as the rest of my clients in this program, then the only problem you’ll have is that I didn’t call you six months ago and get you started then. Sound fair enough?”

And that’s how you close.

I used the word “cash outlay” as a reframer, instead of cost; I used the word “only” as a minimizer, in relation to the $3,000; I then quickly reminded the prospect of three major benefits, to balance out the $3,000 energy expenditure; and then I reiterated the simplicity of getting started and transitioned into a soft close—using my tri-tonal pattern of absolute certainty, collapsing into utter sincerity, and then moving into the reasonable man tone, as I said my last three words: “Sound fair enough?”

Then I shut up.

And eighth, a Straight Line script is part of a series of scripts.

In fact, there might be as many as five or six different scripts that take you through from the open to the close. For example, you’ll have a script that starts with those all-important first four seconds, and then includes your qualifying questions and your transition. Second, you’ll have a script that starts with the main body of your presentation and ends with you asking for the order for the first time. Third, you’ll have a series of rebuttal scripts that include the well-thought-out answers you’ve prepared to the various common objections you’re going to hear. And fourth, you’ll have a series of looping scripts that will include the various language patterns that will allow you to loop back into the sale, in order to move your prospect to higher and higher levels of certainty.

This leads us to an extremely important aspect of the sales process that’s going to have a major impact on how you construct and deliver each of the above scripts, in terms of their length, their breadth, and how much time you have to spend repeating yourself in order to refresh your prospect’s recollection.

What I’m referring to here is the issue of the type of call system you’re using—meaning, how many times do you plan on speaking to your prospect before you ask them the first time for the order? Once? Twice? Three times? Four times?

Whichever the case, the logic behind using a sales system with two or more calls is that each prior call, whether it’s in person or over the phone, serves as a springboard for entering the next call in a tighter state of rapport and with greater insight into the prospect’s needs and pain points, as a result of the intelligence you gathered on the previous calls. And it’s given the prospect a chance to review whatever documents or links you’ve sent, or to do his or her own research in order to increase their level of certainty about each of the Three Tens.

To that end, there isn’t much you can do on three calls that you couldn’t have done on two; so whenever I consult for a company that’s using a three-call system, I always make them at least test a two-call system, in conjunction, of course, with teaching them the rest of the Straight Line System, which is what I was hired to do in the first place. And, in the end, rare indeed are the tests that don’t prove the benefits of using the two-call system, if for no other reason than how difficult it is to get in touch with same prospects three times within the confines of the outer limits of your sales cycle.