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

In other words, every product or service will have its own predetermined sales cycle that has a set number of days between calls. At a certain point, when a prospect has exceeded the outer limit for the number of days between calls, the lead goes into a dead pile, which eventually gets redistributed to someone else in the sales force after the appropriate amount of time—usually three to six months, or maybe even a year; any longer than that and the close rate drop becomes negligible.

This circumvents the self-defeating behavior of chasing after the same prospect again and again, which is par for the course for a non–Straight Line salesperson, even after it would be painfully obvious to any other human being that the prospect is ducking their call when it pops up on the prospect’s caller ID.

The same goes for a four-call system, although they’re so counterintuitive (even to a poorly trained sales manager) that whenever I do run into one, there’s usually a valid reason why the sale has been dragged out. Most of the time, it has to do with the reality of having to deal with multiple decision-makers, which causes a salesperson to have to work their way up the ladder—closing one decision-maker at a time, until eventually getting the final decision-maker to sign off on the deal.

The other common reason is a particular product requiring that the buyer commit a significant amount of their own resources—either time, money, manpower, or all three—to integrate the new product into their current business; so, before they sign on the dotted line, there’s a significant amount of forethought and strategic planning required.

For example, in a four-call-system, a successful outcome for the third call might be your prospect agreeing to sign a letter of intent and, in the cases where it’s necessary, a nondisclosure agreement, so the prospect and their team can take a closer look at the inner workings of your product—a process formally known as “due diligence”—to make sure that it’s everything you’ve cracked it up to be.

In addition, this is also the point in the sale where lawyers from both sides tend to get involved—going back and forth as they review each other’s changes, as they take what started off as a simple, straightforward agreement and complicate it to the point of madness while racking up massive legal fees in the process.

Now, to be clear, while most lawyers are reasonably honest, there are still a lot of chronic over-billers out there, so be careful—especially if your commission is tied to the overall profitability of the deal! If that’s the case, then you definitely want to make sure that someone competent goes through every invoice with a fine-tooth comb and negotiates out anything that looks even slightly suspicious (because this is definitely one of those cases where if there’s smoke, there’s fire!).

Anyway, moving along, once your prospect’s team has given the thumbs-up from their due diligence, and the lawyers have extracted the appropriate amount of flesh from everyone’s bones, then you have the chance to truly close the deal, which usually entails the signing of a definitive agreement, or contract, and the exchange of a predetermined amount of money.

The most important thing to remember throughout this entire process is that until a definitive agreement gets signed and money changes hands, the deal is not closed, which means you need to keep in touch with the prospect and do whatever you can to keep the Three Tens at the highest level possible. This includes sending your prospect testimonials from other satisfied clients; articles from trade journals, newspapers, and magazines that reinforce the idea that the prospect made the right decision; and occasional emails and regular schmooze calls to make sure that you stay in tight rapport as the process drags on.

I cannot overestimate how dramatically this will reduce the number of deals that end up falling out of bed during the waiting period. And while it usually takes anywhere from four to six weeks to complete the process, it can drag on for up to three months, if those special types of lawyers are involved and the prospect isn’t under any time pressure to close the deal.

Nonetheless, as long as you continue to keep your prospect’s level of certainty as high as possible, then things should end up okay, and you’ll close the majority of deals that make it this far and get your commission, which had better be substantial, considering how long the deal took and all the trouble you had to go through to get it to actually close.

Just how substantial is impossible to say without knowing all the details, but suffice to say that if your commission is not in the thousands of dollars for a deal that took six months to close, then you better be getting a hefty base salary to make up for it.