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

Now, in reality, if you’ve been correctly following the steps in the Straight Line Syntax, then you should almost never get hit with an outright “I’m not interested” at this point in the sale. After all, you will have already weeded out the prospects who indicated that during the intelligence-gathering phase.

In other words, the only prospects you should be presenting to at this point are those whose answers to your intelligence-gathering questions dictated that they not only were interested in your product but also needed your product and could afford your product.

So it completely defies logic that someone who ticked all those boxes would suddenly do a complete one-eighty after you just presented them with a series of benefits that were a perfect match for them.

In terms of the exact percentages, you shouldn’t expect to get hit with a flat-out no more than 1 or 2 percent of the time, which is right on par with your lay-downs.

 Or maybe—meaning, the prospect is sitting on the fence and can still go either way. Maybe consists of all the common objections that salespeople typically get hit with during the back half of the sale. In total, there are somewhere between twelve and fourteen of them, although about half are just simple variations of two.

I’ve already listed them in Chapter 2, but for the sake of convenience, and also to refresh your recollection, here are the most common ones again:

“Let me think about it”; “Let me call you back”; “Send me some information”; “I’m not liquid right now”; “I have another source [or supplier or broker] I work with”; “It’s a bad time of year [including it’s tax time, it’s summer vacation time, it’s Christmastime, it’s the end of our fiscal year]”; and “I need to speak to someone else [which includes my spouse, my lawyer, my accountant, my business partner, my financial advisor].”

The Art of Deflection

Let’s say you’re a stockbroker cold-calling wealthy investors, trying to persuade them to open up a new account at your brokerage firm, XYZ Securities. The stock that you’re recommending as an opening trade is Microsoft, which is currently trading at $30 per share, and the firm minimum for opening up a new account is $3,000, or one hundred shares of Microsoft.

Using a standard two-call system, your closing rate is 30 percent—meaning, you close three out of every ten prospects who you can get on the phone a second time—and 90 percent of that 30 percent end up buying after your third or fourth time asking for the order.

From start to finish, it takes you approximately three minutes to go through the front half of the sale and between ten and fifteen minutes to go through the back half of the sale; and while the front half of the sale might strike you as being unusually short, what you need to remember here is that, with a two-call system, virtually all of your intelligence gathering and initial rapport-building gets completed on the first call, giving you a significant head start on the second call.

That is not to say that you don’t have to spend at least some amount of time reengaging your prospect when you begin the second call; but that entire process should take no more than a minute, as opposed to the five to seven minutes it takes to complete an initial call.

Specifically, the reengagement process consists of you leading your prospect, Bill Peterson, through the following steps:

1Start your introduction by greeting Bill by his first name, and then quickly reintroduce yourself—stating your first and last name, the name of your company, and its location—and ask Bill how he’s doing today. Remember, from your very first word, your tonality must be positive and upbeat, with ahintof bottled enthusiasm slipping out around the edges.