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

You see, while Bill’s original objection was “Let me think about it,” rather than acting like every other salesperson and asking him the dead-end question “So, tell me, Bill, precisely what do you need to think about?” you took control of the sale and started picking the lock on his buying strategy.

Your prospect, on the other hand, is completely taken aback, because you’ve come at him in an entirely different manner than he’s used to—including answering his objections before they even came up. Case in point: his real objection is that he doesn’t know you, and therefore has no basis for trusting you; yet somehow you were able to bring that to the surface in a very elegant way. All you have to do now is figure out a way to get around that, which means convincing someone who you’ve only known for five or six minutes, and who you may have never met in person, and who may live on the other side of the country or, for that matter, the world, to trust you at a reasonably high level in the next sixty seconds.

It seems like a rather daunting task, doesn’t it?

Well, believe it or not, it’s actually quite simple—thanks to the existence of an extremely powerful language pattern that takes its name from the only person who possesses an IQ of 65 yet has still managed to get himself invited to the White House on three separate occasions to accept various achievement awards—including one for engaging in Ping-Pong diplomacy with China.

If you haven’t already guessed, the remarkable individual I’m talking about here is none other than that Ping-Pong-playing, cross- country-running, premature-ejaculating, Jenny-loving fool named Forrest Gump, whose six-year-old incarnation served as the inspiration for the very language pattern that proudly bears his name: the Forrest Gump pattern.

Now, I think it’s safe to assume that, unless you’ve been living in North Korea for the last twenty years, you’ve seen the movie at least twice by now, and probably three times.

Either way, there’s a scene at the beginning where young Forrest is waiting for the bus to arrive on his first day of school, and he’s standing there in his little leg braces, staring off into space, as he typically does. Then, suddenly, the bus pulls up, and all at once the door opens and Forrest looks up at the bus driver, and she looks down at him, and he just stands there, like a deer frozen in headlights, and he doesn’t get on the bus.

The bus driver, a gruff-looking woman with a cigarette dangling from her mouth, is apparently not aware of who she’s dealing with yet, so she says, in a brusque tone: “Are you coming on?”

To which Forrest replies, “Momma said not to be taking rides from strangers.”

As she begins to realize what she’s dealing with, the bus driver softens her tone a bit and says, “Well, this is the bus to school.”

But, alas, this doesn’t solve Forrest’s core problem—that the bus driver is a stranger—so he just stands there, looking up at the lady sitting behind the wheel, who’s looking back down at him, not sure what to do.

Suddenly, a wonderful inspiration sweeps over Forrest, and he figures out a way to break the deadlock with the simplest of phrases. He says, “My name is Forrest; Forrest Gump.”

Impressed by the simplicity of Forrest’s solution, the bus driver offers him a warm smile, and she replies, “Well, my name’s Dorothy, and I’m your bus driver.”

To that, Forrest shoots back: “Well, I guess we’re not strangers anymore.” And, feeling totally comfortable, he now gets on the bus.

Now, that’s obviously a very simple example, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s incredibly profound. You see, as a species, this is how human beings are built. When we’ve reached the tipping point, we can go from complete and utter distrust to an extremely high level of trust in a matter of seconds; yet, if you were to analyze these extreme swings on either side, you’d find that the truth typically lies somewhere in the middle, especially in a sales setting.

For example, over the years, I’ve been in literally thousands of situations where a prospect who’d been skeptical at the beginning, to the point of being hostile, would be cooking me a five-course meal thirty minutes later, as they went about calling their friends and relatives to tell them how they’d just met the world’s greatest mortgage broker and that their friends should refinance their homes through me too—despite the fact that I hadn’t done anything yet that was even close to warranting that type of glowing endorsement.

But, again, that’s how human beings are built, especially in a sales setting. When that trust pendulum starts to swing, it swings all the way. The key to get it swinging is to take the time to write out a powerful Forrest Gump pattern before you enter the sales encounter.