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

You’re at that magic moment now, when, in perfect sequence, you’ve summed up the very best benefits, you’ve reduced the energy expenditure, you’ve lowered the action threshold, and you’ve asked for the order in just the right way, using your tri-tonal closing pattern.

So, be quiet and let the client answer!

If you do, you’ll find that about 75 percent of all the prospects who ultimately buy from you will do so right here. In essence, by taking these high–action-threshold buyers and, for a few fleeting minutes, lowering their action thresholds, you can then step through that window and close what are about to become your most loyal customers.

Indeed, if there’s one thing about high–action-threshold prospects that makes them more than worth the extra effort it takes to close them, it’s that they make excellent long-term clients. They’re typically great tippers, they don’t mind paying top dollar, and they almost never leave you for another salesperson, even if they get offered a better deal. They’re basically so happy to have finally found a salesperson who was able to break through their limited beliefs and earn their trust that they’ll stay put under almost any circumstance.

My father was a perfect example of this.

Growing up, I watched with fascination as he dealt with the same few salespeople to fill virtually all his needs, and he never questioned them about anything—about price, delivery times, competing products, the options or features they recommended, how much of a particular item he should buy, and what warranties he should take out. The bottom line is that he viewed each one of them as an expert in their respective fields, and he trusted their judgment on every level.

Ironically, it’s these ultra-loyal, highly lucrative, high– action-threshold prospects, like my father, who end up slipping through the fingers of virtually all salespeople other than natural-born closers and those who have studied the Straight Line System.

To them, these otherwise “ultra-tough prospects” are nothing more than routine closes that had to be taken a little bit farther down the Straight Line as a result of their beliefs, which required the salesperson to crack the fourth number of their buying code—lowering their action threshold.

RUNNING ADDITIONAL LOOPS

So here we are, two loops down and . . . how many to go?

It’s a good question, isn’t it?

I mean, how many loops should you actually run?

Three loops? Four loops? Five loops? Ten loops? Twenty loops?

Before I fully answer that, let me start by saying that for those prospects who haven’t bought yet, you’re definitely going to run at least one more loop. After all, you still have one number left to address in their buying combination—namely, their pain threshold.

In essence, people who are feeling significant pain tend to act quickly; conversely, people who are in denial of their pain tend to act slowly. In consequence, there’s actually an inverse relationship between the amount of pain a prospect is feeling and their action threshold.

In other words, in the same way that we can lower a prospect’s action threshold by running a language pattern, there are also natural, everyday occurrences that can impact it as well; and when it comes to lowering the action threshold, the primary occurrence is how much pain they’re currently feeling.

Here’s a perfect example of how this plays out in real life:

When I was nine years old, my dad was driving us down to Washington, DC, in the family car as part of a two-week summer vacation that was going to take us all the way down to Miami Beach, Florida. We were somewhere around Delaware, about two hours from home, when the water pump blew out, and, all at once, the car started rattling and the lights on the dashboard were flashing and there was smoke coming from under the hood, and my father was muttering curses under his breath as he pulled over to the side of the road.

Now, what you need to understand here is that my father was extremely particular when it came to who could touch any of his possessions—and that includes basic, everyday items like his shirts, his ties, his wristwatch, his camera, and the very hair on his own head, which has been cut by the same barber for the last thirty years. But of all his possessions, the one he was most particular about, by far, was his car. Nobody—and I mean nobody—was allowed under the hood of my father’s car except for one very special man: Jimmy at the local Sunoco station. Anyone else was strictly off-limits.

However, on that particular day, with his family stuck on the side of the road, 120 miles from home, with the sun going down and the temperature dropping, what do you think my father did? The answer is he went to the nearest gas station he could find and said to the owner: “I don’t care what it costs. I need you to fix my car right now!”