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

Whichever the case, the most important thing to remember is that your prospect will always enter the sales encounter at some point on the certainty scale. Just where, who really knows? After all, we’re not mind readers. However, what we do know is that your prospect will definitely be somewhere on the scale, because they haven’t just arrived from outer space or crawled out from under a rock. Your prospect has been living right here, on planet Earth, which means that they will have had at least some type of experience with the type of product you’re selling and the industry you’re in.

For example, let’s say you’re a car salesman, working in a Mercedes dealership. Even if your prospect has never driven or even sat in a Mercedes before, you wouldn’t expect them to react like one of those shrieking chimpanzees in 2001: A Space Odyssey and start jumping up and down on the hood, as if trying to make sense of some completely foreign object.

Get the picture?

My point here is that, no matter what product you’re selling, whether your prospect walks in your door or answers your cold call or clicks on your website, they will always enter the encounter with a preconceived notion about you, about your product, and about the company you work for.

You see, we all arrive at any particular moment in time with a history of beliefs and values and opinions and experiences and victories and defeats and insecurities and decision-making strategies—and then based on all of that stuff, our brain, working at near light speed, will instantly relate it to whatever scenario lies before it. Then, based on the result, it will place us at whatever point on the certainty scale it deems appropriate for each of the Three Tens—and it’s from that starting point that we can then be influenced.

Now, if you think that sounds a bit complicated, have no fear: I promise you that it’s not. In fact, once you become even reasonably proficient with the Straight Line System, you’ll be able to take any prospect, regardless of where they started off on the certainty scale, and move them to higher and higher levels of certainty with remarkable ease. It will simply be a matter of taking immediate control of the sale, and then moving your prospect, step by step, down the straight line, from the open to the close, and building massive certainty along the way.

Two Types of Certainty

Before we move forward, there’s just one more thing about certainty that I need to fill you in on—namely, that there are actually two types of it: you have logical certainty, and you have emotional certainty, and they’re entirely different things.

LOGICAL CERTAINTY

Logical certainty is based primarily on the words you say. For instance, does the case you’ve made to the prospect add up on an intellectual level? I’m talking about the actual facts and figures, the features and benefits, and the long-term value proposition, as it relates specifically to that prospect.

In other words, from a sober, emotionless perspective, does the idea or thesis that you’ve presented to them make sense? Does your product or service truly fill their needs? Is it priced fairly when compared to the competition? Does the cost-benefit ratio make it an unequivocally great deal?

When a prospect is feeling logically certain about your product, they can go from start to finish and connect all the dots in the logical case you’ve made without finding any holes in your story. As a result, they feel confident in their ability to tell the story to someone else and, if necessary, convince that person that they are 100 percent justified to feel the way they do—that, from a purely empirical perspective, the truth is on the their side.

That’s what logical certainty is all about.

EMOTIONAL CERTAINTY

On the flip side, emotional certainty is based on a gut feeling that something must be good. Once it hits us, we feel a craving inside that simply must be fulfilled, even if there’s a heavy price to pay for fulfilling it.

Unlike logical certainty, emotional certainty has to do with painting your prospect a picture of the future where they’ve bought your product and can see themselves using the product and feeling good as a result of it.

We call this technique future pacing, and it serves as the very backbone of how we move someone emotionally.

When you future pace someone, you’re essentially playing out the post-buying movie in the best fashion possible—allowing that person to experience your product’s amazing benefits right now, along with the positive feelings they create. The prospect’s needs have been filled; their pain has been resolved; any itch the they had has been scratched, and they are feeling wonderful as a result of it.

Now, if you’re wondering which of the two kinds of certainty is more important, the answer is they’re both important—and they’re both absolutely crucial if you want to close at the highest level.