The Way of the Wolf: Straight Line Selling (Book Summary)

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

1 CRACKING THE CODE FOR SALES AND INFLUENCE

In every sale, three core elements, known as The Three Tens, must line up in any prospect’s mind before you have a shot at closing them. Logically and emotionally, on a certainty scale from one to ten, your prospect must:
1. trust your product to fulfill their needs at a cost-benefit ratio that is unequivocally a great deal
2. trust and connect with you as an expert in your field who put’s your customers’ needs first
3. trust and connect with your company
People don’t buy on logic; they buy on emotion and then justify their decision with logic. In terms of the split between logic and emotion, you’re always going to build airtight logical cases first and airtight emotional cases second. Why? Quite simply, by making the airtight logical case first, you satisfy your prospect’s bullshit detector, which then frees them up to be moved emotionally.
We do not make a full-blown sales presentation to someone who is not interested in buying what we’re selling. Instead, we want to weed these people out as quickly as possible, during the intelligence – gathering phase
Objections are merely smokescreens for uncertainty for one or all of the Three Tens.

2 INVENTING THE STRAIGHT LINE

While you’re on the straight line, you are doing all the talking. During the sale, your prospect keeps trying to take you off the straight line and take control of the conversation.
You start by taking immediate control via gathering intelligence by asking questions in a manner and sequence that not only promotes a smooth, mutually productive intelligence but also builds rapport
Identify their core and secondary needs
Identify any core beliefs they might have that could impact the sale, such as not feeling comfortable working over the phone or with making quick decisions, and also not trusting salespeople in general.
Find out about any past experiences they’ve had with similar products, both good and bad, and how they feel about the salespeople they bought them from.
Identify their values — meaning, what things are most important to them?
Identify their financial standards, insofar as what level of wealth and spending ability they need to have to feel good about themselves.
Identify where their pain lies — meaning, what’s keeping them up at night? What’s that one single financial worry that sits at the very base of their skull and weighs them down, like an anchor?
Seventh, you need to identify where they stand financially, in terms of how much money they have in the market right now, how liquid they are, how much money they typically invest into an idea they like, and how much they are liquid for overall.
Five Core Elements of the Straight Line System

The prospect must love your product
The prospect must trust and connect with you
The prospect must trust and connect with your company
The action threshold – your prospect must be at a level of certainty on each the Three Tens to be willing to buy
The pain threshold –

Every word that comes out of your mouth is feeding into one single goal, which is to increase your prospect’s level of certainty to the highest possible level
In the vast majority of cases, you’re going to have to ask for the order at least two or three times before you have any chance of your prospect saying yes.

3 THE FIRST FOUR SECONDS

Three things that you need to establish in those first four seconds of an encounter if you want to be perceived in just the right way

Sharp as a tack
Enthusiastic as hell (specifically, “bottled enthusiasm”)
An expert in your field

We all want to deal with pros or experts. You have to sound and act like someone who can help the prospect fulfill their needs and desires.
Add value by offering a unique perspective during the sales conversation, demonstrating extensive knowledge and understanding of the market, industry, product, prospect, and competitors.

4 TONALITY AND BODY LANGUAGE

How you say what you say has a profound impact on how it’s perceived and, for that matter, how you are perceived
Bottled enthusiasm, which sits just below the surface and literally bubbles over as you speak. It’s about enunciating your words with absolute clarity and stressing your consonants so that your words have an intensity to them.

5 STATE MANAGEMENT

Your success is still going to be contingent on your ability to trigger a key emotional state within yourself as you’re about to enter the sales encounter, and then maintain that state to the very end.
Future pacing entails running an imaginary movie through your mind where you get to see yourself in the future having already achieved a certain outcome.
In terms of achieving success in sales, there are four key states that you need to learn how to trigger at will within state management. We call them the four Cs; Certainty, clarity, confidence, and courage.
The basic premise of NLP anchoring is that human beings have the ability to choose how they feel at a particular moment. NLP has distilled the entire state management process into two core elements, both of which are under a person’s conscious control.

What you choose to focus on.
Your current physiology. Comprised of the sum of all the possible ways that you can move and hold your body — your posture, your facial expressions, how you move your appendages, your rate of breathing, your overall level of motion

6 A SUREFIRE FORMULA FOR MANAGING YOUR STATE

There are five basic steps to NLP anchoring:

Choose a state
Choose your focus
Choose your physiology
Intensify your state
Set your anchor as follows: When you are at the absolute peak of the state
1. Link it to a smell – BoomBoom stick at boomboomenergy.com
2. Ball your hands up into fists and dig your fingernails into your palms
3. Belt out the word ”yes” in a powerful yet controlled manner
4. Repeat a-c ten seconds later

7 ADVANCED TONALITY

Your words that move a prospect logically, and it’s your tonality that moves your prospect emotionally.
A salesperson should never address their prospect in an overly formal manner; instead, the salesperson should address the prospect in the way they would respectfully address a friend. So, instead of saying, “Hi, my name is Bill Peterson, from the Acme Travel Company. I’m looking for Mr. John Smith. Is he home?”— which is the equivalent of death — the salesperson should simply say, in a very upbeat tone, ”Hi, is John there?”
Ten Core Influencing Tonalities

“I care”, or, “I really want to know” – upbeat and enthusiastic
Phrasing a declarative as a question – ex: “Hi, my name is Bill Peterson? Calling from Acme Travel Company? In Beverly Hills, California? How are you today?”
Mystery and intrigue – esp. when explaining the precise reason why you called the prospect today.
Scarcity (to create urgency) – lower your voice to a whisper as if you are sharing a secret
absolute certainty – firm and definitive
utter sincerity – calm, smooth, & confident; velvety smooth; humble
reasonable man – raising your voice at the end of a sentence to imply reasonableness; ex: “You got a minute?”
hypothetical, money aside – Ex: So let’s say in response to you asking for the order, your prospect says, “It sounds good. Let me think about it. “Your reply would be, “I hear what you’re saying, but let me ask you a question. Does the idea make sense to you? Do you like the idea?”
Implied obviousness – to infer the notion that it’s beyond obvious that your product or service is a winner.
“I feel your pain” – use when you’re asking questions that are designed to uncover your prospect’s primary and secondary pain points

8 ADVANCED BODY LANGUAGE

The best way to dress is in a style that’s congruent with your profession.
When selling (in person) to another man (whether you are a man or a woman), “corner off” by standing at a light angle to the man, as opposed to directly in front of him. When selling to a woman, stand directly in front of her with your hand above waist level where she can see them
To gain control (1) match the other person without overtly copying/mirroring them (2) then lead them

9 THE ART OF PROSPECTING

Four buying archetypes.

Buyers in heat – they’ve already made the decision to do something about it now
Buyers in power – aren’t consciously feeling pain from their unfilled need, which causes them to lack the same level of urgency as buyers in heat.
Lookie-loos – weed these out.
Mistakes / “People who were dragged there” – weed these out.

10 THE TEN RULES OF STRAIGHT LINE PROSPECTING

Rule # 1; You are a sifter, not an alchemist.
Rule # 2; Always ask for permission to ask questions. Ex: “John, let me ask you just a couple of quick questions, so I can see exactly what your needs are. “
Rule # 3; You must always use a script.
Rule # 4; Go from less invasive questions to more invasive questions.
Rule # 5; Ask each question using the right tonality.
Rule # 6; Use the correct body language as the prospect responds.
Rule # 7; Always follow a logical path.
Rule # 8; Make mental notes; don’t resolve their pain. You do not want to try to resolve their pain at this point. In fact, if anything, you want to amplify that pain.
Rule # 9; Always end with a powerful transition. “Well, John, based on everything you just said to me, this program is definitely a perfect fit for you. Let me tell you why… “
Rule # 10; Stay on the Straight Line; don’t go spiraling off to Pluto.

Rapport is by far the single most misunderstood word in the English language. Do not talk about things that aren’t germane to the prospect’s outcome. For example, If they try to take you off track, say, “It sounds really interesting. I can see why you feel that way. Now as far as your goal for learning how to trade currencies goes…”
Rapport is not a constant; it goes up and down throughout the sale, depending on the following two things:

how your prospect thinks and feels about the last point you made;
his belief as to whether or not you are on the same page with him, in regard to that point.

11 THE ART AND SCIENCE OF MAKING WORLD – CLASS SALES PRESENTATIONS

Charisma is the foundation of rapport; it is the sense that he cares about me, he understands me, and he feels my pain. Charisma’s has three components:

Effective use of tonality
Targeted use of body language
Not saying stupid shit.

Your script is all of your best sales lines, arranged in exactly the right order — starting with those all – important first four seconds and continuing on straight through to the end, at which point your prospect will either buy, or you will end the sales encounter in a respectful way.
You need to become proficient in the art of reading from a script without sounding like you’re reading from a script; and second, you need to become proficient in the art of writing a script that will allow you to sound perfectly natural when you read it.
For your script to be effective:

Your script must not be front-loaded. Front-loading is when you disclose all your major benefits right up front, which leaves you with nothing powerful to say to change your prospect’s mind when they hit you with the first objection
Focus on the benefits, not the features.
Your script must have stopping-off points. If you make a powerful statement, and then another powerful statement, and then yet another powerful statement, by the time you’ve made the third powerful statement, they’ve all started to blend in with one another, and they lose their power. This is why a well – written script has an abundance of stopping – off points, where the prospect will interact with you and affirm that you’re still on the same page. For instance, pause to ask: “You follow me so far?” or ”Make sense?” or ”Are you with me?”
Write in the spoken word, not grammatically correct English.
Your script must flow perfectly.
Your scripts must be honest and ethical.
Remember the overarching equation of energy in, benefits out. In other words, closing should be easy for the prospect. Ex: “Now, John, getting started here is very, very simple. It’s just a question of your name, some basic information, and then we handle everything else for you over on this end. And when you combine that with [ benefit # 1 ] and [ benefit # 2 ] and [ benefit # 3 ], then, believe me, John, the only problem you’re going to have is that you didn’t buy more. Sound fair enough?”
A Straight Line script is part of a series of scripts. One for the first 4 seconds; one for the main body; several rebuttal scripts for common questions; looping scripts to bring you back to the straight line when you encounter questions or objections or digressions.

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
Here are some sample big-picture questions that can be used in virtually any industry;
- What do you like or dislike about your current supplier?
- What is your biggest headache with your business?
- What would be your ideal program if you could design it?
- Of all the factors that we have just spoken about, what is the most important to you?
- Have I asked about everything that’s important to you?

12 THE ART AND SCIENCE OF LOOPING

No matter which objection your prospect hits you with, you are always going to answer in exactly the same way. You’re going to say:
“I hear what you’re saying, Bill, but let me ask you a question; Does the idea make sense to you? Do you like the idea?” Now, notice how, rather than directly answering his objection, you deflected it instead.
Four ways to lower your prospect’s action threshold.

Offer your prospect a money – back guarantee.
Offer your prospect a cooling off or rescission period.
Use certain key phrases that paint a picture that runs counter to the worries and concerns that a typical high–action – threshold prospect ruminates on. Some examples of this are: ”I’ll hold your hand every step of the way”… “We pride ourselves on long-term relationships”… “We have blue – chip customer service. “
(most effective) Use a very powerful language pattern that allows you to temporarily ”reverse” a high–action – threshold prospect’s parallel movies — “Bill, let me ask you an honest question; what’s the worst that can possibly happen here? I mean, let’s say I’m wrong and the stock actually goes down a few points, and you lose two thousand bucks.

As soon as you sense that your prospect is feeling even the slightest bit pressured, you immediately want to pull back and say something along the lines of “Jim, please don’t misconstrue my enthusiasm for pressure; it’s just that I know that this truly is a perfect fit for you.”

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