5 (Perfeito)

Way of the Wolf

Name: Way of the Wolf
Rating: 4.3 (9 reviews)
Author: Jordan Belfort

the reason every sale is the same is because, despite all that individual stuff, the same three key elements still have to line up in any prospect’s mind before you have a shot at closing them. THE THREE TENS 1 The product, idea, or concept 2 You, trust and connect with you 3 The prospect must trust and connect with the company 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. 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. You see, people don’t buy on logic; they buy on emotion, and then justify their decision with logic. The logical mind is analytical by nature, so the more information you give it the more information it wants to know. In consequence, if you get your prospect to a high level of logical certainty, they’ll say, “It sounds great, let me think about it . . .” or “Let me do a bit more research and I’ll call you back.” However, if you skip making the logical case and focus strictly on creating emotional certainty, it won’t do the trick either, because the logical mind serves as a human bullshit detector. It stops us from being swept away by our emotions if things don’t add up logically. you will hear the word no; and that’s absolutely fine. In fact, it’s an important aspect of the Straight Line System, as one of its cornerstone philosophies is that 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. (More on that later.) Remember, it’s not the job of salespeople to turn nos into yeses; it’s simply not what they do. Instead, we turn “Let me think about it” into a yes, and “Let me call you back” into a yes, and “I need to speak to my wife” into a yes, and “It’s a bad time of year” into a yes. In traditional sales parlance, we refer to these various statements as “objections,” and they come up mostly in the back end of the sale, after you’ve asked for the order for the first time. In reality, though, the actual meaning of any particular objection has very little to do with what it states on the surface. You see, at the end of the day, objections are merely smoke screens for uncertainty for one or all of the Three Tens. In other words, if you ask for the order and your prospect is not high enough on the certainty scale, then they’ll throw out a smoke screen in the form of one of the common objections, as opposed to coming clean with you, which would mean revealing specifically which of the Three Tens was holding them back. it’s far less confrontational to say, “Let me think about it” or “It’s a bad time of year,” to someone who’s just spent the last ten minutes telling you how wonderful a product is than to say, “I don’t trust you” or “I think your product stinks” or “I don’t like your company” With the Straight Line System, we don’t leave a crucial outcome like honest communication up to chance. We ensure it by making it the sole responsibility of the salesperson, and then providing him or her with a bulletproof formula to achieve that outcome every time. There were only fourteen objections, and half of them were variations of two: First, that it was a bad time of year, as in it’s tax time, summertime, back-to-school time, Christmastime, Miller time, Groundhog Day. And second, that they needed to speak to someone else, as in their spouse, their lawyer, their business partner, their accountant, their local broker, their local soothsayer, their local Tooth Fairy. In fact, now that I thought about it, no matter what objection the prospect hit me with, I would never just answer it and ask for the order again. That would be pointless, since the objection was merely a smoke screen for uncertainty. By itself, in fact, all an answer would do (even a perfect one) is force a prospect to shift to a new objection, because the root problem still hadn’t been addressed. In consequence, after I answered an objection, I would then loop back to the beginning of the sale and make a follow-up presentation that picked up where my initial presentation had left off—with a goal of increasing the prospect’s state of certainty for all three Tens. And, once again, as with the rest of my strategies, I would execute each one of my loops in precisely the same exact way, every single time. I would teach them to sell exactly the way I did—by taking immediate control of the sale, and then moving the prospect from the open to the close along the shortest distance between any two points: a straight line. is because with every single word you say there’s one specific goal in mind, and that’s to move the prospect down the straight line towards the close; that’s it. There are no free words, no time for stupid statements, and no time to go off to Pluto and talk about the price of tea in China. “When you’re speaking, it’s directed. It’s powerful. Your words have meaning behind them; and the meaning is to create massive certainty in the mind of your prospect as you move him down the straight line, from the open to the close.” “And, by the way, this is where some really great stuff happens—when you’re actually off the straight line, right in those spaces. In fact, there’s not one, but two absolutely crucial things happening here. “First, you’re developing immediate, massive rapport, on both a conscious and unconscious level; and second, you’re gathering massive intelligence, which up until tonight, I used to refer to as qualifying. But, starting right now, I want you to wipe that word out of your mind forever, because it doesn’t even come close to describing what we need to accomplish here. “You see, with the Straight Line, you need to gather intelligence—and I mean massive intelligence—which goes far beyond trying to figure out whether or not a prospect is financially qualified. “When you gather intelligence from a prospect, you’re doing all of the following things: “First, you’re identifying their needs—and not just their core need but also any secondary needs or ‘problems’ they might have. “Second, you’re identifying 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. “Third, you want to 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. “Fourth, you want to identify their values—meaning, what things are most important to them? Are they looking for growth or income, or do they want to set themselves up for retirement, or to give their profits to a certain charity, or a religious institution? It can even be that the prospect is an action junkie and they’re in it for the thrills. “Fifth, you want to identify their financial standards, insofar as what level of wealth and spending ability they need to have to feel good about themselves. “Sixth, 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? “You see, at the end of the day, it’s knowing your prospect’s pain and, if necessary, amplifying that pain; if they’re currently in denial, that’s going to help you close the tougher sales. “And 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. “So, getting back to the Straight Line: “When you’re off the line, you’re looking to (a) continue building on the rapport that you already have, and (b) use that rapport to help you gather the more invasive intelligence, like how liquid the prospect currently is. “And at the same time, you’re always making sure that the encounter stays within the boundaries, as you continue the process of moving the sale down the Straight Line, towards the close. “Essentially, those are the three basic tenets of the front half of the Straight Line: 1 You must take immediate of control the sale. 2 You must engage in massive intelligence gathering, while you simultaneously build massive rapport with your prospect. 3 You must smoothly transition into a Straight Line presentation, so you can begin the process of building absolute certainty for each of the Three Tens. “So, again, during the front half of the sale, you first take immediate control of the sale; then you use that control to gather massive intelligence, which entails asking highly specific questions, which I’ll map out for you in advance, to make sure that you’ve gathered all the intelligence you need—and I’m going to circle back to this later, because, starting tomorrow, you’re going to be asking a lot more questions than you used to. “And then, after you ask for the order for the first time, which happens right around here, while you’re still close to the beginning”—I pointed to a spot on the line about a third of the way towards the close, and punctuated it by drawing a big, thick black dot—“that’s where the back-half of the sale begins, when you get hit with your first objection. So, obviously, this whole front-half-back-half-business is merely a figure of speech.” I shrugged. “I mean, I can teach a frickin’ monkey to read from a script and ask for the order; so don’t think that you’ve accomplished anything amazing because you made it through the front half of the sale; it’s the back half of the sale where the real selling begins! This is when you finally get the chance to roll up your sleeves and get down to cases—meaning, to get to the bottom of what’s really holding your prospect back, which is certainly not the objection they gave you; that’s merely a smoke screen for uncertainty! “That’s what’s going on,” I repeated. “Every word, every phrase, every question you ask, every tonality you use; every single one of them should have the same ultimate goal in mind, which is to increase the prospect’s level of certainty as much as humanly possible, so that by the time you get to the close, he’s feeling so incredibly certain that he almost has to say yes. That’s your goal. “In fact, think of this as goal-oriented communication,” I continued, spitting out the phrase at literally the same instant it popped into my mind. “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, as you’re moving him down the straight line towards the close. Consisting of eight distinct steps, the syntax served as a simple road map for taking a prospect down the straight line. It showed the Strattonites what to do first, what to do second, what to do third . . . all the way down to the eighth and final step, where the prospect either said yes, and opened an account with you, or he stuck to whatever objection he’d been using as his smoke screen, and you ended the call, respectfully, and moved on to the next prospect. Twice a day, every day, I would stand before a rapidly expanding army of obscenely young Strattonites and pound them with a combination of Straight Line skills training and daily motivation. In essence, by radically enhancing their mind-sets and skill-sets, I was able to persuade each new Strattonite to leave the insults of the past behind and check their emotional baggage at the door; to accept the fact that the moment they stepped into the boardroom everything in the past fell off. And I told them to act as if. I said, “Act as if you’re a wealthy man, rich already, and you will become rich. Act as if you have unmatched confidence, and you will become confident. Act as if you have all the answers and the answers will come to you!” But, either way, since these objections are actually smoke screens for uncertainty, the salesperson has to be prepared to not only answer them in a way that satisfies the prospect but also make a follow-up presentation that picks up right where the initial presentation left off—with a goal of increasing the prospect’s level of certainty for the Three Tens even further, and with an ultimate goal of getting the prospect as close as possible to a “10, 10, 10,” both logically and emotionally, which gives the salesperson the best possible chance of closing the deal. The Straight Line technique that we use to accomplish this is called looping. Looping is a simple yet highly effective objection-handling strategy that allows a salesperson to take each individual objection and use it as an opportunity to further increase a prospect’s level of certainty, without breaking rapport, and then seamlessly transition into a close. In many ways, the art of looping is the so-called “secret sauce” to the Straight Line System (or at least to the back half of it)—as it allows a salesperson to increase a prospect’s level of certainty in small increments, as opposed to all at once. In other words, each objection creates the opportunity to loop; and each loop results in a further increase to a prospect’s level of certainty; and as each loop is completed, the prospects find themselves that much farther down the line, and that much closer to the close. You see, at the end of the day, not all prospects are created equal. There are some who are very tough to sell to; others who are very easy to sell to; and still others who are right in the middle, being neither tough nor easy. When you dig beneath the surface, it turns out that what separates all these potential buyers from one another is the sum of the individual beliefs they have about buying, about making decisions in general, and about trusting other people, especially those who are trying to sell them things. Together, the sum of all these beliefs, and all the experiences that have contributed to the formation of these beliefs, creates a defined “threshold of certainty” that a prospect must cross over before he or she feels comfortable enough to buy. We call this level of certainty a person’s action threshold, and it comprises the fourth core element of the Straight Line System. a prospect’s action threshold is malleable; it is not set in stone. THE FIVE CORE ELEMENTS OF THE STRAIGHT LINE SYSTEM 1 The prospect must love your product. 2 The prospect must trust and connect with you. 3 The prospect must trust and connect with your company. 4 Lower the action threshold. 5 Raise the pain threshold. And here’s what we know about the “safe” of the human brain, when it comes to making a buying decision: there are only five numbers in the combination; that’s it! The first number is a prospect’s level of certainty about your product; the second number is their level of certainty about you; the third number is their level of certainty about your company; the fourth number addresses their action threshold; and the fifth number addresses their pain threshold. That’s all there is: five basic numbers to crack. In the first Straight Line syntax, and in each syntax that followed, taking immediate control of the sale was the very first step in the system, and it always will be. Just how you go about doing that turned out to be elegantly simple, albeit with one complication: You have only four seconds to do it. Otherwise, you’re toast. FOR BETTER OR WORSE, WE have to accept the fact that, as human beings, we’re basically fear-based creatures. We’re constantly sizing up our surroundings and making snap decisions based on how we perceive them. But, either way, whether in person or over the phone, there are 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: 1 Sharp as a tack 2 Enthusiastic as hell 3 An expert in your field Remember, the biggest misconception among new salespeople is that they feel like they have to wait a certain amount of time until they can brand themselves as an expert. That’s a load of crap! You need to be “acting as if” from the very start, while you educate yourself as fast possible, to close the knowledge gap. In other words, it makes sense for them to take time out of their busy day, because someone who’s as sharp as you and enthusiastic as you, and who’s achieved your level of expertise, is going to: 1 Get to the point quickly 2 Not waste the prospect’s time 3 Have a solution to their problem 4 Be an asset to them over the long-term In addition, once the prospect has come to this positive conclusion about you, their brain will instantly extrapolate your value to its logical end, which is: You can help them achieve their goals. You can help get them what they want in life. You see, despite comprising only 10 percent of our communication, words aren’t just important; they’re actually the single most important element of our communication strategy, but—and this is a very big but—only when we finally open up our mouths to speak. In other words, 90 percent of the time, we’re communicating without actually speaking! First, and I mean this in a kind, avuncular way: Cut the crap! It’s time for you to get out of your own way and start living the life you deserve. You are capable of becoming proficient at anything you put your mind to. All you need is an easy-to-learn, step-by-step strategy to show you the way, which is exactly what the Straight Line System is. In fact, one of the true beauties of the Straight Line is that even after just a little bit of training, when you’re still at a very low level of competency, you’ll still get surprisingly good results. I’m talking about something called 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 intensity to them. It’s like you’re talking with your fists clenched, and there’s an active volcano inside you ready to erupt at any second—but of course it doesn’t, because you’re an expert who’s in total control. That sort of bottled enthusiasm makes a massive impact on someone emotionally, and it’s one of the earmarks of sounding like an expert. Just always remember to never stay in any one tonality for too long, or else the prospect will become bored—or in scientific terms, habituate—and ultimately tune out. Now, in terms of how to start using this in the real world, you’ll find that with just a little bit of practice, you’ll be applying the right tonality and body language unconsciously—meaning, automatically—whenever you find yourself in a situation of influence. But, until then, you need to be extra vigilant about consciously applying the right tonality and body language to every word and every turn of phrase. Some 200 million times more powerful than its conscious counterpart, your unconscious mind, with its blazing speed and near infinite storage capacity, is what keeps you alive as you move through the world. Working around the clock, it controls your entire autonomic nervous system—regulating your heartbeat, your blood pressure, your respiration, your digestion, your hormone secretions, and every other system in your body that seems to hum along effortlessly without you having to think about it. Broadly speaking, the primary goal of your unconscious mind is to keep things the same, or, in scientific terms, maintain a state of homeostasis. Your weight, your body temperature, your blood sugar level, the amount of oxygen in your blood, the amount of light hitting your retinas; each of these things and countless others like them are constantly being adjusted to maintain a certain set point that a million years of evolution has deemed to be optimal. When the sales encounter is over the phone, we’ll use our ten core tonalities to move our prospect emotionally, while the words they’re attached to will move the prospect logically; and when the encounter is in person, we’ll also use body language to move our prospect emotionally, while our words will continue to move them logically. So, at the end of the day, whether it’s in person or over the phone, the strategies you employ and the outcomes you desire will always be the same: you’ll use words to influence your prospect’s conscious mind, and tonality and body language to influence their unconscious mind. And the outcome of the former will be an airtight logical case, and the outcome of the latter will be airtight emotional case. All you need to know is precisely what words to say and when to say them, and what unconscious communication to apply and when to apply it. It’s as simple and straightforward as that. However, as foolproof as this formula is, 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. We refer to this process as state management, and it’s one of the most important elements in achieving success. In other words, I told them that they should not only think like wealthy people but to also carry themselves that way, because it leads to the right state of mind. As previously mentioned, the technical term for this is state management. In essence, when you’re managing your emotional state, you’re temporarily blocking out any troubling thoughts or emotions that might normally make you feel negative—thereby allowing yourself to maintain a positive state of mind. What makes state management so important in achieving success is that your current emotional state determines whether or not you’ll be able to access your internal resources at that moment to achieve your outcome. When you’re in an empowered state—like “certainty,” for instance—then you’re able to access your internal resources, which then sets you up for massive success. However, one point I want to clarify here is that what I am not saying is that you need to, or for that matter should even want to, live in empowered states all the time. That’s completely nuts! The key distinction here is that once you’ve learned the technique for triggering an empowered state (I’m going to teach you the most powerful one in the world in a moment), you only want to use it at certain key moments, when it matters most, like before you enter a sales encounter, or try to close a business deal, or enter into a negotiation, or even if it’s just an important decision you need to make in your personal life. In fact, in the latter case, you definitely want to make sure that you’re in an empowered state, because human beings, as a species, make their worst personal decisions when they’re in a disempowered state (and their best decisions when they’re in an empowered state). 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. Operating on the fringe of mainstream psychology, NLP’s basic premise is that the human brain functions similarly to a computer and hence can be programmed as such to make near instant changes to certain key behavioral patterns. The only sticking point, however, is that before you can make any changes, you need to know two important things first: How to write code for the human brain What type of software to embed the code in According to NLP, the software of the brain is language, and the way you write code is by creating language patterns, which consist of a group of words—as brief as a short sentence or as long as a few paragraphs—that have been structured in accordance with a series of basic yet extremely powerful linguistic principles that can be used to reprogram virtually any person’s brain, including your own, in a number of very profound ways. The basic premise of NLP anchoring is that human beings have the ability to choose how they feel at a particular moment in time, as opposed to it being chosen for them by what’s going on in their surrounding environment or their personal life. In other words, we can be proactive when it comes to choosing our emotional state, as opposed to reactive, which is what most human beings have been conditioned to think is our only choice. NLP has distilled the entire state management process into two core elements, both of which are under a person’s conscious control. The first of these two elements is: What you choose to focus on. In essence, at any particular moment, you have the ability to choose the precise direction of your focus; and based on that choice, you’ll fall into a state that’s congruent with what you’ve chosen to focus on. The second of these two elements is: 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—physiology of human beings as it relates to each emotional state is nearly identical across all cultures. You see, while it’s true that we can, in fact, make ourselves feel any way we want at any given moment, that moment is fleeting—giving us a window of opportunity that’s anywhere from five minutes to maybe an hour at most. After that, you’ll slowly start to settle back to whatever state you were in before. NLP’s first leap of logic was based on the idea that human beings could proactively manage their emotional state with near 100 percent success by directing their focus and their physiology in a specific way. The second leap of logic was to combine this concept with classic Pavlovian conditioning, as in: Pavlov’s dogs. In essence, you want to use something that’s going to hit your brain in an unforgettable way and literally shock your senses. That’s what a great anchor does, So to sum it all up: with zero preparation, beyond simply choosing what state you want to anchor, all you have to do is wait for that awesome moment when you close a really big sale (or any situation that causes you to organically pop into a state of absolute certainty, or absolute anything, for that matter), and then, right then, in that very instant, when that moment hits, you whip out your tube of BoomBoom, unscrew the cap, take a deep, prodigious blast up each nostril so you can literally feel the rush of the mint and citrus bathing your olfactory nerves, giving you that pleasant, invigorating burn. Then ball your hands into a pair of fists and start squeezing tightly, with your fingernails digging into your palms so you can really feel it, and belt out the word “yes” in a forceful yet controlled manner, so the bulk of the volume and power is directed inward, right to your solar plexus, where it resonates with your heart and soul and liver and loins and your very gizzard itself. And that’s it. You’ve just set yourself an extremely powerful anchor that you can use the next time you’re about to enter a sales encounter. What I’ve been leading up to here is the existence of an immensely powerful strategy that uses the ten core influencing tonalities to enhance your outgoing communication in a way that’s so profound that your prospect’s conscious mind finds itself struggling to keep up with all the additional words it’s hearing as a result of the constant shifts in tonality. In a matter of seconds, virtually all of its processing power is now dedicated to this one specific task—trying to keep up with the avalanche of additional words it keeps hearing—and you’ve taken control of your prospect’s own inner monologue and have it narrating for you, versus against you. when you’re speaking to a prospect in a situation of influence, their brain is actually listening to two distinct things at once: first, they’re listening to the words you say and analyzing the meaning of each one, both individually and in the context of the overall sentence; and second, they’re listening to their own inner monologue, as it debates the pros and cons of the last few words you said, based on the meaning they applied to them. You see, unbeknownst to you, the tonality that you thought you had applied had somehow been blocked or impeded from completing its journey out of your mouth, to accompany your words, which, for their part, faced no blockage or impediment at all. In other words, the absence of tonality—or, far more frequently, the presence of only a trace amount of tonality in your outgoing communication—was not a conscious choice you made; rather, you were a victim of a subpar internal communication platform that made you “tone deaf,” as the phrase goes. At the very instant that your words were escaping your lips and you heard them with your own ears, you were tricked by your unconscious mind into thinking that you sounded perfect, which is to say, that you sounded just the way you had intended to sound. Yet, in reality, attributes like certainty, confidence, passion, enthusiasm, urgency, empathy, clarity, and other subjective qualities that characterize a well-told story or well-explained concept got lost in translation—victims of a one-two punch at the formidable hands of nature and nurture, which sent you into adulthood with an internal communication platform that waters down your outgoing messages by allowing your words to flow freely, while it impedes the tonality you’ve applied. Now, insofar as how this impacts your ability to close, on the most basic level—meaning, when you use tonality in the traditional sense, as opposed to taking control of your prospect’s inner monologue—you can draw a straight line back to the emotional component of the Three Tens to see the carnage. You see, in the absence of the right tonality, your ability to move your prospect emotionally is severely limited and your ability to close is also limited accordingly. Remember, it’s your words that move a prospect logically, and it’s your tonality that moves your prospect emotionally. And, in addition to that, we can also use tonality at a much higher level to take control of our prospect’s inner monologue and stop it from narrating against us.

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

Jordan Belfort

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Way of the Wolf

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