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

by Jordan Belfort

The second vulnerability had to do with the type of anchor you choose (the equivalent of the bell in Pavlov’s experiment). As Bandler explained, not only does the anchor need to hit you all at once but it also needs to stand out in a dramatic way. A common, everyday sound or gesture simply won’t cut it. It needs to be extreme—the more extreme the better, in fact—and the more unusual the better too. 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, and it’s absolutely crucial that you have one. But don’t waste any of your time trying to find one. A little over seven years ago, I stumbled upon the world’s greatest anchor, and I’m going to be handing it to you on a silver platter in this very chapter. Now, in terms of the best way to teach you olfactory anchoring, what I’ve found, over the years, is that the secret is to take you through NLP anchoring first. This provides you with the perfect context for truly mastering olfactory anchoring, which, by the way, is so easy to master that not only will you be able to do it in one sitting but a seven-year-old could do it as well.

Step #1: Choose a state This is where you set an intention for the emotional state you want to anchor. This will always be a conscious decision, based on the circumstances that you’re about to face, not what you’re currently facing. In other words, anchoring is a forward-looking process that’s proactive in nature. For the purpose of this exercise, let’s choose a state of absolute certainty, as this is the state that you must be in when you enter any sales encounter.

Step #2: Choose your focus This is where you close your eyes and go back to a moment in your life when you were feeling absolutely, positively certain. A perfect example of this would be the moment after you just closed a really tough sale, as a result of sounding totally awesome. For whatever reason, you were at your very best that day, and now, as you bask in the sale’s afterglow, you have that superconfident feeling—that feeling of absolute certainty where you know you can take on the world and close anyone who’s closable. Once you’ve located that memory, I want you to create a vivid picture of it in your mind’s eye. I want you to take in the whole scene, so you can see all the players who were there, looking just the way they looked, including how they were dressed, how their hair was styled, and even how the room looked. Creating an internal picture like this, where you’re looking down at yourself from above, involves being in what is called a disassociated state, and it’s a crucial aspect of goal-setting and self-motivation—inasmuch as it allows you to see yourself completing a certain goal or task or an even more complete vision for your future. However, for the purposes of setting an anchor, there’s an even more powerful way to use this internal picture, which I’ll get to in a few moments, in step four.

Step #3: Choose your physiology This is where you’re going to change your physiology to match the exact physiology of the state that you’re trying to anchor. For example, in this case, you’re going to make sure that you’re standing certain and holding your head certain and walking certain and talking certain and even breathing certain, so that literally every aspect of your body, including your most minute gestures and facial expressions, is resonating with the emotion of absolute certainty. If you think it’ll help, you can even take the picture from step two and actually put it in motion, so you’re now seeing yourself in a movie, and you can use that as your model as you adopt the physiology of absolute certainty. Remember, being shy or bashful with your physiology is...

Step #4: Intensify your state This step involves using your five sensory modalities—also known as your five senses—to take the picture you’ve created in your mind’s eye in step two and use your brain to manipulate it in a way that intensifies the feeling of absolute certainty that it creates inside of you. First let me take you through the five sensory modalities, which are: Visual: this is what you see, both externally, in the real world, and internally, in your mind’s eye. In the latter case, the picture can be from a memory, or it can be something that you’ve created yourself using your imagination, or it can be a combination of the two. Auditory: this is what you hear, both externally and internally, and with the same permutations as above. Kinesthetic: this is what you feel, both externally and internally, and with the same permutations as above. Gustatory: this is what you taste, both externally and internally, and with the same permutations as above. Olfactory: this is what you smell, both externally and internally, and with the same permutations as above. Now, for the most part, we tend to rely on the first three modalities to make sense of the world, with our visual mod...

PUTTING YOUR BRAIN TO WORK I want you to start by taking the still picture you created in your mind’s eye and putting it into motion, so you can actually see yourself moving in the picture, and being your best self, as you go about closing this huge sale. If it helps, you can even put a frame around the picture and imagine that it’s a flat-screen TV. The point is that by turning a still picture into a motion picture, you’ll start feeling more connected to the scene and your state of certainty will start to intensify—especially when we execute our next step, which is to add on dialog from your memory. So, do that right now: add on the appropriate dialog, as best as you can remember, and give yourself that same, perfect tonality and body language. Or, if the dialog you recall doesn’t suit you, you can create new dialog—choosing words that will empower you and help you trigger the exact state you want.

As you’re making these various “edits” to this internal movie, notice how the feelings associated with this memory continue to intensify and intensify. And then you can intensify those feelings even further by imagining them occupying a certain part of your body, like just over your heart or your solar plexus, and then placing the palm of your hand over that spot and noticing how the feeling tends to spin or tumble in a certain direction. Then allow your hand to move with that feeling, until they merge into one entity. You can use your hand to spin the feeling even faster, and you can even infuse your favorite color into the feeling, or have little explosions of fireworks shooting out if it . . . And, with that, let’s pause for a moment.

Step #5: Set your anchor Now we’re at step five, which is where you actually set your anchor. What this entails is taking the intense state that you’ve just created and linking it to a word or mantra, or to some external sound or sharp feeling, like clapping your hands and screaming the word “yes”—which was when the entire process had begun to break down for me. It started with my struggle to find a sound or a word or a movement that felt extreme enough and unique enough to serve as an anchor that I could fire in any situation. For whatever reason, nothing felt right, nothing felt profound—until, one day, it did. Just how I came up with the idea to use sense of smell I don’t fully recall, although it definitely had something to do with my memories from childhood. You see, as an adult, it never ceased to amaze me how even the slightest whiff of something that I had smelled during my childhood—a freshly cut grass field in the Catskill Mountains during summer camp, low tide at the jetty where my dad took me fishing, or the musky, mothballed scent of my grandma’s house—was enough to send the most powerful memories rushing back, to the point where they viscerally hit me. Once I hit upon the idea of using the sense of smell to set an anchor, it didn’t take long to find the perfect product. There were two requirements: 1 It had to be a scent that was extreme enough, unusual enough, powerful enough, and pungent enough to meet Bandler’s criteria, yet still be pleasing enough to the...

In other words, why try to manufacture an ultrapeak state of absolute certainty through a series of powerful yet entirely subjective NLP techniques and never really know if I ever got there? All I had to do was wait until I closed a really big sale, in the real world, which caused me to pop me into a peak state of absolute certainty organically, and then, right then—and I mean right then, in that very instant—when I was basking in the afterglow of closing an awesome sale, and I knew in every cell of my body that I truly was in an organic state of absolute certainty, as opposed to an artificially manufactured imitation, I would bring out my BoomBoom and take a giant whiff up each nostril —boom! boom!—and just like that, I’d have set myself one powerful anchor.

Step #1: Choose a state Like before, let’s choose a state of absolute certainty. Step #2: Set your anchor You wait for a very specific moment, and then take out your BoomBoom, unscrew the top, and follow the steps above—take a massive blast up each nostril and then ball your hands up into fists and dig your fingernails into your palms, and belt out the word “yes” in a powerful yet controlled manner. Then, ten seconds later, with the scent of BoomBoom still lingering but the initial rush gone, repeat the process again. And that, as they say, is that. You’ve anchored in a state of absolute certainty.

When I say, “extremely powerful,” what I mean is that once you become even reasonably proficient with this strategy, you can actually get people to buy things they shouldn’t buy, and do things they shouldn’t do, without them even realizing that an extraordinary amount of influence was brought to bear. Now, obviously, a strategy like that has the potential to be seriously abused by an unscrupulous salesperson, so I want to make sure that it’s crystal clear to every last reader that I don’t condone that sort of behavior in even the slightest way—hence, I would greatly appreciate you signing the following ethical warning:

I will never use the strategy I’m about to learn to manipulate my prospects into acting against their own self-interest. If I do, then I deserve the same ten years of pain and suffering that Jordan had to endure.

Before I teach you the specifics of this strategy, there’s one crucial distinction that I need to go through first. It has to do with how born closers automatically apply the proper tonality to the words they say, as opposed to everyone else. You see, when you’re a born salesperson, you don’t have to consciously decide which of the ten core influencing tonalities you need to apply to your words in order to take control of your prospect’s inner monologue and stop it from narrating against you. Your unconscious mind provides this service for you automatically, and gets it right every single time. As if by magic, if at any point during the sale it behooves you to sound absolutely certain or utterly sincere, or caring and sympathetic or perfectly reasonable, or any of the ten core tonalities that drive human influence, then that very tonality will get layered on top of your words, without you having to even think about it. It simply just happens. On the flip side, though, when you’re not a born salesperson, a literally ginormous group that includes over 99 percent of the population, then a breakdown in your internal communication occurs. Specifically, your conscious and unconscious minds fail to link up in a way that allows for the unimpeded exchange of information between the two. In consequence, your outgoing communication ends up becoming a watered-down version of what you’d originally intended—lacking the richness and vibrancy that you thought you had expressed through the...

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?” Now, when I say, “a very upbeat tone,” I’m referring to one of the ten core influencing tonalities, called the “I care” or “I really want to know” tonality. By applying this sort of upbeat, enthusiastic tonality, while virtually all other salespeople are saying the same words in a perfunctory manner, not only do I immediately stand out from the rest of the pack, but I also begin the process of taking control of my prospect’s inner dialog.

Now, in this particular case, the additional words Mr. Smith heard after “Hi, is John there?” were: “I really want to know! I’m not like the rest of the salesmen who ask you that, just to get it out of the way. I genuinely want to speak to him!” Now, to be clear, there is a sweet spot here, insofar as just how much peppiness and upbeatness you can layer onto your words until you start to sound disingenuous. In other words, you don’t want to say it like Tony the Tiger says, “It’s grrrrrreat!” I mean, you’d sound like a complete idiot if you did that. You want to be upbeat enough to get your point across, but not so over the top that you sound ridiculous. Remember, tonality is the secret weapon of influence, because it’s an unspoken language. Your prospect hears words without you having to say them, and gets influenced without even knowing. So how does Mr. Smith respond? At the same time he’s hearing the additional words from Bill Peterson’s amped-up greeting and trying to process their meaning, he says, “Yeah, this is John,” to which Bill Peterson immediately breaks out his second core influencing tonality, which is called phrasing a declarative as a question, and he applies it in the following words: “Hi, my name is Bill Peterson, calling from Acme Travel Company in Beverly Hills, California. How are you today?” Now, notice how each one of those three thoughts is a declaration: 1 Hi, my name is Bill Peterson, 2 calling from Acme Travel Company 3 in Beverly Hills, Californi...

Now, to be clear, as powerful as this concept is, you shouldn’t delude yourself into thinking that just because you phrased a declarative as a question, your prospect is now going to buy from you. That’s simply not how tonality works. Rather, it keeps the prospect in the game—by stopping their inner monologue from narrating against you—thereby, opening up the possibility for further influence by you, which will come in the form of your next sentence. In fact, at this point in the sale, that’s precisely how I want you to be thinking about things: word by word and sentence by sentence.

In addition, because you lower your voice to just above a whisper, the reason takes on the properties of a secret, creating a sense of urgency and scarcity, which takes us now to our fourth core influencing tonality, namely: scarcity. In sales, we use the word “scarcity” to describe a prospect’s natural inclination to want more and more of what he or she perceives there to be less and less of. In other words, when a person finds out that something they desire is in short supply—or scarce—it makes them desire that something even more. All told, there are actually three types of scarcity. The first type is called verbal scarcity. Verbal scarcity is a state of scarcity created strictly by the use of words. Let’s switch examples now (and say goodbye to Mr. Smith and Bill Peterson), and let’s assume that you’re a BMW salesman and a prospect walks into your dealership looking to buy a black 750iL with black leather interior. And say you wanted to create verbal scarcity about the model and color of car that prospect wanted. You could say something like “We only have one black-on-black 750iL left on the floor, and it’s going to be three months until our next shipment comes in.” Pretty straightforward, right? In essence, by explaining to the prospect that the car he wants is in short supply, the salesperson increases the likelihood that the prospect will buy the car now, to avoid the possibility of missing out. In sales, we refer to this process as creating urgency, and it’s an int...