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

by Jordan Belfort

Even if you’re not in “sales,” you still need to become at least reasonably proficient at sales and persuasion. Otherwise, you’re going to find yourself living a severely disempowered life.

Indeed, when you take all the apparent differences that can pop up in a sale at any time, it comes as no surprise that only a tiny percentage of the population feels comfortable at the thought of entering a situation that requires sales and influence. The rest of the world actively shies away from it—despite knowing how absolutely crucial it is to the achievement of wealth and success.

the same three key elements must still line up in any prospect’s mind before you have a shot at closing them. Let me repeat that: 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.

If in a single moment in time, you can create these three crucial elements in a prospect’s mind, then you’ve got an excellent shot of closing. Conversely, if even one of them is missing, you have basically no shot at all.

We call these three core elements the Three Tens—with the context being a prospect’s current state of certainty on a scale from one to ten.

For example, if a prospect is currently at a “ten” on the certainty scale, then it means he or she is in a state of absolute certainty at that moment. Conversely, if the prospect’s currently at a “one,” then they are in a state of absolute uncertainty at that moment.

In other words, before there’s any chance of a prospect buying a product, they first have to be absolutely certain that the product makes sense to them, insofar as it filling their needs, eliminating any pain they might have, being a good value for the money . . . and so forth.

So—the first of the Three Tens is your product. THE THREE TENS 1 The product, idea, or concept

In essence, your prospect must be absolutely certain that they love your product, or as we like to say with the Straight Line System, your prospect must think it’s the best thing since sliced bread!

5 representing a state of pure ambivalence. That’s where your prospect isn’t leaning one way or the other. In normal sales parlance, this is referred to as your prospect “sitting on the fence,”

THE THREE TENS 1 The product, idea, or concept 2 You, trust and connect with you

Whatever the case, my point is that, in the same way that you have varying degrees of certainty for how the prospect feels about your product, there are also varying degrees of certainty for how the prospect feels about you.

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

Lastly, if you’re working for a small company whose reputation is neither good nor bad, but simply unknown, that will have little impact on where your prospect enters the encounter on the certainty scale, other than the usual skepticism that’s created by dealing with a company that you’ve never heard of before.

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?

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?

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—

EMOTIONAL CERTAINTY On the flip side, emotional certainty is based on a gut feeling that something must be good.

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.

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 the...

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.”

At those points in the sale, 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.

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.

the prospect will often start off their objection with a quick one-liner about how much they like your product. For example, the prospect might start with something like, “It sounds pretty good, Jim,” or “It seems really interesting, Jim,” and then follow it up with, “I just need to speak to my wife first. How about I give you a call back tomorrow?”

Before we move on, I just want to dispel any notion you might have that Straight Line’s strategy for handling objections is going to promote, support, or even remotely recommend the use of high-pressure sales tactics in any way whatsoever. Simply put, it won’t.

In retrospect, even before I had invented the Straight Line System, I always knew that there wasn’t any real difference between one objection and another. But, somehow, seeing them all scribbled out on the whiteboard this way highlighted just how interchangeable they all really were. In fact, it was in that very moment that it truly hit me that, at the end of the day, they were all basically the same—that the common objections were nothing more than smoke screens for what was really holding a prospect back, which was a lack of certainty.

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 ...

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.

“The key here is that, from literally the first word out of your mouth, everything you say and everything you do is designed to keep your prospect on the straight line, and slowly nudge him forward, from the open to the close.

Typically, what happens is that your prospect keeps trying to take you off the straight line and take control of the conversation.” I drew a series of thin arrows, pointing upward and downward (↑↓), away from the straight line, to illustrate that point.

“So what we have are these healthy boundaries, above and below the line—one here and one here,” I continued, drawing two dotted lines that were parallel to the straight line, one of them six inches above it, and the other six inches below it. “When you’re inside the boundaries, you’re in control of the sale, and moving forward towards the close. When you’re outside the boundaries, the client is in control and you’re spiraling off to Pluto, or down here, to Your-anus, where you’re talking about the price of tea in China or politics in America or some other irrelevant topic that’s not germane to the sale.

“I’m going to teach you guys how to take control of the sale tonight, the way I do it, and how I taught Danny to do it; and that means you’re going to stay inside these boundaries, here and here. This is where you’re in control Boom, boom!” I banged my right knuckle on two spots inside the boundaries, one above the line and one below, and I marked each spot with the initials IC. “And here and here: this is where you’re out of control.” And I banged my right knuckle on two spots outside of the boundaries, one above the top dotted line and one below the bottom dotted line, and then I marked each space with the initials OC. “In control, out of control,”

“Now, when you’re on the straight line—meaning, directly on it—that’s where you’re doing all the talking. And all these little arrows here: the reason they’re all pointing down the line, to the close”—

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.

“So, again, that’s what’s happening when you’re directly on the straight line. You’re the one doing all the talking, and your client is listening. And when you’re off the straight line, but still inside the boundaries, right here and here”—I point to the spaces—“it’s the prospect who’s doing the talking, and you’re doing the listening.

“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 grow...

“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 ...

“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 d...

“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!

“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. Here—let me draw it out for you on the board.

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!” I told them to act as if their success was a foregone conclusion—that it was time to accept the fact that they had true greatness inside them, greatness that had always been there, dying to come out, but it had been buried under countless layers of insults and bullshit that society had dumped on them, in an effort to keep them down and make them settle for a life of mediocrity and averagism.

IN ORDER TO MOVE FORWARD THE PROSPECT NEEDS A HIGH LEVEL OF CERTAINTY 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 cert...