Way of the Wolf: Straight line selling: Master the art of persuasion, influence, and success

by Jordan Belfort

“Well, I’ve got a news flash for you,” I continued sarcastically. “You’re wrong. People see through that shit in two seconds flat, especially rich people, who are constantly on guard for that. To them, it’s actually repulsive, not attractive, which is the opposite of what building rapport is all about.”

“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,” I repeated, tapping the respective initials.

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. “That shit is for novices.” My obvious contempt for novices dripped off the very word.

“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.”

“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....

“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 ...

You must take immediate control of the sale. You must engage in massive intelligence gathering, while you simultaneously build massive rapport with your prospect. 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 next, as you’re gathering all this intelligence, you’re going to do it in a way that allows you to build massive rapport with your prospect at the same time, which is absolutely crucial, by the way, because the questions you’ll be asking him are going to get more and more invasive as you move along.

“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.

“Imagine a continuum of certainty between one and ten,” I said confidently. As I began turning back to the whiteboard, I saw one of the Strattonite’s hands shoot up. It was Colton Green. Colton Green was an eighteen-year-old Irishman, with a beefy skull, a budding drinker’s nose, and an IQ just above the level of an idiot. A nincompoop among nincompoops! But a lovable nincompoop, nonetheless. With a dead smile: “Green?” “What’s a continuum?” he asked. The rest of the Strattonites chuckled at Colton’s idiocy, which was rather ironic, I thought, considering that most of them were idiots too. But, as it turned out, the usual deterrents to success, such as idiocy and stupidity, were about to become completely irrelevant inside the four walls of Stratton’s boardroom.

Day after day, I told them that their past did not equal their future, unless they choose to live there. I told them that if they fully embraced the Straight Line System and simply picked up the phone and said the words I taught them, they could become as powerful as the most powerful CEO in America.

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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!”

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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.

“Maybe you were born just an average guy: not all that smart, not very well-spoken, not overly motivated; and you slept through grade school, you cheated your way through high school, you didn’t go to college. So maybe you’ve had the desire to achieve greatness, but you truly weren’t capable of it. You lacked the skills you needed to go out into the world and kick some ass! “Now, be honest here, how many of you guys feel like that sometimes? Not always, but sometimes, like when you’re lying in bed at night, alone with your thoughts, and the fears and the negativity come out and start whispering in your ear, eating away at your self-confidence and self-worth? Raise your hand if you feel like that sometimes.” Like clockwork, every hand in the room would go flying up. “Exactly,” I’d continue. “Most people feel that way; and they actually have every right to … because they’re not special! They don’t have any special skill or talent or ability that sets them apart from everyone else; they have no edge, no advantage that they can use to separate themselves from the pack, nothing they can use to get rich. “And, by the way, I hate to say it, but that includes pretty much every one of you in this room.” Then I’d quickly add the punch line. “Or at least it used to. “See, I don’t know if you guys actually get this, so let me make it crystal clear for you: you are not the same person who walked into this boardroom on your first day. In fact, you’re not even close to being the same per...

I’m making this shit up or even exaggerating, then go ask any rich person and they’ll tell you, straight away, that without the ability to close the deal, it is really hard to make money; and once you do have that ability, then everything becomes easy.

By the end of year one, top producers were earning over $250,000 a month, and their success seemed to be almost contagious. Even par had climbed to $100,000 a month, and the attrition rate was basically zero. In other words, if you made it into the boardroom, then you were almost guaranteed to succeed. All you had to do was take a quick look around you, in any direction, and there was massive success everywhere.

At the heart of the system are five core elements. To this very day, they’re exactly the same as the day I created them, and they serve as the backbone of the entire system. As you may have guessed, I’ve already touched on the first three elements, namely, the all-important Three Tens:

The prospect must love your product. The prospect must trust and connect with you. The prospect must trust and connect with your company.

In essence, as you move your prospect down the straight line, everything you say should be specifically designed to increase your prospect’s level of certainty for at least one of the three elements—with your ultimate goal being to move all three of them to as close to a 10 as possible, at which point you’re going to ask for the order and hopefully close the deal.

Now, when you finish the main body of your sales presentation, you’ve reached a point on the Straight Line where you are going to ask for the order for the first time and wait for a response—and then the back half of the sale begins, which gets triggered when the prospect hits you with the first objection. Alternatively, this is the point in the sale where you’ll find out if you have a lay-down on your hands, in which case the prospect will simply say yes, and you can close the deal without having to address any objections.

Most of the time, prospects are going to hit you with at least one or two objections, although usually it’s more like three or four.

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 short, the prospect has made it crystal clear to you through their words, their tonality, and, if you’re in person, their body language that they are absolutely certain about all of the Three Tens; yet, for some inexplicable reason, they are still not buying.

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. By way of definition, we refer to people who are very easy to sell to as having a low action threshold; and we refer to people who are very difficult to sell to as having a high action threshold.

So, for these ultra-tough nuts to crack, we now turn to the fifth core element of the Straight Line System: the pain threshold. You see, at the end of the day, pain is the most powerful motivator of all—causing human beings to quickly move away from whatever they believe is the source of their pain, and to move towards whatever they believe will resolve their pain.

In essence, pain creates urgency, which makes it the perfect vehicle for closing these tougher sales. To that end it’s absolutely crucial that you take the time to uncover precisely what your prospect’s pain is and where it comes from.

Once I have that information, I can then position my product as a remedy for their pain, and then verbally paint a picture for them of the future—showing how much better they are going to feel as a result of using my product, which has taken away all their pain and has them feeling pleasure again. In addition, by saving this powerful human motivator for last, it gives us the ability to make that one final push—taking a prospect who needs our product and wants our product and can...

THE 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. Lower the action threshold. Raise the pain threshold.

In a manner of speaking, that’s precisely what you’re doing when you’re moving a prospect down the Straight Line. Essentially, you’re cracking the code to his or her buying combination, and you’re doing it the same way every single time.

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.

However, as powerful as the Straight Line System is, it completely breaks down in the absence of one crucial element, which is: You need to take immediate control of the sale.

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. Is it safe? Is there danger nearby? Do we need to be extra careful about something? This type of snap decision-making goes all the way back to our caveman days, and it’s wired into our reptilian brains. When we saw something back then, we had to size it up instantly and decide whether to stay or run. It was only after we were sure that we were safe that we’d start debating whether or not it made sense to stick around for a potential benefit.

That quick decision-making instinct is still with us today. The stakes are much lower, of course, because we don’t typically face life-or-death situations every day. But, still, the process happens just as quickly. In fact, it happens in less than four seconds over the phone, and in only a quarter of a second when you’re in person. That’s how fast the brain reacts.

To be clear, though, even when you’re in person, it still takes four seconds before a final judgment gets made. The difference is that the process starts sooner when you’re in person—literally from the first moment the prospect lays eyes on you.

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: Sharp as a tack Enthusiastic as hell An expert in your field

Those three things absolutely must come across in the first four seconds of a conversation; otherwise, you set yourself up for a major uphill battle.

The bottom line is that you have four seconds until someone rips you apart, compartmentalizes you, judges each piece, and then puts you back together again based on how you were perceived. And if those three aforementioned things—being sharp as a tack, enthusiastic as hell, and an expert in your field—haven’t been established firmly in your prospect’s mind, then you have basically no chance of closing them.

Experts have a certain way of talking that literally commands respect. They say things like “Listen, Bill, you need to trust me on this. I’ve been doing this for fifteen years, and I know exactly what you need.”

1 First, you’re sharp as a tack.

In essence, you have to sound and act like someone who can help the prospect fulfill their needs and desires. You can accomplish this by demonstrating mental speed and agility, fast decision-making, and a unique pace of delivery that immediately impresses the prospect and builds trust. However, to achieve lasting success, you must actually become an “expert in your field,” so that you do, indeed, know what you’re talking about.

Second, you’re enthusiastic as hell. This sends a subliminal message to your prospect, telling them that you must have something great to offer.

3 Third, you’re an expert in your field—an authority figure and a force to be reckoned with.

From the time they’re old enough to walk, people are taught to respect and listen to authority figures. In sales situations, I convince the prospect that I am a highly competent, ultraknowledgeable professional by coming off as a world-class expert in my field, right out of the gate.

I’ll also add value by offering a unique perspective during the sales conversation, demonstrating extensive knowledge and understanding of the market, industry, product, prospect, and competitors. 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.

So if your words won’t do it, then where do you turn? The answer is simple: your tone of voice.

In terms of percentages, tonality and body language comprise approximately 90 percent of our overall communication,