Jordan Belfort, also known as  “the Wolf of Wall Street” shares valuable insights into his tried and tested Straight Line System. The sales techniques mentioned in his book are applicable not only for salespeople but for everyone who wants to improve their negotiation and persuasion skills both in their personal and work life.

Every sale is the same. The reason every sale is the same is because, despite all those individual circumstances, the same three key elements should align.

• The three core elements, called “The Three Tens”, should 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. Love your product and trust that it will fulfill their needs
  2. Trust you as an expert in your field will fulfill their needs first
  3. Trust and connect with your company

Illustration:

If a prospect is currently at a “10” 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.

For example, your product is at “10” Your prospect is absolutely certain that they love your product

At “5” this is referred to as “sitting on the fence”. Or in other words “PLEASE INFLUENCE ME NOW! I CAN’T MAKE UP MY MIND, SO PLEASE HELP ME!”

At a “3 or 7”, feelings of certainty or uncertainty are less set in stone than if they were at the level to the right or left of them. Their current state of certainty is just that – current. It is not permanent, and they are eagerly waiting to be influenced by you.

The closer you get your prospect to a 10, the better your chances of closing them.

TWO TYPES OF CERTAINTY

1. LOGICAL CERTAINTY – based primarily on the words you say.
2. EMOTIONAL CERTAINTY – based on a gut feeling that something must be good. Once it hits us, we feel a craving inside that simply must be fulfilled, even if there’s a heavy price to pay for fulfilling it.

People don’t buy on logic; they buy on emotion, and then justify their decision with logic.

If you want to close at the highest level, then you’re going to have to create both types of certainty – logical and emotional

At the end of the day, objections are merely smokescreens for uncertainty for one or all the Three Tens.

• Salespeople like us should not make a full-blown sales presentation to someone who is not interested in buying. Instead, we want to weed these people out as quickly as possible, during the intelligence – gathering phase

Related Article: The Psychology of Selling by Brian Tracy

Take immediate control of the sale, and then move the prospect from open to the close along the shortest distance between any two points: a straight line. Now, when you’re on the straight line – meaning, directly on it – that’s where you’re doing all the talking.

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

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.

• How to do a massive intelligence gathering? Identify:

1. 1. Their needs, core needs and problems they might have.
   2. Any core beliefs they might have that could impact the sale.
   3. Past experiences they’ve had with similar products.
   4. Values – meaning, what things are most important to them.
   5. Financial standards, their spending ability.
   6. Where their pain lies.

• When you’re off the line, you’re looking to
  • continue building on the rapport that you already have, and;
  • use that rapport to help you gather the more invasive intelligence.

• The 3 basic tenets of the front half of the Straight Line:

1. 1. You must take immediate control of 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.

• 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.

• Five Core Elements of the Straight Line System

1. 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. The action threshold – your prospect must be at a level of certainty on each the Three Tens to be willing to buy

A prospect must cross over the “threshold of certainty” before he or she feels comfortable enough to buy.

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.

A prospect’s action threshold is malleable; it is not set in stone.

1. 5. The pain threshold

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.

Related Article: The Art of Closing the Sale by Brian Tracy

It takes only a quarter of a second for a prospect to make an initial decision about you if you meet them in person.

It only takes four seconds over the phone to take control of the sale.

The 3 things that you need to establish in those first four seconds of an encounter if you want to be perceived as worth speaking to:

1. Sharp as a tack

If prospects don’t think that you’re sharp as a tack, you’re wasting their time.

You have to sound and act like someone who can help the prospect fulfil 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.

2. Enthusiastic as hell

This sends a subliminal message to your prospect, telling them that you must have something great to offer.

You must sound upbeat, enthusiastic, and full of energy, and be a positive influence in their lives.

3. An expert in your field

Prove that you are an authority figure and a force to be reckoned with.

Convince the prospect that you are a highly competent, ultra-knowledgeable professional

Not only does this allow you to instantly gain the prospect’s respect, but it also causes them to defer to me and basically hand over control of the sale.

• NOTE: If you make a negative first impression, it takes eight subsequent positive impressions to erase that one negative first impression.

Related Article: The Secrets of Closing the Sale by Zig Ziglar

Your tone of voice or how you say what you say has a profound impact on how it’s perceived and, for that matter, how you are perceived; and not just during those all-important first four seconds, but throughout the entire conversation as well.

• If a sales encounter takes place in person, then a second communication modality comes into play, working hand-in-hand with tonality to help us get our point across- body language.

• Serving as the dual linchpins of an immensely powerful communication strategy known as unconscious communication, tonality and body language play major roles in how we get out point across – both while we’re talking and as we’re listening.

• In terms of percentages: tonality and body language comprise approximately 90 percent of our overall communications, spilt evenly down the middle, with each modality having approximately a 45 percent impact. The remaining 10 percent of communication is comprised of our words – the actual words we say as we verbally communicate.

• In total, of the twenty-nine tonalities that a human being uses to communicate, only ten of them are core-influencing tonalities – meaning that we use them over and over again as we go about influencing and persuading.

• Bottled enthusiasm makes a massive impact on someone emotionally, and it’s one of the earmarks of sounding like an expert.

It’s about enunciating your words with absolute clarity and stressing your consonants so that your words have an intensity to them.

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.

Related Article: Executive Summary of Books Billionaires Read

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.

The result is that you get to experience the positive feelings associated with a future achievement right now, as opposed to having to wait until a few years from now, when you actually achieve it.

• Act as if

Act as if you’re a wealthy man, rich already, and you will become rich.

Act as if you have unmatched confidence, and people will have confidence in you. Act as if you have all the answers, and the answers will come to you.

• When you’re in an empowered state – like “certainty, then you’re able to access your internal resources, which then sets you up for massive success. Conversely, when you’re in a disempowered state, you’re blocked from accessing your internal resources, and you’ve set yourself up for massive failure.

• In terms of achieving success in sales, there are Four Key States “The Four C’s” that you need to learn how to trigger at will within state management.

1. 1. Certainty
   2. Clarity
   3. Confidence
   4. Courage

• NLP and Anchoring State

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.

1. The first of these two elements is: What you choose to focus on.
2. 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.

Anchoring is a process used in NLP (neuro linguistic programming) to elicit a positive internal response to an external trigger so that the response may be quickly and sometimes covertly re-accessed.

As with Pavlov’s dog experiment where the scientist would ring a bell every time before feeding the dog. After enough conditioning, they would ring the bell and even without any food present, the dog would begin salivating.

• Belfort uses this same psychological trick to his advantage. He uses it to elicit peak emotional states, such as supreme confidence to use in sales situations.

In his case, he uses smell.

Whenever he closes a deal and feels the rush of success, he pulls out his essential oil inhaler and takes a big whiff, anchoring in the peak emotional state.

Then, whenever he needs an extra boost of confidence he pulls it out and takes a big whiff, recalling the peak state and instantly flooding his body with confidence.

• How to do this:

First, you are going to need to find an anchor. If we are doing it like Belfort, you need to find an olfactory anchor. However, this can’t be just any anchor. In order to be optimally effective it needs to have these three characteristics:

1. 1. It must be a smell that you like.
   2. It must be a smell that is unique! Something you do not smell often. This is probably the most important factor of all, because you want this smell to have prime real estate in your brain.
   3. The anchor should be easy to carry and administer effectively. You want to be able to pull it out of your pocket or purse the moment you feel a peak state that you want to anchor. For an anchor to be set, it must be set in the peak state of which you want to access later.

• So, now that you have your anchor, what do you do?

Whenever you find yourself in a peak positive emotional state, pull out your anchor and take a big whiff. Inhale into both nostrils. Allow the sensation to flood your body and lock in the desired emotion.

Then, whenever you want to recall that emotional state (say before a big meeting, a date, or anytime you want to feel confident, powerful, and good) you simply pull out your anchor and take a big whiff. Close your eyes and notice how your body automatically responds with the peak emotional state.

The best thing to do is to anchor in good feeling states when you are at peak emotion, and use it to recall the states at about a ratio of 80/20. This will ensure that your body associates the trigger primarily with the real feeling.

Anybody can pick from the Five Sensory Modalities

1. 1. Visual
   2. Auditory
   3. Kinesthetic
   4. Gustatory
   5. Olfactory

Remember, it’s your words that move a prospect logically, and it’s your tonality that moves your prospect emotionally.

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.

• 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.

Instead of saying, “Hi, my name is Bill Peterson, from the Acme Travel Company. I’m looking for Mr. John Smith. Is he home?”— the salesperson should simply say, in a very upbeat tone, ”Hi, is John there?”

Ten Core Influencing Tonalities

1. 1. “I care”, or, “I really want to know” – you should sound upbeat and enthusiastic when dealing with the prospect
   2. 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?”
   3. Mystery and intrigue – When explaining the precise reason why you called the prospect today.
   4. Scarcity -Always try to create at least some degree of urgency right before you ask for the order, as it will dramatically increase the likelihood of your prospect saying yes.
   5. First, verbal scarcity is used to convey the logic.
   6. Second, you add on tonal scarcity by using a power whisper, which greatly intensifies the prospect’s sense of scarcity.
   7. Third, you add on informational scarcity by explaining that even the information itself is in short supply.

1. 5. Absolute certainty – your voice takes a firmer, more definitive tone, with a power that seems to come right from your solar plexus, in order to convey your absolute conviction about whatever you happen to currently be saying.
   6. Utter sincerity – a calm, smooth, confident, low-pressure tone that implies that what you’re currently saying to the prospect is coming directly from your heart, and that you’re being absolutely sincere with them at the highest possible level.
   7. Reasonable man – entails you raising your voice up at the end of the sentence, to imply the reasonableness of your statement. The extra words your prospect hears are “I’m reasonable, you’re reasonable, and this is a very reasonable requests.”
   8. Hypothetical, money aside – When a prospect hits you with one of the common objections – they still want to think about it.

The first questions you’re going to ask them, no matter what objection they hit you with:

“Does the idea make sense to you? Do you like the idea?”

“Hypothetically speaking, putting money aside, does the idea make sense to you? Do you like the idea?”

1. 9. Implied obviousness – to infer the notion that it’s beyond obvious that your product or service is a winner.
   10. “I feel your pain” – When you’re asking questions that are designed to uncover your prospect’s primary and secondary pain points.

Nonverbal communication is ten times more powerful than verbal communication, and it hits you with the force of a cannonball to the gut.

Related Podcast Episode: Understanding Body Language w/ Joe Navarro

When a person lays eyes on you for the first time, in that 1/24th of a second that their judgment indicator goes up and down, they see your face and how you move and they make a judgement. In essence, they rip you apart, process you in their brain, then put you back together and you are judged.

• Remember that getting into a rapport with someone is done primarily through tonality and body language, not your words.

• Interesting fact: If you don’t make eye contact at least 72 percent of the time, people won’t trust you.

• Active listening – a way of listening to someone that helps you actually build rapport with them. Example gesture: As simple as nodding your head while your prospect is speaking. Then you add an occasional nod, along with a few ahas! And yups! And I got it!

• Other facial expressions:

Compressing your lips and lowering your head a bit, which implies sadness

Compressing your lips and nodding your head slowly, which implies sympathy and empathy.

• The audible cues are even more important when you’re on the phone and don’t have body language to rely on. In that case, those little grunts and groans are the only way to stay in rapport with your prospect while they’re talking.

• Matching can be a way to calm anyone down, or get them excited about something, or feeling certain about something. You simply enter their world where they are, and then you pace them, you pace them… and then you lead them in the direction you want them to go.

• How to Stand in front of a Man vs Woman you’re selling to

MAN – 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.

WOMAN – When selling to a woman, stand directly in front of her with your hand above waist level where she can see them

Trying to sell something to someone who doesn’t need it or want it is a fool’s errand and a total waste of time.

When you gather intelligence, you want to know everything there is to know about your prospect, so long as it’s relevant to closing the sale – including their needs, beliefs, values, the hierarchy of values(meaning, the relative importance of each value), their past experiences with similar products, past experiences with other salespeople, personal financial situation (insofar as affording your product), and both their primary and their secondary pain points.

• The fact that your ability to gather intelligence will be directly related to how powerful a first impression you make on your prospect during those first four seconds. In other words, the only way that your prospects will answer your questions honestly and forthrightly is if they perceive you as being a true expert in your field, and a person whose confidence and eloquence and bottles enthusiasm has left them no doubt whatsoever that you’re definitely a person worth listening to, someone who can help them achieve their goals and resolve their pain.

• Quick overview of the relationships between marketing and sales.

• You have marketing on one side of the equation, and sales on the other. The objective of marketing is to:

Research the marketplace to identify the best prospective buyers – prospects, for short – for a particular product.

Develop a cost-effective strategy that gets the company’s message in front of as many of these prospects as possible.

Embed the message with some of offer or book or call to action that prompts as many of these prospects as possible to enter the company’s sales funnel.

Coordinate with the sales departments to ensure a seamless handoff of the funnel, so prospects can be turned into customers.

• Straight Line prospecting is all about sifting through prospects who enter your sales funnel to eliminate the ones who don’t qualify to buy your product – thereby avoiding wasting your time making a full-blown sales presentation to them.
• In any given marketing campaign, there are four categories of buyers who will enter your sales funnel.

Four Buying Archetypes:

1. 1. Buyers in heat – they’ve already made the decision to do something about it now. Between 10 and 20 percent of the total prospects that enter your sales funnel will fall into this category

1. 2. 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. Between 30 and 40 percent of the total prospects that enter your sales funnel will end up falling into this category.

1. 3. Lookie-loos, aka “tire-kickers – weed these out. Between 30 and 40 percent of their sales funnel is filled with professional time-wasters (disguised as buyers in power)

1. 4. Mistakes / “People who were dragged there” – weed these out. They had no desire to enter your sales funnel in the first place, so you have basically no chance of closing them.

• Three main goals of Straight Line prospecting:

1. 1. Identify the lookie-loos and the mistakes and remove them from your sales funnel as quickly as possible.
   2. Gather the necessary intelligence from the buyers in heat and the buyers in power, and then continue moving them down the Straight Line towards the close.
   3. Begin the process of turning the buyers in power into buyers in heat by amplifying their pain.

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.

A list of all seven questions in their most logical sequence.

1. What part of town do you live in?
2. How long have you been living there?
3. What do you like most about your neighborhood?
4. Are you married or single?
5. Do you have any children?
6. What kind of work do you do?
7. Are you self-employed or do you work for someone else?

Rule #8: Make mental notes; 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. Ex. “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.

• Genuine rapport is based on two things. First that you care. Second that you’re just like them.
• We don’t associate with other people based on our differences; we associate based on our commonalities.
• You can’t close a sales while you’re out of rapport with your prospect; it’s that simple.
• You need to be actively building rapport throughout the entire sale, 100 percent of the time, without ever letting your guard down.

It’s these three distinctions – he cares about me, he understands me, and he feels my pain – that serve as the very foundation on which all rapport is built, and they come naturally to those who possess massive charisma.

In fact, the power of charisma is so vital to a salesperson’s success that it’s almost impossible to find even a single top producer who doesn’t possess it in massive quantities.

Charisma’s first component, which is the effective use of tonality – meaning, that you sound so good when you speak that you keep people hanging on your every word as opposed to them tuning out, or dividing their attention among other people in the room.

The second component is the targeted use of body language principles, with a heavy emphasis on active listening, to communicate an extraordinary level of attentiveness and empathy.

Third component – which is typically the toughest one of all, for most people – is not saying stupid things.

• Eight things that set Straight Line scripts apart from everything else or key features that must be in place in order for your script to be effective:

1. 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.

The key to writing a great script is to frame, not front-load.

2. Focus on the benefits, not the features.
3. Your script must have stopping-off points.

After you make a powerful statement, you want to lock it down by asking the prospect a simple yes-or-no question, such as: “You follow me so far?” or “Make sense?” or “Are you with me?” By doing this, not only do you keep the prospect engaged in the conversation but you also get them into the habit of saying yes, which creates consistency.

4. Write in the spoken word, not grammatically correct English.
5. Your script must flow perfectly.
6. Your scripts must be honest and ethical.
7. Remember the overarching equation of energy in benefits out.

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?”

Make it clear to your prospect that you will do everything in your power to make the process as simple as possible for them.

8. 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.

• Once you’ve gone through the script-building process and you’ve finalized your draft, there are only two things left to do: Training and drilling.
• You should always use a script, whether you’re selling in person or on the phone.
• Know your scripts so well you move past the point of the actual words. Remember, 10 percent of human communication is words; the other 90 percent is tonality and body language. By memorizing scripts, you free up your conscious mind to focus on the 90 percent.
• Keep reading your scripts back to yourself, to make sure all the language patterns and transitions are absolutely seamless.

The Power of Language Patterns

Every word that escapes your lips has been specifically designed to feed into one overarching goal, which is to increase your prospect’s level of certainty for each of the Three Tens to the highest level possible, a 10 on the certainty scale.

• Now, in terms of the order in which you go about creating certainty, you’re always going to follow the same protocol, which is:

The product.

You, the salesperson second.

And the company that stands behind the product third.

• The basic rules for creating a powerful introduction. We’ll assume an outbound phone call:

Be enthusiastic right from the start.

1. Always speak in the familiar. For example, you wouldn’t say “Hi, is Mr. Jones there?” You would say, “Hi, is John there?”

Introduce yourself and your company in the first couple of sentences, and then restate the name of your company a second time within the first couple of sentences.

1. Use power words, like “dramatically,” “explosive,” “fastest growing.” “Most well respected.” Power words go a very long way to capturing someone’s attention and establishing yourself as an expert.
2. Use your justifiers.
3. Ask for permission to begin the qualification process.

Note: 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 most important to you?
• Have I asked about everything that’s important to you?

The sale doesn’t truly begin until after your prospect hits you with the first objection; only then do you have the chance to finally roll up your sleeves and earn your paycheck.

There are only three possible ways that your prospect can respond the first time you ask them for the order.

1. Yes – meaning, the deal is closed and it’s time to break out the paperwork and collect payment.
2. No – meaning, the prospect is definitely not interested and it’s time to end the sales encounter and move on to the next prospect.
3. Maybe – meaning, the prospect is sitting on the fence and can still go either way. Maybe consists of all the common objections that salespeople typically get hit with during the back half of the sale.

• In terms of which objection your prospect chooses, it doesn’t even matter, because you’re going to respond to all the common objections in exactly the same way.

For example, let’s say Bill replies, “It sounds interesting. Let me think about it.”

To that, you’ll answer with the standard Straight Line response to an initial objection, which is: “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?

• In Straight Line parlance, we refer to this process as deflection, and it comprises step number six of the Straight Line Syntax. In essence, when you deflect a prospect’s initial objection, you’re avoiding answering it head-on by using a two-step process:

1. 1. Step one consists of a simple, five-word language pattern – I hear what you’re saying – which you’ve infused with the reasonable man tonality.
   2. Step two consists of another simple language pattern – Let me ask you a question: Does the idea makes sense to you? Do you like the idea? – Which you’ve infused with the money-aside tonality.
   3. Transition into your follow-up presentation when hit with an objection, using the same proven language pattern every time.

You’re going to say, “Exactly! It really is a great buy at this level! In fact, one of the true beauties here is…” and then you’ll go directly into your follow-up presentation, which must be so utterly compelling that even the most skeptical of prospects will have no choice but to become logically certain after hearing it.

THE ACTION THRESHOLD

• The action threshold is the collective level of certainty that a person needs to be at before they feel comfortable enough to buy.
• The instant before you make a buying decision, your brain runs not one but two separate movies: it runs a positive one and a negative one. It happens so fast that you don’t even realize it.

• Four ways to lower your prospect’s action threshold.

1. 1. Offer your prospect a money – back guarantee.
   2. Offer your prospect a cooling off or rescission period.
   3. 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. “
   4. 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.

• By taking these high-action threshold buyers and, for a few minutes, lowering their action thresholds, you can then step through that window and close what are about your most loyal customers.

• If there’s one thing about high-action threshold prospects that makes them more than worth the extra effort is it takes to close them, it’s that they make excellent long-term clients.

• They’re basically so happy to have finally found a salesperson who was able to break through their limited beliefs and earn their trust that they’ll stay put under almost any circumstance.

• People who are feeling significant pain tend to act quickly; conversely, people who are in denial of their pain tend to act slowly.

• You do not want to use pain to disempower people; you want to use it to empower people by helping them make good buying decisions, so they can have the things that they truly need.

SYNTAX OF THE STRAIGHT LINE

• First four seconds
• Build and get into massive rapport, both conscious and unconscious
• Gather intelligence
• Transition to the body of the presentation
• Ask for the order
• Deflect and build certainty through the process of looping
• Lower the action threshold
• Add on pain
• Close the deal
• Get massive referrals
• Develop customers for life