فصل 02

2

INVENTING THE STRAIGHT LINE

“I’M READY TO GO ALL night,” I said to the Strattonites threateningly, and slowly I locked eyes with each and every one of them and let each feel the full weight of my stare. They were sitting behind old wooden desks, arranged classroom-style, and on each desktop sat a cheap black telephone, a gray-colored computer monitor, and a stack of maybe a hundred three-by-five index cards that I’d purchased from Dun & Bradstreet for 22 cents a piece. Each of these cards had the name and phone number of a wealthy investor on it, along with the company they owned and its annual revenue for the prior year.

To Danny and me, these D&Bs, as they were called, were as valuable as gold—with every two hundred cards yielding ten qualified leads, from which we would open between two or three new accounts. And while those numbers might not sound overly impressive, any broker who did that for three straight months would be on pace to make over $2 million per year; and if he did it for a year, he’d be on pace to make more than triple that.

Unfortunately, the Strattonites’ results hadn’t been quite as impressive. In fact, they’d been downright awful. For every two hundred D&Bs they dialed through, they were averaging only five leads, and from those five they were closing an average of . . . no one.

Ever.

“So you might as well get comfortable,” I continued, “because we’re not going anywhere until we figure this out. So let’s start by getting brutally honest. I want you guys to tell me why you’re finding it so hard to close rich people, because I really don’t get it.” I shrugged. “I’m doing it! Danny is doing it! And I know that you guys can do it too.” I flashed them a hint of a sympathetic smile. “It’s like you have some sort of mental block against this, and it’s time to break it down. So, let’s start by you guys telling me why this is so hard for you? I really want to know.”

A few moments passed, as I just stood there at the front of the room, looking holes through the Strattonites, who seemed to be literally shrinking in their seats under the weight of my stare. They were a motley crew, all right. There was no denying that. It was a miracle that any of these clowns had even passed their broker’s exam.

Finally, one of them broke the silence.

“There are too many objections,” he whined. “I’m getting hit with them left and right. I can’t even get a pitch off!”

“Me too,” added another. “There are thousands of objections. I can’t get a pitch off either. It’s a lot harder than with penny stocks.”

“Exactly,” added a third one. “I’m getting smashed with objections.” He let out a deep sigh. “I vote for penny stocks too!”

“Same here,” added another. “It’s the objections; they don’t let up.” The rest of the Strattonites began nodding their heads in agreement, as they muttered their collective feelings of disapproval under their breath.

But I wasn’t the least bit fazed. With the exception of that one reference about “voting”—as if this were a fucking democracy!—I’d heard it all before.

In fact, since the day we’d made the switch, the brokers had been complaining about the increased number of objections and how difficult they were to overcome. And while there was some degree of truth to it, it wasn’t nearly as difficult as they were making it out to be, not even close. There’re thousands of objections? Give me a break!

For a moment, I considered taking immediate action against the rabble-rousing Strattonite who’d mentioned the V-word, but I decided against it.

It was time to call these guys out on their bullshit, once and for all. “Fair enough,” I said, with a hint of sarcasm. “Since you guys are so sure about these thousands of objections, I want to list every single one of them right now.” And, with that, I turned to the whiteboard and grabbed a black Magic Marker off the ledge of the stand and raised it to the center of the board. “Go ahead!” I continued. “Start calling them all out, and then I’ll rattle off all the answers for you, one by one, so you can see how easy this is. Come on, let’s go!”

The Strattonites began to shift uncomfortably in their seats. They looked utterly dumbfounded, like a family of deer caught in the headlights, but not nearly as cute.

“Come on,” I pressed. “Speak now or forever hold your peace.”

“ ’I want to think about it!’ ” one finally yelled.

“Good,” I replied, and I wrote the objection on the whiteboard. “He wants to think about it. That’s a great start. Keep going.”

“He wants you to call back!” shouted another.

“Okay,” I replied, writing that one down too. “Wants a call back. What else?”

“ ’Send me some information!’ ”

“Okay, that’s a good one,” I remarked, jotting it down as well. “Keep going. I’ll make it easy and we’ll shoot for a thousand. There’s only 997 to go.” I flashed them a sarcastic grin. “It’s totally doable.”

“ ’It’s a bad time of year!’ ” someone yelled.

“Good,” I shot back. “Keep going.”

“ ’I need to speak to my wife!’ ” yelled another.

“Or his business partner!” shouted yet another.

“Excellent,” I said calmly, writing both objections down. “We’re making serious progress here. There are only 994 to go. Keep going.”

“ ’I’m not liquid right now!’ ” yelled a broker.

“Ah, now, that’s good a one!” I said quickly, scribbling it down on the board. “Although, you have to admit that you’re not getting that one quite as much since we started calling rich people. Anyway, let’s keep going. There are only 993 to go.”

“ ’I only deal with my local broker!’ ” one of them yelled.

“ ’I never heard of your firm before!’ ” shouted another.

“ ’I’ve been burnt before!’ ”

“ ’I don’t like the market right now!’ ”

“ ’I’m too busy!’ ”

“ ’I don’t trust you!’ ”

“ ’I don’t make quick decisions!’ ”

And on and on they went—calling out objection after objection, as I wrote each one down, in progressively worse handwriting. By the time they were done, I’d covered the entire surface of the board with every objection they could possibly think of . . . which, at the end of the day, turned out to be only fourteen.

That’s right. 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.

What a bunch of crap! I thought.

For the last four weeks, the Strattonites had been going on and on about how impossible it was to deal with these “thousands of objections,” to the point where, in my darkest hour, they had almost convinced me that they were right—that there were simply too many objections for the average salesperson to handle and that the success that Danny and I were having was another example of the difference between natural born closers and everyone else. Yet it had all been a bunch of crap!

All at once, I felt my face growing hot.

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 would execute each one of my loops in precisely the same exact way, every single time.

It was at that very moment when it suddenly hit me—the idea that every sale was the same. In fact, all at once, that very concept came bubbling up into my brain, followed a millisecond later by an elegantly simple image that I could use to explain it.

The image, as it turned out, was a perfectly straight line.

But that was just the beginning.

Something had clicked inside my brain, and a window of clarity had swung open, giving me unfettered access to a seemingly infinite reservoir of what can best be described as pure sales wisdom. I’m talking about radically advanced stuff here—ideas and concepts and tactics and strategies were flashing through my mind at an incredible rate. In my mind’s eye, I could see my own sales strategy being pulled apart, into its elemental pieces, and then put back together, in exactly the right order, along a perfectly straight line. My heart literally skipped a beat. It happened so fast that it seemed almost instantaneous, but it hit me with the force of an atomic bomb.

Until that very moment, I simply hadn’t known why I had been able to far outsell every other salesperson, at every single company I had ever worked for. But now I knew.

My own sales strategy, which had been mostly unconscious until then, had suddenly become conscious. I could see each distinct chunk of my strategy, as if it had the defined edges of a jigsaw piece, and each individual piece seemed to be screaming out its purpose at me. But there was more—much, much more.

When I shifted my focus to any particular piece, I suddenly had access to every root experience and every memory that justified the piece’s purpose and location; and by focusing a bit deeper, a torrent of words came gushing into my consciousness, providing the perfect explanation for the piece and how it related to the others.

For example, if I looked at the point on the line marked “sales presentation,” then I immediately knew that there were three things that had to be addressed before the prospect would say yes; and then, if I focused a bit harder, the word “certainty” popped into my mind, followed, a millisecond later, by each of the Three Tens, which seemed to be floating above the line and tethered to scenes going back all the way to my childhood, of random sales situations I had been in on either side, as salesperson or prospect, and a vivid memory of why I had said no or yes to the salespeople, or the prospects had said no or yes to me.

All of those things, each compressed into a millisecond, had flashed through my brain while I stood before the whiteboard, staring at the objections. From end to end, the entire experience was maybe one or two seconds, but when I turned to face the Strattonites I was an entirely different person.

As I scanned their faces, the strengths and weaknesses of each came popping into my brain in a singular rush of thoughts, as did a perfect way to train each of them to perfection. In short, 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.

With renewed confidence, I said, “Don’t you guys get it? Every sale is the same!”

All twelve Strattonites shot me confused looks.

I ignored them, with relish, and I unleashed my discovery.

“Watch,” I said forcefully. “It’s a straight line!” And I turned back to the whiteboard, and for the very first time, I drew that long, thin horizontal line across the middle of it and placed a big, thick X on either end.

“Now, this is your open”—I pointed to the X on the left end of the line—“where the sale begins, and this is your close”—I pointed to the X on the right end of the line—“where the prospect says, ‘Yeah, let’s do it,’ and he opens up the account with you.

“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. You guys follow me so far?”

The Strattonites nodded in unison. The room was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop. The air felt electric.

“Good,” I replied quickly. “Now, as a salesperson, every once in a while, we get one of those perfect, lay-down sales, where the prospect seems to be almost pre-sold before we even open up our mouths.” As I continued to speak, I began drawing tiny arrows on the center of the line, starting just after the left X, and then moving down the line, to just before the X on the right. “It’s one of those sales where everything you say, and everything you do, and every case you make about why the prospect should buy from you, he keeps on saying, yes, yes, yes, without giving you even a single objection, right up to the moment where you ask him for the order, and he agrees to close. That’s what I mean by a perfect straight-line sale.

“Who’s ever had one of those perfect, lay-down sales, where the client seemed to be almost pre-sold from the start? You all have, right?” I raised my right hand, prompting them to do the same.

All twelve hands quickly shot up.

“Of course you have,” I said confidently. “The problem is that those sales are far and few between. 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, basically, you want to keep the prospect on the straight line, moving forward towards the close, and he keeps trying to take you off the straight line, and spiral off to Pluto”—I wrote the word “Pluto” near the top of the whiteboard—“or down here, to Your-anus”—I wrote the word “Your-anus” near the bottom of the whiteboard—“which is not a very good place to be, at least for most of you.” I threw my hands in the air and shrugged, as if to say, “To each his own!”

“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.

“And, by the way, I hear you guys doing this shit all the time when I walk around the room, and it drives me fucking crazy!” I shook my head gravely. “Seriously—ninety percent of the time you guys are off in freaking Pluto, talking about some nonsense that has nothing to do with the stock market.” I closed my eyes tightly and gave my head a few quick shakes back and forth, as if to say, “Some things just completely defy logic!” Then I said, “Anyway, I know what you guys are thinking—that the more time you spend bullshitting with these people, the more rapport you end up building.

“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.” I shrugged. “Anyway, it doesn’t really matter, because you guys are done with that shit, now. It’s over.

“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,” I repeated, tapping the respective initials.

“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”—I began tapping the tip of my marker on each arrow, as I continued speaking, starting with the very first arrow, just after the open, and moving quickly to the right, all the way down to the close—“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.

“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.” I pointed to the arrows again. “That’s why every one of these arrows is compact, and tight, and right on the line—and they’re all pointed straight towards the close.

“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 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 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.

“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!

“And the objection could be any one of these.” I grabbed the top right edge of the whiteboard and flipped the board over, revealing the fourteen common objections.

“They want to think about it or call you back or talk to their wife or do some research or it’s a bad time of year; it doesn’t matter which one they give you. In the end, they’re all basically the same; they’re smoke screens for uncertainty! In other words, your prospect still isn’t certain enough to say yes, which means you’ve still got some selling left to do.” I paused for a moment and flipped the board back over, to reveal my drawing of the Straight Line.

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

“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.

You see, over those next few hours, I literally invented the Straight Line System as I was teaching it to the Strattonites. The system effortlessly poured out of me, with each breakthrough paving the way for yet another breakthrough. I felt as if I were almost channeling the information from some place else, a place of infinite knowledge and infinite wisdom, a place where the answers to all of my questions, no matter how complex, were ready and waiting, and there for the taking. So I took all that I could, with relish.

By midnight, I had laid out the framework for the entire system, and had created the first Straight Line Syntax. 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.

About a month later, I added on two additional steps, as deeper layers of the system continued to pour out of me; then, many years later, I increased the number to fourteen, when I created the 2.0 version of the Straight Line System and began teaching it around the world. Amazingly, though, the core of the syntax remains almost identical to what came out of me that first Tuesday evening, which makes perfect sense when you consider what happened the next morning, when the Strattonites hit the phones armed with the Straight Line System for the very first time. In fact, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it.

From literally the moment they started dialing, the entire office went on an account-opening spree of such biblical proportions that, within 90 days, every last one of them had become a million-dollar producer.

But that was only the beginning.

As word of our success began to spread, brokers began showing up at my door unannounced.

By the end of 1989, there were more than 200 Strattonites working in one massive boardroom at Stratton’s new corporate headquarters in Lake Success, Long Island.

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.

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.

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.

And while all those thoughts were still fresh in their mind, I would set up my transition, focusing on the dire importance of skills training by getting brutally honest with them. I would say, “Maybe some of the stuff that people said about you was actually true. Maybe your parents and your teachers and your ex-boss, and ex-girlfriend—maybe they were all right about you. Maybe you’re not that special?

“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 person! The Straight Line System has changed you! It’s made you an infinitely more effective human being than you’ve ever been in your entire life—because you now own a skill that sets you apart from pretty much everyone else on the planet: you have the ability to close the deal, to influence and persuade at the highest possible level, to the point where you can close anyone who’s closable.

“And since you didn’t own this skill before, anything negative that happened to you in the past has absolutely no bearing on the future. Do you understand that? Do you see the power in that? Do you guys realize that every last one of you has turned yourself into a force of nature? Someone who can create any vision for the future they want and then go out and achieve it. The simple fact is that the ability to close the deal is the single most important distinction, bar none, when it comes to achieving wealth and success, and you guys literally own that skill at the highest level. And if you think 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.

“In fact, that’s why I can point to any person in this room who’s been here for more than a few months, and he’ll tell you some ridiculous success story that no one outside of this room would even believe, because the success is so extreme that they can’t even wrap their arms around it . . . ,” and on and on I would go, day in and day out, once in the morning, before the market opened, and then again in the afternoon, after it closed. I kept pounding the Strattonites with a twice-daily combination of skills training and motivation; and with each passing day the success stories grew crazier and crazier.

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.

For a new trainee, this was more than sufficient to quash any doubts about the power and effectiveness of the Straight Line System. In fact, after a few months of teaching it, I had devised a paint-by-number training curriculum that was so easy to follow that it was virtually foolproof.

Five Core Elements of the Straight Line System

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:

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.

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.

However, that being said, what you need to remember here is that this is not the type of process that happens all at once. In fact, in the vast majority of cases, you’re going to have to ask for the order at least two or three times before you have any chance of your prospect saying yes.

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.

But, as I said before, these lay-down sales are few and far between. Most of the time, prospects are going to hit you with at least one or two objections, although usually it’s more like three of four.

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 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.

While looping is a very simple process, there is one particular scenario that keeps coming up again and again, and unless a salesperson is prepared for it, it tends to drive them up the wall.

For the most part, this scenario rears its ugly head after you’ve run two or three loops, and you’ve raised your prospect’s level of certainty to a point where they’re so absolutely certain that you can actually hear it both in their tone of voice and the actual words they say.

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.

There’s actually a very logical reason for this, and it has to do with an invisible force that holds sway over every sales encounter—dictating how far down the line a salesperson has to take any particular prospect before they finally say yes; or, put another way, at what collective level of certainty does any particular prospect need to be at before he or she says yes?

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.

Now, that’s all fine and dandy, but what makes this concept so absolutely crucial to a salesperson’s success is a remarkable discovery I made that proved to be the linchpin strategy that allowed people with very little natural sales ability to close at the same level as a natural born salesperson, namely: that a prospect’s action threshold is malleable; it is not set in stone.

Practically speaking, the implications of this are staggering. After all, if you can lower a person’s action threshold, then you can turn some of the toughest buyers into easy buyers—which is something that we do with great effect in the latter stages of the sale, and that sets up the possibility of being able to close anyone who is closeable.

However, when you’re out in the field, you’re going to find some extraordinarily tough customers. I’m talking about prospects who still won’t buy from you, even after you’ve raised their level of certainty as much as humanly possible, and then lowered their action threshold and asked for the order again.

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 truly benefit from our product—and creating just enough pain to push them across their action threshold and get them to buy.

So, there you have it:

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.

Each of these core elements serves its own unique purpose, while paving the way for everything that comes after it.

My favorite metaphor to explain this process is how a professional safecracker goes about plying his trade, like in the movie The Italian Job. If you haven’t seen it, here’s the skinny:

Donald Sutherland plays one of those old-fashioned safecrackers, who puts his ear to the tumbler and listens for each click. Upon hearing the first one, he spins the tumbler in the opposite direction and waits for the next one, and then the next one, and then the next one after that. Finally, when he’s gotten a click for each number in the combination, he’ll pull down the handle to try and open the safe and—voilà!—if he’s identified each number correctly, the safe will open.

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.

Now, in terms of how we spin the tumbler, well . . . that’s what the next 200 pages of this book are about. In that regard, I guess it’s fair to say that this book is basically a universal safecracker’s manual for the human mind.

Will it crack every single buying combination?

No, not every one; and that’s a good thing.

After all, not everyone is closable, at least not on every occasion, and sometimes it turns out, due to ethical reasons, a prospect shouldn’t be closed. That said, however, what the Straight Line System can do, once you become reasonably proficient at it, is get you to a point where you can close anyone who’s closable.

In other words, if someone doesn’t buy from you, then you’ll know that it wasn’t because you did something wrong. You won’t walk away from a sale saying to yourself, “Too bad JB wasn’t here; he would’ve closed him!”

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.

Without control, it’s like you’re an amateur boxer stepping into the ring with Mike Tyson. Within seconds, you’d be completely on the defensive, covering up from Tyson’s massive blows, until one finally slips through, and you get knocked out.

Yet, from Tyson’s perspective, because he took immediate control of the encounter, from literally the moment the bell rang, he won the fight by knockout before it had even started—same as he did in the last fight, and the fight before that, and the fight before that.

Put another way, by taking immediate control of each fight he was able to make every fight the same. Slowly but surely, he maneuvered his opponent into a corner, cutting off every possible escape; then he softened him up with body blows and waited for him to drop his hands; and then—bam!—he’d land the exact knockout punch that he’d been planning all along.

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.