فصل 09

9

THE ART OF PROSPECTING

“SELL ME THIS PEN!”

The first time I sprung this on a cocky young salesman, I was sitting behind my desk in my office at Stratton, and what I got in return was a very telling response.

“You see this pen?” chirped the cocky young recruit, sounding like he’d just walked off a used car lot. “This is the most amazing pen money can buy. It can write upside down, it’ll never run out of ink, it feels great in your hand.

“Here, check it out for yourself; tell me how great it feels.” And, with that, he leaned forward in his seat and extended his arm across my desktop and offered me the same disposable pen that I’d handed to him a moment earlier, to begin the test.

Playing along, I grabbed the pen and rolled it around in my fingers for a few seconds until it slid into its usual writing position.

“Pretty damn amazing, right?” he pressed.

“It feels like a pen,” I replied flatly.

“That’s exactly my point!” he exclaimed, ignoring my lukewarm response. “That’s how a great pen is supposed to feel—like it’s been a part of you for years.

“Anyway, it’s obvious that you and this pen were made for each other, so I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do: I’m gonna take 30 percent off the regular purchase price, but”—he raised his right index finger in the air, for a moment—“only if you buy it right now. Otherwise, it has to go back up to the normal price.

“Either way, it’s a really great deal, but at 30 percent off it’s the deal of the century. Whaddaya say?”

“What do I say?” I shot back. “You mean besides the fact that you’re obviously completely full of shit?”

No response. The would-be Strattonite just sat there completely still, with a panic-stricken look on his face.

“That wasn’t a rhetorical question. You want me to ignore how completely full of shit you are, yes or no?”

He slowly opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. He just sat there with his mouth hanging open.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” I continued, deciding to let the kid off the hook. “So, putting that small detail aside for the time being, I will say that I’m not in the market for a pen right now.

“I don’t want one, I don’t need one, I barely ever use one; and, in truth, if I ever do decide to go out and buy a pen, it won’t be a piece of shit like this. I’d probably pick up a Mont Blanc or something.

“But how could you possibly know that?” I continued, zeroing in on the main point of the exercise. “In fact, how could you know anything about me? From the second you opened up your mouth, all you did was spew out a bunch of cheap sales talk.

“ ’The pen is this,’ ” I chirped, mocking his used car salesman rap, “ ’the pen is that, the pen writes upside down, it’s your long lost brother’. . . and blah, blah, fucking blah. Even if you put aside how utterly ridiculous that sounds, did it ever occur to you to maybe ask me a few questions before you attempted to ram a pen down my throat? Like, am I even in the market for a pen? Do I have a certain price range in mind? Do I prefer one type of pen to another?

“I mean, think about it for a second: how could you try to sell me something without knowing the first thing about me? It completely defies logic.”

The would-be Strattonite nodded his head sheepishly. “So, what should I have said?”

“You tell me,” I shot back.

Just then the door swung open and Danny walked into the office, wearing a $2,000 suit and a cynical expression. “You almost done with this?” he asked.

“Almost,” I replied, “but I’m actually glad you popped in. Your timing is perfect. I need you to do something for me.”

“What’s that?” he answers cautiously.

“I want you to sell me this pen!” I declared, grabbing another pen off my desktop and extending my hand towards him.

Danny shot me a look. “You want me to sell you a pen. Seriously?”

“Yeah,” I fired back. “Show the kid how it’s done. Sell me this pen.”

“Fine, I’ll sell it to you,” he muttered, grabbing the pen and taking a moment to examine it. Then, all at once, he completely changed his demeanor and flashed me a warm smile and said, in a respectful tone: “So, tell me, Jordan, how long have you been in the market for a pen?”

“I’m not in,” I replied. “I don’t use pens.”

“Really? Well, then you can have your lousy pen back,” he snapped, tossing the pen back onto my desktop.

Then he looked at the kid and said, “I don’t sell things to people who don’t need them. I leave that to novices, like you.”

While the moral of the story seems plainly obvious, there’s actually a lot more going on here than meets the eye. So let me take things one at a time, starting with the obvious:

Firstly, it should be crystal clear to you by now that 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.

A Straight Line salesperson, and for that matter any professional salesperson, would never consider shooting from the hip like that. Instead, they would sift through their prospects as quickly and efficiently as possible, separating out the ones who were interested from the ones who weren’t.

In general sales parlance, this sifting process is referred to as “qualifying a prospect,” and the primary method by which a prospect gets qualified is by answering a series of questions that get posed to the prospect by the salesperson.

All in all, it’s a cut-and-dried, no-frills process that’s utilitarian in nature and gets straight to the point. If upon answering your questions, it turns out that the prospect needs what you’re selling, and can afford to pay for it, then they are qualified. It’s as simple as that.

And then you use the Straight Line System, where the word “qualifying” is never to be uttered under penalty of . . . well, not death, but, at least, shame.

Here, we refer to this process as “Straight Line prospecting,” and the primary method by which we do our sifting is through gathering intelligence.

Now, if you recall, I touched on this topic at the end of Chapter 2, when I presented you with a flashback from the night when I first invented the Straight Line System.

When you gather intelligence, I explained, 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, 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.

On top of that, what I also explained that night—and what I want to reemphasize now and dig into more deeply—was the fact that your ability to gather intelligence will be directly related to how powerful a first impression you made 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 bottled 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.

Without that, there’s simply no reason for your prospects to waste their time opening up to you or risk the embarrassment or loss of confidentiality that could result from it. So instead, they’ll only give you perfunctory answers to your questions or, more likely, they’ll try to take control of the sale themselves, causing things to spiral out of control.

I’ve seen it happen a thousand times:

A novice salesperson tries to qualify a prospect, only to have the prospect answer their questions with questions of their own, until the whole thing has devolved into chaos. It’s a perfect example of the Iron Mike Tyson metaphor I used at the end of Chapter 2. The only difference is that instead of getting barraged by devastating punches, you’re getting barraged with devastating questions—devastating in the sense that they’ll cause you to veer off the Straight Line and go spiraling off to Pluto or, even worse, Your-anus.

Conversely, when you are in control, the barrage stops. Realizing that they are in the presence of an expert in their respective field, the prospect feels compelled to defer to you, and allows you to ask as many questions as you deem necessary, without interruption.

Now, this latter point is absolutely crucial, because in the absence of interruptions, questions can now be asked in a manner and sequence that not only promotes a smooth, mutually productive intelligence-gathering session but also enhances your ability to build rapport. But I’m jumping ahead now.

Straight Line prospecting has more moving parts than any other step in the syntax, so the most effective way to teach it to you is to start with the big picture first.

Let me zoom out for a moment and give you a quick overview of the relationship between marketing and sales—insofar as how they work hand in hand with one another to turn a company’s goods and services into cash—and how Straight Line prospecting serves as the bridge between the two.

In essence, you have marketing on one side of the equation, and sales on the other. The objective of marketing is to:

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

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

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

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

Now, in today’s world, there are two types of marketing.

First, we have offline marketing, which includes everything that takes place off the Internet—TV and radio ads, newspaper ads, magazine ads, billboard ads, direct mail, telemarketing, network marketing, educational marketing, door-knocking campaigns, etc. And, second, we have online marketing, which includes everything that takes place on the Internet—Google ads, Facebook ads, Twitter ads, YouTube ads, banner ads, landing pages, opt-ins, retargeting campaigns, email blasts, affiliate marketing, SEO campaigns, and much, much more.

Now, as I said, whichever marketing modality a company decides to use, the ultimate objective is always the same: to bring as many qualified buyers as possible into the company’s sales funnel, so they can then be handed off to the sales department and turned into customers.

Pretty straightforward, right?

Actually, not quite.

You see, no matter how carefully you target your marketing campaign, there is no possible way that every prospect who enters your sales funnel will end up being a qualified buyer. In fact, in most cases, if even half of those prospects turn out to be qualified buyers, then you’re doing great.

In essence, this is what 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.

To that end, in any given marketing campaign, there are four categories of buyers who will enter your sales funnel. We call these the four buying archetypes.

The first archetype is called buyers in heat.

These are basically your best, most motivated buyers. These prospects want your product, need your product, can benefit from your product, can afford your product, and, most importantly, they’re prepared to make a buying decision right now.

Like all legitimate buyers, buyers in heat have a certain pain they’re looking to resolve; however, what separates them from the rest of the pack is that they’ve already made the decision to do something about it now. In other words, they’re done waiting; they’re ready to act. They’ve gotten to the point where they are simply no longer willing to tolerate the pain that comes from an unresolved need, so they’ve decided to get proactive.

The only downside to this group of ready-made buyers is that there aren’t that many of them. Depending on what industry you’re in and how targeted your marketing campaign was, you’ll find that somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the total prospects that enter your sales funnel will fall into this category; the rest will be spread among the other three.

The second buying archetype is called buyers in power.

These are your second best group of buyers. The primary difference between the first two archetypes is that buyers in power aren’t consciously feeling any major pain from their unfilled need, which causes them to lack the same level of urgency as buyers in heat.

In other words, while buyers in power have every intention of buying the type of product you’re selling, their lack of urgency makes them feel like they’re in a position of power, so they’re not going to pull the trigger until they’re done shopping around and have made themselves absolutely certain that they’ve found the best solution to their problem.

Nonetheless, these are still excellent prospects (and there are also a heck of a lot more of them than buyers in heat!). On average, somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the total prospects that enter your sales funnel will end up falling into this category.

At the end of the day, it’s the prospects from these two categories—buyers in heat and buyers in power—who will make it past the intelligence-gathering phase and continue their journey down the Straight Line. The prospects from the remaining two buying archetypes need to be weeded out as quickly as possible, especially those who fall into the third archetype:

The dreaded lookie-loos.

Also known as “tire-kickers,” the lookie-loos are the most dangerous prospects that will enter your sales funnel. What makes them so destructive is that they disguise themselves as buyers in power—acting as if they’re genuinely interested in buying your product—while they actually have no intention of doing so. In consequence, they continue their journey down the Straight Line, as opposed to getting weeded out during the intelligence-gathering phase as they’re supposed to be.

The resulting damage occurs on two levels:

First (and most obviously), it causes a massive amount of time to be wasted as you end up making full-blown sales presentations to prospects who have no intention of buying. And second (and even more damaging) is the confusion and negativity it creates as a novice salesperson tries to figure out why their closing rate is so low. “Is there something wrong with me?” the salesperson wonders. Is it their pitch? Is the salesperson not making a strong enough logical case? Emotional case? Or maybe the salesperson is screwing up at the very end, during the objection-handling phase? After all, the prospects remain interested the whole way through—giving the salesperson buy signal after buy signal to the very end—and then they don’t buy.

You see the problem here?

Having no idea that between 30 and 40 percent of their sales funnel is filled with professional time wasters (disguised as buyers in power), salespeople end up spending the bulk of their time making sales presentations to prospects who have no intention of buying.

The good news is that identifying them isn’t very difficult.

There are four telltale signs that will alert you to the fact that you’re having your time wasted by a lookie-loo:

1 They tend to ask lots of questions that they seem to already know the answers to.

2 They make it a point to kick the tires of whatever it is you’re selling, almost to the point of over-kicking them.

3 They let out a large number of ooos and aahs and yups, to reinforce the sense that they’re genuinely interested.

4 When asked about their finances, they either become boisterously overconfident or unnecessarily vague.

Again, I can’t overestimate the importance of being hypervigilant when it comes to identifying and weeding out the lookie-loos as quickly as possible. You’ll end up avoiding a lot of pain over the long run.

Now, this takes us to the fourth and final buying archetype, which I refer to as the mistakes, or “the people who were dragged there.” In essence, these are people who never belonged in your sales funnel in the first place. Either they clicked on the wrong website, showed up at your place of business by mistake, or they were simply dragged into your sales funnel by someone else.

Whatever the case, the common thread among all the mistakes is that they had no desire to enter your sales funnel in the first place, so you have basically no chance of closing them.

So, in summary, the three main goals of Straight Line prospecting are as follows:

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.

Now, insofar as number 3 is concerned, there’s a lot more to this concept than it makes sense to discuss now, so let me circle back to it when we get to the next chapter, which covers the ten core distinctions of Straight Line prospecting.

In fact, let’s dive into that chapter right now.

It’s time to take you from the theory of Straight Line prospecting to the real world application of it.

The next chapter will show you precisely how you get there.