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

When you immediately establish these three things, they roll up into one simple fact in the prospect’s mind, namely that you’re a person worth listening to.

My point here is that, no matter what product you’re selling, whether your prospect walks in your door or answers your cold call or clicks on your website, they will always enter the encounter with a preconceived notion about you, about your product, and about the company you work for.

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

If you’re perceived the right way—that you’re sharp as a tack, enthusiastic as hell, and an expert in your field—then the prospect will defer to you and let you take control of the sale.

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

Remember, it’s not the job of salespeople to turn nos into yeses; it’s simply not what they do. Instead, we turn “Let me think about it” into a yes, and “Let me call you back” into a yes, and “I need to speak to my wife” into a yes, and “It’s a bad time of year” into a yes. In traditional sales parlance, we refer to these various statements as “obj

In both of these cases, however, whether your prospect is at a 7 or a 3, there are two important things to remember. First, your prospect’s feelings of certainty or uncertainty are less set in stone than if they were at the level to the right or the left of them. Secondly, their presence at either level does not directly translate into a better or

Another great example of this is how we use enthusiasm to create massive emotional certainty in our prospect—meaning, they get an overwhelming sense that whatever product we’re selling simply must be good. To be clear, though, what I’m not talking about is that crazy brand of over-the-top enthusiasm, where you’re yelling and screaming and flailing

We call these three core elements the Three Tens—with the context being a prospect’s current state of certainty on a scale from one to ten. For example, if a prospect is currently at a “ten” on the certainty scale, then it means he or she is in a state of absolute certainty at that moment. Conversely, if the prospect’s currently at a “one,” then th