Jordan Belfort Straight Line selling
The Jordan Belfort Straight Line selling method is a powerful sales training course, from the man otherwise know as the Wolf of Wall Street. You can buy this course online, although it is a hell of an investment, coming in at a hefty $1,997. You might be wondering if this investment is worth it. Well I’ve been through the training course and here are some of the notes I took. I will post more notes in later posts. You should get an idea of what the content of this training contains and ultimately whether it is worth your investment. The Straight Line Selling System
The Sixty-Day Challenge
Jordan kicks off the Straight Line Method course with the sixty-day challenge. That challenge is for you to work twice as hard as you normally do. For instance if you normally make 100 calls per week, you will make 200 per week during the sixty day challenge.
Secondly, Belfort tells us the Straight Line System is so powerful that you should only use it ethically. You should not use it to get people to buy what they don’t want or need.
Thirdly, selling should be goal orientated. It is not a random conversation with the hope of a sale. You should always have a goal for every encounter, such as a phone call or face-to-face meeting. You will have an outcome goal ie make a sale, but you should also have a process goal. This means you have a goal around what you can control. For instance, a process goal might be to agree with the customer a next action or meeting.
Finally, you should have belief in yourself, your product and your company.
The Tenets of Selling
There are the three tenets to straight line selling. These are principles, which underpin the whole system. Those three principles are:
1. To develop instant rapport, inside four seconds of speaking to a prospect.
2. To gather intelligence, by asking the right questions.
3. You will control the sale, all along the straight line. (More on the straight line in a later post).
Questions
Start with big picture open-ended questions. Then gradually move down to small specific questions.
Imagine a straight line on a piece of paper and that you are moving from left to right from the open to the close ie getting the order. You are trying to move from left to right, ideally this will be a straight line from opening to getting the order. This means that you ask the right questions to gather information and to gain rapport.
What happens in real life is that when you are asking question, the prospect might go off on a tangent, giving you irrelevant information. Instead of moving from left to right, you start moving up towards the dotted line. This is fine and is a normal part of the conversation, until you reach the top. You don’t want to let the conversation veer off into another area so you would bring the conversation back on track.
A great way to do this elegantly is to say, “That’s great… by the way” and then ask another question to bring the conversation on track. Be careful with your tonality, you want to sound interested and that you care. If the prospect is in rapport, he may go into personal details of his life. That’s fine but you are both their on business so don’t let it go on too long. On the other side, don’t completely disregard your prospect because you will lose rapport. This is the bottom side of the straight line.
Throughout the conversation, you will naturally vary in your rapport with the prospect. As you listen to his personal details and show interest, your rapport will increase. However when you ask challenging questions, you might lessen your rapport and you will veer down towards the bottom line. Be careful not to go too far out of rapport or you may completely break it.
One trick you can do here is to visualise the perfect sales meeting where you move from the open to the close. During the visualisation, you gather great information without going off piste and you keep at level of high rapport.
Presentations
After you have asked all the qualifying questions, you would then transition into the presentation stage by saying, “Based on this, from what you have just told me, this should be a perfect fit for you”. This is a transition statement. It serves several purposes. First, it is a transition from qualifying to presenting. Secondly, you are telling the prospect that they have told you that it is beneficial to them. Thirdly, you are now taking charge of the proceedings.
Now you get into your presentation. Always remember that selling, persuading and influencing start with the prospect saying “No”. Anticipate them saying no. what you want to do is to anticipate the objections and knock them out before. That is you are overcoming the prospects buying limiting beliefs. You will do this in three ways:
Build an airtight logical case to buy now. Leave you powder dry and don’t give them all the best benefits straight away too early. If they say “no”, they will have to stay consistent and you will have nothing else left to overcome their objection.
- Build an airtight emotional case to buy now.
- Crack through all their limiting buying beliers.
You achieve these three things with scripts. Scripts are crucial. You can split test your scripts, so that you have the best scripts. Just keep using these scripts.
The Three Tens
In the eyes of your prospect, there are three parts to the sale:
- The product
- The company
- You
You need to be at level ten in each of these areas, at the same time, for you to make the sale. If you are at 10 in only two of them, you won’t make the sale. For example, your prospect loves you and your product but somehow they just don’t trust your company. Perhaps they have had a bad experience in the past before your time. Your job in the presentation is to move the level of your company up to a 10 whilst maintaining 10’s in both other areas.