Whilst giving your presentation, it is important to use the right tonality. Here are three tonalities to practise:

• Secrecy and scarcity
• Certainty
• Disarming

Anchoring the tonalities

The easiest way to practise using these tonalities is to actually feel them and create an anchor. An anchor is a term used in neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). For more on anchors, see my post at ChangeAndAchieve.com (LINK).
For instance, think of a time when you were certain. As an example maybe when you absolutely knew that you were going to win a sale and you did. Think of that time. Recall all the feelings and anchor them. This means adopt the same body language or create a gesture, like pumping your fist into your palm.

How to create an anchor

Here is the step-by-step process for creating a resource anchor.

Whenever you make a sale or even just book an appointment, close your eyes and make two fists.
Associate with the feelings for ten seconds, including mental images. Intensify the feelings.
Get a smell anchor. You could use a fragrance in your office. Every time you make the sale take a sniff. Try to get four anchors –

• Auditory (it could be ringing a bell.
• Kinaesthetic (make a fist)
• Olfactory (smell the fragrance)
• Visual (look at a motivational poster)

Repeat this three times ONLY when you close a sale. This will lock the anchor in place.
Then only use the anchor as a resource when you really need it, for instance just before a presentation. Don’t just do it for phone calls, as this will dilute it. Save it for that special occasion, when you need to be at your best.
Use Gestures for anchoring the tonalities

Identify one gesture that creates support for each tonality, for example for certainty, slap the back of your hand into the other hand.
Do an anchor for the other tonalities: scarcity (a sideways glance as if you are checking if someone is listening) and disarming (raise your palms facing away).

Presentation: The Basic Structure of a Pitch

Before we start, always remember that a pitch or script is always a work in progress, as you should always be testing and improving your delivery and the words.

1. Less is more, when making a presentation. For example, “Good morning this is Mike Holden” would be better as “Morning, Mike Holden Here”. Then the body of your presentation should be bookended by:
   “… This should be the perfect fit for you” and “Believe me you won’t be sorry”. In between these two statements, the body of your presentation should be no more than one page of A4 long.
2. Once you have hand-written your presentation script out, read it through and tweak it a hundred times to make it flow naturally and sound casual. (Tip – take it with you to pull out when you have a spare couple of minutes, for instance if you are waiting in a reception room). Remove any unnecessary words and sentences. Shorten words like “it is” to “its”.
3. Paint a picture using comparisons and metaphors. This is crucial. People like to hear stories as it helps them to picture themselves using your product in their mind.
4. Link your goods or service to a trustworthy figure. Are there any industry leaders in your company, who may have used your product or service? Are there any famous people who have endorsed your company? Has your company dealt with any household named companies before?
5. In the last paragraph create some urgency, but remember to stay ethical. E.g. “the reason I’m calling now is…” or “we’ve just got this new”…
6. Use a soft close within the presentation, followed by “sound fair enough?” Price might not have been mentioned yet, but it could be. This should be no more than 1 to 1.5 minutes and no more.

The power of presupposition

A presupposition is a term used in NLP, which describes a statement, which pre-supposes something. For example “When you start this program and start earning more money…” This pre-supposes that the prospect will earn more money if they start the program.

Embrace the power of No

The sale begins with “no” and here are some of the reasons they will say no:
The don’t love your product
The don’t love you
They don’t love your company
They haven’t resolved their limiting buying beliefs.
The three tens
We have discussed the three tens before, but here they are again. They are the conditions you need to fulfil at ten out of ten before your prospect will buy:

First they need to love your product
Then they need to love you
Finally they need to love your company

The art of boxing someone in (ethically)

Imagine that your prospect is standing in a box. In Jordan Belfort’s model, you want to box him in by building solid walls around him metaphorically. The four walls represent:
A cast iron logical case.
A cast iron emotional case.
You dismantle his limiting beliefs around buying.
You reach and surpass his action threshold for taking action.
If you do this whilst showing you care, with the correct tonality and you will make the sale. Otherwise, the prospect will hang up the phone or end the meeting.

The art of looping.

Looping is a skill where the prospect says no. So you loop back in the conversation and re-establish the three tens. Then you try again. During the sales conversation, you keep repeating this so that you box him in and you make the sale.

The first Ten – the product

People will not buy if they’re not convinced that the product or service is the best thing since sliced bread. So the first ten is to get them to believe that the product is the best thing since sliced bread. Here is an example script:

“Now getting started is easy, it’s just a matter of some basic information along with you card details and I can reserve you a seat at next month’s training. And believe me Bob if you do even half as well as the other people who have gone through this programme, you are going to be very, very impressed. Sound fair enough?”

Answer – sounds good, let me think about it. (The first no).
What you want to do here is deflect this.

“I hear what you are saying, but let me ask you a question. Money aside, does the idea make sense to you, do you like the idea?”
Yeah its sounds pretty good.

(Match his tonality – if he is at level 6 enthusiasm you be at six, then start going up the level to lead him) “Exactly…”

You want to enter the world of your prospect where he is, then raise it and he will follow.

In the script, get him to the spot, a pre-planned question with an obvious positive answer. He will answer in a state of certainty. Then anchor this and take it back into the product to get your first ten.
Next you future pace the prospect’s success.
“Once you sing up you’ll start making real money follow what I’m saying?”
Yes

The second ten – you

Sell yourself by creating an example – a metaphor. For example if you are a stockbroker, your prospect won’t know you or trust you if it’s a first call, so you ask them if they’d bought before and knew you would they buy. If yes, reintroduce yourself to them and re-sell yourself. After that, you come to the third ten.

The third ten – your company

Give them a name and face for your company. Tell them the owner’s origin story, how he formed the company. Make them honest and ethical. Script this.
Now they still probably won’t order yet, they might say that they need to consult with their lawyer.
“I hear what you’re saying, but let me say this- the true beauty of this program…” (The second deflection.)
Now give them a third presentation with all the good stuff in that you have saved and tailor it to his objection. For example, he might say he needs to consult his wife, so mention this in the close:
“When you make the first £x thousand, go and buy your wife something – sound fair enough?”
THEN DON’T SPEAK

Tipping the scales from negative to positive.

“What’s the worst that could happen; let’s say I’m wrong…” “The up side is…all I ask is this –just give me one shot and believe me if you get half of the benefit of xyz you will be amazed. Believe me the only problem you will have is I didn’t call you last year and got you started then. Sound fair enough?”
They may get uncomfortable at this point because he is getting boxed in.
The next loop is very tight. You re-sell the company; you re-sell yourself again in two lines, then say:
“What exactly do you have to talk to your partner about?”
Let him speak.

The post The Presentation – The Power of the Three Ten’s appeared first on Mike Holden Sales.

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 is also available in book format. 

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.

The post Jordan Belfort Straight Line selling appeared first on Mike Holden Sales.