You have one chance to make a first impression. You have four seconds or less to establish rapport. After this you’re toast.
According to the The Wolf of Wall Street again, in the prospects mind you need to come across as:
1. Enthusiastic as hell.
2. Sharp as a tack.
3. A figure of authority.
You need to convince the prospect in four seconds that you are all these three things. This is so that they can be sure that you can help them achieve their goals or give them control of their life.
If you lack any of these three, your prospect will be unlikely to buy from you – ever. All future encounters with this prospect will be coloured by what happens in the first four seconds.

Tonality

In telephone selling, establishing rapport is even more difficult than face to face, but there are certain things you can do to stack the odds in your favour. The main thing you can control is the tonality of your voice.
Your tonality needs to convey that you are enthusiastic, sharp and that you are an authority. Speak like an influencer.
To help you along the way, you must have a script. This is the art of not blowing it. This way you take out all of the variable as possible. This script must be tested and tested. You do this by starting with a script and measuring your results You then tweak one thing in the script and measure if this has improved your script. Tweak the words and tonality until you have gained all the improvements possible. This will then be your tested script.
So for example you first words – “Hi, is John there?” should set the pace and establish that you are enthusiastic, sharp and an authority. Stand up and smile before you dial.

Inferred Micro Agreement

In the mind of the prospect you will be a stranger until you speak. Your tonality can convey that you aren’t a stranger, but you have spoken before and might have actually met. You do this with an inferred micro agreement in other words by using a raised inflection A raised inflection is when the pitch of your voice goes up, as if you are saying “you remember don’t you?”, although you aren’t actually saying it. For instance “It’s Mike Holden (raised inflection) of Karmelle (raised inflection), I sent you the information on filling machines (raised inflection).
Your prospect will then be searching their memory banks to remember.

Establish Mystery

Here again you create some mystery and anticipation with your tonality.
“… now if you recall (pitch rising and falls on recall – think of a small child saying aww please but without the whining)… you attended the seminar on liquid packing (raised inflection – you remember don’t you?)… Does that ring a bell?”
Answer – “YES”
“Ok Great” (bottled enthusiasm)… “Now” (tonality down and slow – getting serious now) … the reason for the call today is that you are one of the last ones to attend who haven’t had a follow up call” (say this like you are telling them a deep secret)…”if you’ve got 60 seconds I’d like to share the process with you…Got a minute?”(Imply you’re a reasonable man.)
When you are formulation your script, use transitional words as you move from section to section and change your tonality from for instance enthusiastic to serious. Some examples of transitional words are:
Well
But
Now

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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.

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