here’s the skinny:
Donald Sutherland plays one of those old-fashioned safecrackers, who puts his
ear to the tumbler and listens for each click. Upon hearing the first one, he spins the
tumbler in the opposite direction and waits for the next one, and then the next one,
and then the next one after that. Finally, when he’s gotten a click for each number
in the combination, he’ll pull down the handle to try and open the safe and—
voilà!
—if he’s identified each number correctly, the safe will open.
In a manner of speaking, that’s precisely what you’re doing when you’re moving
a prospect down the Straight Line. Essentially, you’re cracking the code to his or her
buying combination, and you’re doing it the same way every single time.
And here’s what we know about the “safe” of the human brain, when it comes to
making a buying decision: there are only five numbers in the combination; that’s it!
The first number is a prospect’s level of certainty about your
product
; the second
number is their level of certainty about
you
; the third
number is their level of
certainty about your
company
; the fourth number addresses their action threshold;
and the fifth number addresses their pain threshold.
That’s all there is: five basic numbers to crack.
Now, in terms of how we spin the tumbler, well . . . that’s what the next 200
pages of this book are about. In that regard, I guess it’s fair to say that this book is
basically a universal safecracker’s manual for the human mind.
Will it crack every single buying combination?
No, not every one; and that’s a good thing.
After all, not everyone is closable, at least not on
every
occasion, and sometimes it
turns out, due to ethical reasons, a prospect shouldn’t be closed. That said, however,
what the Straight Line System
can
do, once you become reasonably proficient at it,
is get you to a point where you can close anyone who’s closable.
In other words, if someone doesn’t buy from you, then you’ll know that it wasn’t
because you did something wrong. You won’t walk away from a sale saying to
yourself, “Too bad JB wasn’t here; he would’ve closed him!”
However, as powerful as the Straight Line System is, it completely breaks down
in the absence of one crucial element, which is:
You need to take immediate control of
the sale.
Without control, it’s like you’re an amateur boxer stepping into the ring with
Mike Tyson. Within seconds, you’d
be completely on the defensive, covering up
from Tyson’s massive blows, until one finally slips through,
and you get knocked
out.
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Yet, from Tyson’s perspective, because he took immediate control of the
encounter, from literally the moment the bell rang, he won the fight by knockout
before it had even started—same as he did in the last fight,
and the fight before
that, and the fight before that.
Put another way, by taking immediate control of each fight he was able to make
every fight the same
. Slowly but surely, he maneuvered his opponent into a corner,
cutting off every possible escape; then he softened him up with body blows and
waited for him to drop his hands; and then—
bam!
—he’d land the exact knockout
punch that he’d been planning all along.
In the first Straight Line syntax, and
in each syntax that followed, taking
immediate control of the sale was the very first step in the system, and it always will
be.
Just how you go about doing that turned out to be elegantly simple, albeit with
one complication:
You have only four seconds to do it.
Otherwise, you’re
toast
.
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3
THE FIRST FOUR SECONDS
FOR BETTER OR WORSE, WE
have to accept the fact that,
as human beings, we’re
basically fear-based creatures. We’re constantly sizing up our surroundings and
making snap decisions based on how we perceive them. Is it safe? Is there danger
nearby? Do we need to be extra careful about something?
This type of snap decision-making goes all the way back to our caveman days,
and it’s wired into our reptilian brains. When we saw something back then, we had
to size it up instantly and decide whether to stay or run. It was only
after
we were
sure that we were safe that we’d start debating whether or not it made sense to stick
around for a potential benefit.
That quick decision-making instinct is still with us today. The stakes are much
lower, of course, because we don’t typically face life-or-death situations every day.
But, still, the process happens just as quickly. In fact, it happens in less than four
seconds over the phone, and in only a
quarter
of a second when you’re in person.
That’s how fast the brain reacts.
Think about that: it takes only a quarter of a second for a prospect to make an
initial decision about you when you meet them in person. We know this because
scientists have conducted experiments where they hook people up to a certain type
of MRI machine that reveals how the brain works as it’s processing information.
Here’s what happens when scientists flash a test subject a picture of someone: first,
the subject’s visual cortex lights up almost instantly, and then, a quarter of a second
later, their
prefrontal lobe lights up, which is where the judgment center of the
brain is located, and a decision gets made. It happens
that
quickly.
During a phone call with a prospect, you have a bit longer—you have four
seconds to make an impression.
To be clear, though, even when you’re in person, it still takes four seconds before
a
final
judgment gets made. The difference is that the
process starts sooner when
you’re in person—literally from the first moment the prospect lays eyes on you.
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But, either way, whether in person or over the phone, there are three things that
you
need to
establish in those first four seconds of an encounter, if you want to be
perceived in just the right way:
1
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