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 Sharp as a tack
2
 Enthusiastic as hell
3
 An expert in your field
Those three things absolutely 
must
come across in the first four seconds of a
conversation; otherwise, you set yourself up for a major uphill battle.
Now, in truth, if you screw up the first four seconds, you have another ten
seconds, at most, to play catch-up ball, but after that, you’re completely done. It’s
basically a lost cause. You can’t influence anybody.
At this point you might be asking yourself, “What happened to not judging a
book by its cover? What about 
that
, Jordan?”
Well, my parents were actually big believers in that adage, and so were my
schoolteachers.
But you know what?
They
did it, and so do 
I
; and so do 
you
, for that matter. Each and every one of us
judges books by their covers. It’s basically hardwired into our brains; and it’s not
just an American thing; it’s also an Australian thing, a Chinese thing, a Brazilian
thing; an Italian thing—it’s a 
human
thing. It exists everywhere in the world, and
crosses all cultural boundaries.
The bottom line is that you have four seconds until someone rips you apart,
compartmentalizes you, judges each piece, and then puts you back together again
based on how you were perceived. And if those three aforementioned things—being
sharp as a tack, enthusiastic as hell, and an expert in your field—haven’t been
established firmly in your prospect’s mind, then you have basically no chance of
closing them.
Now, why is that?
Well, think about it for a second: do you really want to do business with a
novice
? When you go buy a car or a stock or a computer, who do you want guiding
you through the process, a novice or an expert? An 
expert
, of course!
In fact, we’ve been conditioned since we were 
yea
big to seek out experts to help
us solve our problems and eliminate our pain. When we were sick, our parents took
us to a very special person called a doctor, who wore a white lab coat and had a
stethoscope around their neck; and we were awestruck, at first, at how even our 
own
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parents
deferred to this person—until they told us why. This person, they explained,
had been through countless years of schooling, during which they learned
everything there was to know about making sick people feel better. These people
were even taught how to dress and how to act and how to talk so people would have
confidence in them at a single glance, which is why you started to feel better just by
being in their presence. This person had earned the right to be called a doctor,
because they were a true expert in their field.
But, of course, this was only the beginning of our conditioning. As we grew
older, the parade of experts continued.
If we were struggling in school, our parents might hire us a tutor; if we wanted
to master a certain sport, they’d hire us a coach. And when we entered adulthood,
we picked up right where our parents left off, and to this very day we continue to
seek out experts and teach our children to do the same.
Think about it for a moment.
Who do you think Scarlett Johansson wants styling her hair on the day of the
Oscars? Is she going to seek out some pimple-faced kid who’s fresh out of beauty
school, or is she going to track down the world’s foremost stylist, who’s been
making celebrities look fabulous for the last twenty years?
And who do you think Jordan Spieth or Jason Day will turn to if they’re in a
slump: a local pro at a municipal course or a world-famous swing doctor who’s
written books on the subject and who’s worked with other famous professionals for
at least twenty years?
The simple fact is that we 
all
want to deal with pros or experts, and we also want
to deal with people who are sharp and on the ball, and who are enthusiastic about
what they do. Experts have a certain way of talking that literally 
commands
respect.
They say things like “Listen, Bill, you need to trust me on this. I’ve been doing this
for fifteen years, and I know exactly what you need.”
Novices, on the other hand, tend to speak in far less definite terms, and their
limited grasp on the deeper nuances of their product and their particular industry
becomes more and more apparent as they move a prospect farther down the
Straight Line and enter the looping phase, and are forced to “free-form”—meaning,
they run out of scripted material and are forced to make things up on the fly in an
effort to push their prospect’s level of certainty above their action threshold so
they’ll buy.
My point here is that how you are perceived will carry through to every part of
the sale, but it starts in the first four seconds. If you screw that up and make a
negative first impression, then you basically have no chance of closing the deal.
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Interestingly, the first time I said this was close to thirty years ago, on that very
Tuesday evening when I invented the Straight Line System. I told the Strattonites
that evening that they had precisely four seconds to make that all-important first
impression.
However, as it turns out, I was actually wrong.
In 2013, a professor at Harvard University published a study on this exact topic
—the importance of first impressions—and what the study found was that it wasn’t
four seconds until a prospect made the initial judgment; it was actually 
five
seconds.
So I have to apologize for being off by one second.
Apologies aside, what the study 
also
found was that if you make a negative first
impression, it takes 
eight
subsequent positive impressions to erase that one negative
first impression. Frankly, I don’t know about you, but in all my years in sales, and
with all the products I’ve sold, I can’t think of one industry where, if I screwed up
the first meeting, I got eight subsequent chances to redeem myself. It simply doesn’t
happen.
That’s why it is absolutely mandatory to establish those three crucial elements in
the first four seconds of the conversation, every single time. Otherwise, you’re toast.
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