On the heels of two bestselling memoirs and a blockbuster Scorsese movie, I spread an undiluted version across the entire world, to virtually every business and industry. From banking to brokerage to telco to the auto industry to real estate to insurance to financial planning, to plumbers to doctors to lawyers to dentists to online marketers to offline marketers—and basically everyone in between. As amazing as the results had been the *last* time around, *this* time they were even better.
Gone were any high-pressure sales tactics, questionable language patterns, or even the slightest reference to closing a sale at all costs to simply earn a commission; all of these were purged from the system in favor of more elegant strategies. It was a painstaking process, where no expense was spared and no stone left unturned. World-class experts were brought in to review every aspect of the system—from occupational psychologists to experts in content creation, best adult-learning practices, and neuro-linguistic programming.
And what emerged in its place was something truly incredible: a system that was so powerful and effective, and that maintained such a high level of ethics and integrity, that I knew in my heart that the Straight Line System had finally evolved into what I always knew it could be: A money-making force for good. What I offer you on the following pages is a turnkey solution for applying the Straight Line System to any business or industry. For those of you in sales, or if you own your own business, this book will be a total game-changer for you. It will show you how to shorten your sales cycle, increase your closing rate, develop a steady stream of customer referrals, and create customers for life. In addition, it will also offer you a paint-by-number formula for building and maintaining a world-class sales force.
And, for those of you who are not in sales, this book will be equally as valuable to you. You see, one of the costliest mistakes that “civilians” make is that they tend to think of sales and persuasion in traditional terms only, where there’s a salesperson closing a deal. So, they ask themselves, “Since I’m not in sales, what’s the point of learning how to sell?” Meanwhile, nothing could be further from the truth. Even if you’re not in “sales,” you still need to become at least reasonably proficient at sales and persuasion. Otherwise, you’re going to find yourself living a severely disempowered life. Selling is everything in life.
In fact, either you’re selling or you’re failing. You’re selling people that your ideas make sense, your concepts make sense, your products make sense: you could be a parent selling your kids on the importance of taking a bath or doing their homework; you could be a teacher selling your students
on the value of education; a lawyer selling a jury on the innocence of your client; a pastor selling your congregation on the existence of God or Jesus of Mohammad or Buddha; a politician selling your constituency on the benefits of voting for a certain referendum—in short, selling applies to all people, and all aspects of life, both business and personal. After all, at some point in our lives, we’ll all have to sell ourselves to someone: a prospective partner, a future employer, a future employee, a future first date, and on and on.
I began the first part of my search by studying something called “human behavior.” That’s some- thing you can get a degree in without ever really figuring it out. It is also something that older people seem to know more about than younger people. No matter how many educational degrees my professors could profess, I suspected that some of the grayed and silver-haired older people I knew had figured out what human behavior was all about long before we were taught courses in the subject. I next studied something called motivational mar- keting.
That teaches us what makes people do what they do even when they don’t want to do it. When I completed my course work, it was my final opinion that you can never really get anyone to do anything they don’t want to do unless you use force. I decided that in most of the free world, “force” is called adver- tising. And yet, after learning these great and marvelous truths, and some of them are, I would take with a grain of salt anyone’s claim that they can give you the “secret of success.” If anyone offers you the moon, don’t buy it. As much as I have been a student of success, I have also been a skeptic. For many years I read and studied and listened.
And I wondered: If there are so many “keys” to success, why aren’t they working? Why are there shelves full of self-help best-sellers? It seemed to me that if the books were working as they ought to work, we wouldn’t keep needing new ones. If there are so many answers to our questions about what to do to make life better, why have so many people failed at making these great ideas work? Or if they work for a time, what makes them stop working?