Way of the Wolf

Book Review: A sales manifesto for unapologetically effective persuaders

The manifesto of the world's most infamous salesman, Jordan Belfort, has some devilishly clever persuasion hacks. Let's dive right in by looking at Jordan's best state-management biohack...

 The olfactory biohack for instant confidence

The key distinction here is that once you’ve learned the technique for triggering an empowered state (I’m going to teach you the most powerful one in the world in a moment), you only want to use it at certain key moments, when it matters most, like before you enter a sales encounter, or try to close a business deal, or enter into a negotiation, or even if it’s just an important decision you need to make in your personal life.

The most common state that salespeople will try to set an anchor for is a state of absolute certainty, and the most common anchor they’ll choose to try to link it to is a combination of shouting the word “yes” and simultaneously clapping their hands.

Anchoring confidence

The key, Bandler explained, is that you have to be at the absolute tippy-top of the state, in terms of the emotional intensity you feel inside, in order to successfully set an anchor. Anything less than that, and the anchor won’t set.

let’s choose a state of absolute certainty, as this is the state that you must be in when you enter any sales encounter.

Scent anchoring

It had to be a scent that was extreme enough, unusual enough, powerful enough, and pungent enough to meet Bandler’s criteria, yet still be pleasing enough to the nose to not gross me out or become its own negative anchor.

You wait for a very specific moment, and then take out your BoomBoom [scent anchor], unscrew the top, and follow the steps above—take a massive blast up each nostril and then ball your hands up into fists and dig your fingernails into your palms, and belt out the word “yes” in a powerful yet controlled manner. Then, ten seconds later, with the scent of BoomBoom still lingering but the initial rush gone, repeat the process again. And that, as they say, is that.

Jordan recommends this product the BoomBoom which apparently hits you with a really strong and distinctive energizing scent. But it doesn't seem wise to anchor your confidence to a specific product, as they may go out of business. Also, it looks like BoomBoom is only available in America. I suggest anchoring with essential oils, the ones with the strongest scents are Patchouli, Frankincense, Eucalyptus, and Ylang Ylang. In the past, I've used a smelly old dry cigar as a scent anchor.

I've got an addon mindset strategy to stack on top of the olfactory confidence biohack. Recently I have been anchoring certainty and confidence while doing the Dispenza-style epigenetic mindset transformation meditation. 

The Straight Line System

THE FIVE CORE ELEMENTS

1 The prospect must love your product.

2 The prospect must trust and connect with you.

3 The prospect must trust and connect with your company.

4 Lower the action threshold.

5 Raise the pain threshold.

The three tens

1 The prospect must love your product.

2 The prospect must trust and connect with you.

3 The prospect must trust and connect with your company.

Vs objections

In reality, though, the actual meaning of any particular objection has very little to do with what it states on the surface. You see, at the end of the day, objections are merely smoke screens for uncertainty for one or all of the Three Tens. In other words, if you ask for the order and your prospect is not high enough on the certainty scale, then they’ll throw out a smoke screen in the form of one of the common objections

Future pacing

We call this technique future pacing, and it serves as the very backbone of how we move someone emotionally. When you future pace someone, you’re essentially playing out the post-buying movie in the best fashion possible—allowing that person to experience your product’s amazing benefits right now, along with the positive feelings they create. The prospect’s needs have been filled; their pain has been resolved; any itch the they had has been scratched, and they are feeling wonderful as a result of it.

In short, future pacing entails running an imaginary movie through your mind where you get to see yourself in the future having already achieved a certain outcome. The result is that you get to experience the positive feelings associated with a future achievement right now

The First Four Seconds

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. 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 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.

Tonality and Body Language

You'll be judged by your cover

The things a person will internally debate start with a very basic observation: your appearance. They’ll then make a snap decision about you as a result of that. It’s like we discussed in item number one on the syntax. They’ll be debating things like how clean-cut you are, if you’re well dressed or not, how much jewelry you’re wearing. It all goes back to judging a book by its cover. How someone dresses, how long their hair is, how they groom themselves, how they shake hands—it all makes a huge difference in how we’re perceived and, for that matter, how we perceive other people.

Check out the chapter of my book on Lifehacking Your Looks and these beauty hacks for both the fairer and not-so-fair sex...

• Supplementing Collagen, C60, and Schisandra for glowing healthy skin and hair.
• Eating raw coconut; a beauty superfood.
• Using red light therapy daily for brilliant skin.

Spatial awareness

If you’re a man selling to another man, then you want to do what’s called cornering off—meaning you want to stand at a slight angle to another man, as opposed to directly in front of him. When a man faces another man, it creates for many a feeling of conflict and hostility, and it instantly takes the men out of rapport. So what you do to avoid this is you corner off with the other man—meaning you shift your body position so you’re at a slight angle to him, which has the effect of immediately disarming him.

Eye contact

Speaking of eye contact, here’s an interesting fact: if you don’t make eye contact at least 72 percent of the time, people won’t trust you.

Tonality matters

You see, after millions of years of evolution, the human ear has become so adept at recognizing tonal shifts that even the slightest one can have a dramatic impact on the meaning of a word or phrase.

a power whisper, which comes from deep in your gut. (Give your solar plexus a few quick pats with the palm of your right hand. That’s the spot I’m referring to when I talk about your gut.) A whisper from there creates the perception that what you’re saying has extra importance to it, that you really mean it.

Just always remember to never stay in any one tonality for too long, or else the prospect will become bored

More tonality tips

a salesperson should never address their prospect in an overly formal manner; instead, the salesperson should address the prospect in the way they would respectfully address a friend.

You can learn more about tonality here on Jordan's Youtube channel.

The Airtight Logical-Emotional Case

whether it’s in person or over the phone, the strategies you employ and the outcomes you desire will always be the same: you’ll use words to influence your prospect’s conscious mind, and tonality and body language to influence their unconscious mind. And the outcome of the former will be an airtight logical case, and the outcome of the latter will be airtight emotional case.

Avoid timewasters

Having no idea that between 30 and 40 percent of their sales funnel is filled with professional time wasters (disguised as buyers in power), salespeople end up spending the bulk of their time making sales presentations to prospects who have no intention of buying.

There are four telltale signs that will alert you to the fact that you’re having your time wasted by a lookie-loo:

1 They tend to ask lots of questions that they seem to already know the answers to.
2 They make it a point to kick the tires of whatever it is you’re selling, almost to the point of over-kicking them.
3 They let out a large number of ooos and aahs and yups, to reinforce the sense that they’re genuinely interested.
4 When asked about their finances, they either become boisterously overconfident or unnecessarily vague.

Always ask for permission to ask questions.

Plain and simple, unless you ask for permission to ask questions, you run an extremely high risk of being perceived as the Grand Inquisitor–type, instead of a trusted advisor, and the Grand Inquisitor–type does not “care about you,” nor are they “just like you,” which are the two driving forces behind getting into rapport. However, the good news here is that all you have to do to avoid this outcome is remember always to ask for permission to ask questions. It’s as simple as that.

Active listening techniques

1 Nodding your head while your prospect is speaking. This shows that you understand what they are saying and that you’re on the same page as them.
2 Narrowing your eyes and compressing your lips, while nodding your head slowly, when your prospect is disclosing an issue that’s very important to them.
3 Narrowing your eyes even more while compressing your lips more intensely, if the above topic deals with one of the prospect’s pain points. In addition, you’ll continue to nod your head slowly while letting out the appropriate oohs and aahs to show that you actually feel your prospect’s pain.
4 Leaning forward when you ask an emotionally charged question, and then continuing to lean forward while your prospect answers (while also using the active listening techniques I laid out above in number 3).
5 Leaning back when you ask a question that’s grounded in logic, and continue to lean back and nod your head in understanding and scratch your chin thoughtfully while your prospect answers.

The profit is in the pain

pain serves as a warning signal that there’s something wrong in their life—something that they need to take action to fix—so if you take them out of pain before you make your presentation, then you’re actually doing them a huge disservice. In other words, when a prospect reveals their pain to you, you don’t want to jump the gun and say, “Oh great! There’s no need to worry now! My product is going to take away all your pain, so there’s no longer any reason to feel bad anymore. Just sit back and relax while I explain everything to you.” If you do that, then you’re shooting yourself in the foot in a massive way.

Instead, you want to amplify their pain by asking them a series of follow-up questions that actually future pace it—forcing them to experience the reality of being in even greater pain at some point down the road if they don’t take action now to resolve it.

Why disqualify prospects

Remember, today’s unqualified prospect can be tomorrow’s perfectly qualified prospect, and the amount of goodwill you establish by sending them somewhere else is incalculable. In fact, I’ve had situations where I did just that, and before I could even leave the table, the prospect started calling their friends to try to drum up business for me

The Art and Science of Looping

In many ways, the art of looping is the so-called “secret sauce” to the Straight Line System (or at least to the back half of it)—as it allows a salesperson to increase a prospect’s level of certainty in small increments, as opposed to all at once. In other words, each objection creates the opportunity to loop; and each loop results in a further increase to a prospect’s level of certainty; and as each loop is completed, the prospects find themselves that much farther down the line, and that much closer to the close.

“I hear what you’re saying, Bill, but let me ask you a question: Does the idea make sense to you? Do you like the idea?”

Secure ultra-loyal, highly-lucrative, high-action-threshold prospects

My father was a perfect example of this. Growing up, I watched with fascination as he dealt with the same few salespeople to fill virtually all his needs, and he never questioned them about anything—about price, delivery times, competing products, the options or features they recommended, how much of a particular item he should buy, and what warranties he

should take out. The bottom line is that he viewed each one of them as an expert in their respective fields, and he trusted their judgment on every level. Ironically, it’s these ultra-loyal, highly lucrative, high– action-threshold prospects, like my father, who end up slipping through the fingers of virtually all salespeople other than natural-born closers and those who have studied the Straight Line System.

 Cold Calling Phone Script: Get through the gatekeeper

In my experience, you can usually find out who the decision-maker is in about 60 seconds using Google or quickly browsing through the company's website...

Call Corporate Office:

Hello Stacy (admin assistant's name), how are you today? I'm Jonathan Roseland and I'm calling in regards to marketing. Is the person in charge of that type of thing at your office?

If you know the name of the decision-maker:

Hello Stacy (gate keeper's name), how are you today? I'm Jonathan Roseland. I'm calling for Dave Johnson (decision-maker's name). Is he available?

I find when dealing with small to mid-sized companies this line works great because the directness and use of my last name subtly indicate that the decision-maker already knows who I am. It's important to deliver it with a confident intonation. A lot of the time they will connect you right to the decision-maker.

Leaving a voicemail:

Hello Dave, this is Jonathan Roseland, my number is XXX-XXX-XXXX, please give me a call back at your convenience.

This voicemail message will get you a call back 50%-70% of the time compared with 10%-20% of the callbacks you get when you describe your product. Some might consider it slightly misleading since I'm not telling them what my call is about, I've used this message for years and I can't think of a time when my prospect was mad at me or felt misled when they called back.

The book makes the cut to be included on my social dynamics reading list, along with Never Split the Difference, Pitch Anything, The 48 Laws of Power, and The 2AM Principle. I must deduct one star because some of the theoretical concepts presented did not seem to be properly validated with case studies and storytelling, or pragmatic how-to's. The links in the book to hear the different types of tonality are broken although Jordan's assistant responded very promptly to my email letting them know this and provided me with this link to the Way of the Wolf resources page.

Entraining the prosperity brainwave with Biohacking tech

I've you're wondering what I have strapped to my head here in the book review vlog, it's my PEMF device with which I'm entraining my brain into a gamma state, Gamma brain waves are one of the lesser-known advantages of "natural born killer" salespeople and entrepreneurs; the guys that just seem to effortlessly outperform and prosper. Check out my biohacker review of the PEMF IC Hummer here...

IC Hummer

 

4.0

Category: Mind Hardware