This is the transcript for this episode:

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Welcome to the Grow Fast Podcast, where we talk to leading sales, marketing, and biz dev professionals about how to accelerate sales, optimize marketing, and grow your business fast. Let's go!

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Grow Fast Podcast. My name is Mark Shriner, and I'll be your host for this episode of the Grow Fast Podcast. Today, we're going to be doing two things that are quite new and unique to this podcast, or any other podcast that I've done. One, I'm flying solo today. Normally, I have a guest on whatever podcast I'm doing, talking with other subject matter experts. Today, I'm flying solo, just going to be riffing. And I am going to be doing a book review. We're going to be reviewing The Way of the Wolf by Jordan Belfort, aka The Wolf of Wall Street.

Again, this is completely unscripted, just riffing here. But the reason why I'm doing a book review is that I always say that learning is super, super important. In fact, in my book, The Inside Game: How to Become a Top Performing Salesperson and Enjoy Every Step of the Way, I have a whole chapter dedicated to always be learning. That said, I find that unless I have some specific objective, or course, or goal, or some structure, sometimes I can go a little sideways and not spend as much time and energy on self-improvement and learning and development as I probably should.

So my commitment to myself for this new year here is for the next six months, I want to read and review at least two books related to sales, marketing, business growth, personal development, time management, etc., per month. Two books per month and review them. Why do I review them? Because when I do something like this, or when I write out a written review, it forces me to think more deeply about what it is that I just read or listened to, and put some structure around it. It helps to crystallize and then edify the content so that it makes a bigger impact on me.

I love reading. I love listening to books because there's that immediate lesson that you get. But oftentimes what happens is even bigger benefit is the message in one book somehow connects with a message in another life lesson or another book. And it's one plus one equals three all of a sudden, because you start to see these different patterns emerge, or these different opportunities that you can use to apply your knowledge or that you're learning.

Again, today, we're going to be talking about The Way of the Wolf by Jordan Belfort. And as I mentioned, learning helps to bring changes to our perspective a lot of times. And what I loved about this book is Jordan comes to the sales training stage from a slightly different perspective than most other sales trainers and authors out there.

Most of the books out there that I've read tend to focus on a strategic and tactical process for selling that relates to, for example, qualifying your customer, finding out who are the stakeholders, potential blockers, what are their buying types, and things like that. Those are all very much important, especially in a B2B or business-to-business sales environment. But I would argue that one of the least understood and least effectively taught are the strategies and techniques related to personal communication, both in terms of how we're communicating with our client or persuading them, and also some of our internal dialogue. Because sometimes our internal dialogue can be harder on us than the customers we are facing.

Jordan does a super deep dive and looks both at the art and science of personal communication and persuasion, etc. Now, I say art and science because, by his own admission, he is a natural-born salesperson, a natural-born communicator. He didn't have to develop this skill. He just had it in him. He acknowledges that. But he was able to put his scientific lab coat on and analyze what he was doing and why it was effective compared to the people that he was training. Way back in the day, when he was leading sales teams initially, he was struggling to get them to be, or his teams to be, as effective as he was. And so he really did an analysis and looked at what he was doing compared to what they were doing. And then he was able to map out the gap there and then figure out a process that he calls the straight line system that he could easily teach, that could be easily learned by salespeople, and then help them to be super effective.

Now, the proof is in the pudding. The guy, he's made more money and lost more money than I ever will. And a big part of that just came from selling and then teaching people how to sell. So clearly, it's effective. We'll get into some of the contentious items, for example, persuasion versus manipulation, etc., in a second. But let me back up and talk about, again, this idea of teaching communication skills.

What I've found personally from working with salespeople, training salespeople, leading workshops all around the world, it's more easy to teach the mechanics of selling, like some of the things that I talked about that most of the books address, with understanding who stakeholders are, qualifying your customer. It's more difficult, in my opinion, to teach people to change their communication style. In my opinion, that's because the way we communicate is something we've been doing our whole lives. And it's part of who we are. It's part of our self-identity.

If somebody comes along and says, "Hey, Mark, you're making too much eye contact," or "You're not making enough eye contact," "You're standing too close to this person," "You're standing too far away from them," "You are conveying too much enthusiasm or not enough enthusiasm," "Your body language needs to be tweaked a bit," or "Your tonality is off," if somebody comes along, I can't help but sometimes may take that personally, and also resist and say, "I've been doing this my whole life, and I've been pretty successful so far. So why would I change?"

In fact, coaching successful people to get to the next level, in terms of changing something, can almost be more difficult than coaching beginners, because the successful people will say, "Hey, I've been successful. And my success is because of what I've been doing." And the classic example that I like is the book called What Got You Here Won't Get You There, which means you've been successful in spite of some of these areas of your technique, or strategy, or communications that you could optimize. And unless you optimize them, you're not going to get to the next level. But again, people are resistant.

Jordan, though, if you listen to this book, he does a really good job of taking this kind of personal element of selling in terms of how we communicate, and what's going on in our customers' minds, in our own mind. And he breaks it down in a way that I think makes it less personal, more digestible, and more easy to accept.

Now, I'm not going to go into every single aspect of this because I could not do it justice. But I'll just give you an overview of what are the main themes of the book.

First off, he developed something called the straight line system. And the straight line system is basically a way that you keep when you keep your customer and you engage with them on a continuum, that you never let the process or the word the customers deviate too far away from your process. Sounds vague, but let me say how it starts off. First off, you have to judge where your customer is at in terms of their willingness to buy from you. And it starts with, do they need the product? And is this something that they could potentially buy? And you would want to rate that on a scale of one to 10. Where are they at on that continuum?

You could say, "Hey, I'm selling pens." And the guy or the gal could say, "I've got a million pens, and I'm just not in the market for a pen ever again." That's going to be a one or a zero. And that's going to be very hard to shift them up to a 10 is where you need them. Okay, but just being aware of that helps you to understand. Now, if there are five or six or seven, there are ways, and Jordan explains how you can move them more towards a 10 in terms of, "You know what, I really do need to buy a pen." Okay? But even if they say, "I do need to buy a pen," that doesn't mean you're gonna get the deal.

The second thing is you need to get the customer to trust you. You could be selling the best pen in the world. But if the customer doesn't trust you, they're not going to buy it from you. Okay? Nobody's going to give you their credit card information, their bank information, or even take something from you. I would argue that if somebody doesn't trust you and you walk up to them and say, "Hey, take this pen, it's free," most people are like, "Well, no," because they think there are some kind of strings attached here. Maybe the pen's stolen, I don't know. But I'm not going to interact with somebody that I don't trust.

So Jordan says they gotta be in the market for what you're looking for, what you're selling, and they have to trust you. The third thing is they have to trust the organization that you work with or represent. So, yeah, I'm in the market for a pen. "Hey, and Mark, I really like you, but your company, man, I just saw that they went bankrupt and laid off 1000 people." It's gonna be hard to move forward with that deal. So you gotta work on those three things. And I think just being aware of those three dynamics is really critical. And then you can start to address where they're at on the continuum of one to 10 for each one of those three items, and then try to move them along.

Now, he looks at different communication styles to move people. He says people make decisions based upon logic, and they also make decisions based upon emotion. A lot of times the actual end buying decision, he argues, is made from emotional reasoning, and then justified from logical reasoning. But back up, how are those two reasonings? How are they affected? And he argues that the logical reasoning is affected by the words that we use to explain the benefits and features of whatever it is that we're selling. And that's a small percentage of the overall communication, because he argues, and it's commonly accepted, that most communication is nonverbal. That our logical reasoning is highly affected by the nonverbal communication, things like body language, tonality, etc.

He argues, first off, be aware, they need to want your product, trust you, and trust your company. And you can convince them of all three of them, especially the latter two, based primarily on your nonverbal communication, your tonality, your enthusiasm, and so on. Now, the logical elements are affected by, for example, are you smart? Do they want to spend time with you? Do they feel like you're wasting their time, or do they feel like you're bringing some value to the table? The second thing is, are you enthusiastic? You can be the smartest guy in the world, but if you're like, "Yeah, this pen is..." that's not going to work. So clearly, you need to be enthusiastic. I argue in my book that the foundational piece of selling is product knowledge because product knowledge leads to product belief. And if you believe in something, you'll be much more enthusiastic about selling it. He doesn't go down that rabbit hole so much, but he does explain, you need to have the appropriate level of enthusiasm. You can't be like, "Oh my God, this is the best pen ever, trust me." That would be freaking people out. So you need to observe and mirror the communication style and the enthusiasm level of your prospect, and maybe just be a little bit more enthusiastic than them, just want to ratchet it up a bit. But you definitely need to be confident.

The third thing is, and now we're working on both the logic and the emotional side here, but back to the logical side, you need to be an expert in your field. Okay? If I say, "Jordan, I'm telling you, this is the best pen in the world," or "This is the best investment," "This is the best car," I need to be able to explain it to you or demonstrate to you why that is. If I can't, I think we've all had situations where you go in and you ask a salesperson a question, and they give you a very vague or just uninformed answer, and you can sniff it out right away. And you're like, "Okay, clearly this guy doesn't know or doesn't know what they're talking about. And now they're just making stuff up." I would argue that if you're ever caught in that situation, somebody asks you, don't just try to shoot from the hip and make something up and bluff your way out of it. I would argue that you should immediately just say, "You know what, that's a really good question. I don't know. Let me check with somebody in my team and get back to you with an answer. Would that be okay?" If you do that, people would appreciate your honesty, and the door will be open for you to come back. And if you're not 100% an expert in the field, you can work through that.

But Jordan would say you need to be smart. He says, "Sharp as a tack," you need to be "enthusiastic as hell," again, his words, and you need to be an expert in your field. And I would agree that those all bring credibility to the table. And they allow you to impact both the logical side and the emotional reasoning side. Now, he would argue that when you're communicating with your clients and customers, you need to be very cognizant of not wasting their time, and so you need to get to the point quickly, respect your prospect's time, you need to provide a solution to their problem, okay? And so basically, you have to deliver value, and I don't think anybody's going to argue with that.

He does start to talk about, before you start communicating with the customer, you also need to work on your own emotional state. He starts talking about some of the NLP or neuro-linguistic programming and about anchoring yourself and getting yourself in a positive, very confident state. Before you step into the phone call or into the meeting or knock on the customer's door, you need to be ready and confident because for you to go and sell something, remember I said that you need to have product knowledge, product belief, and then we both agree on enthusiasm. He talks about the four C's, that would be certainty, clarity, courage, and confidence. Yeah, you gotta have those. So you gotta be certain about what you're gonna do, you need to be crystal clear on what you're gonna present, you need to be confident, and then you need to have the courage to do that. And confidence and courage go hand in hand, but they are slightly different in terms of the courage comes in where, like, everybody that I know, especially in the beginning, you get nervous knocking on a door or cold calling somebody, but it's your ability to just work through that that's where the courage comes in.

Now, so you got your positive mental state, and you're engaging with the customer. You've figured out where they're at in the buying continuum of needing the product, trusting you, and trusting your company. And now you want to, he gets into the art and science of persuasion, where it can actually sometimes be construed as manipulation. And he even says that if you use these techniques to convince somebody to buy something they don't need, and you manipulate them, that's unethical. He does not advocate that.

Now, this is a debate that I would love to talk to him about or anybody else about because I'm curious. At the end of the day, he gives advice on how to use tonality and scripts, and I'll talk about scripts in a second. But he combines using tonality with scripts that are proven and effective, and they work on both the logic and the emotional reasoning of the person you're talking to. And they make the client create, you create a sense of opportunity and urgency. And you also create pain if they are hesitant. So you're doing things like you can be really confident and friendly. But then you want to lower your voice and say, "I've got a really good opportunity for you." And then he goes through, like, 10 or 11 to 12 different types of tonality that all of us probably use on a regular basis anyway.

I think he gives the example of when his mom would call him and be like, "Jordan," and that tone, he'd be like, "Oh, I'm in trouble." But otherwise, for example, if his mom said, "Hey, Jordan," so the tone totally affects the emotion that the recipient or the listeners are getting. And I'm not going to do a deep dive on it because again, I wouldn't do it justice. He spends a lot of time on that and on scripting. Now, I think both are important. I would argue that the scripting is equally as important. Why? Because you don't have to necessarily follow the script word for word. But in the absence of knowing what you're going to say, it's good to have that script to go back to or fall back on. And I would argue in both of these situations, and I'm curious what you think, that in most of these lessons that he's teaching, I think they are more applicable to B2C sales. That is, I'm selling to an individual or to a family, a service that they're directly going to consume or use.

In B2B scenarios, I don't think you're going to close most of the time by running through a script on a phone call or in a face-to-face meeting because most B2B sales, they do have to be rationalized in terms of, is this the best product-market fit for us? There's multiple people involved. And it's not something that you're going to close on one call, two calls, three calls. So he gives scenarios or examples of calling a customer or prospect, and then two weeks later calling them back and then using this process to close the deal. Again, you can do that in B2C, it's less common and less likely in B2B scenarios.

I'm not saying the lessons aren't relevant. I think, again, going back to communication styles and understanding how we communicate is very important. But in terms of the art of persuasion, sometimes manipulation that he teaches, I think it's going to be more relevant and more effective in those B2C scenarios. Interested to hear what you would say. If I was going to take issue with anything that he says, I would say, for example, with the scripting part, in every single objection scenario that where there was an objection, he advises that you always go back to the same exact script. So, for example, if a customer says, if you say to them, "Do you feel confident moving forward?" and they'd say, "Anytime we think about it," instead of asking them what they want to think about or what their concerns are, he just advises that you go, "I hear what you're saying. But this is a really good opportunity. Do you agree?" or something along those lines. So you're deflecting the objection and then getting them to move forward.

Okay, so I'm going to switch topics here. But Bruce Lee, he would teach, he'd tell everybody that there is no one martial art style. You've got to figure out what works for you, for your body type. Are you tall and skinny? Are you short, stocky? And also for your mental and personality type? Are you somebody that is more aggressive, less aggressive? And you figure out what works for you. And that is going to be much more effective than just taking something off the shelf and making everybody do that. I think it's the same with scripting and communication skills to a good degree. I would say, for example, in my case, if somebody has an objection and they say, "Yeah, I'm interested," I might ask them, instead of just moving on and saying, "I hear what you're saying, but this is a really great deal. Let me tell you more about it," I would probably drill down on that and say, "What are your concerns? Let's face it." Because I'm looking at it from a different perspective. I spent most of my career on the B2B side. I did sell financial services for four years. But even then, I was never in a rush to close the deal. That's not true. I never, every time I was in a rush, it always backfired on me. Okay. I always felt that it's better to take time, develop the relationship.

That said, I never made anywhere close to the amount of money that Jordan and hundreds of the people who worked for him have made. That's a whole other discussion. What is your real objective? Is it just to make as much money as possible, maximize your earning potential, or is it to develop solid, lifelong relationships with your customers? And the benefits to that are they'll introduce more people to you or new customers to you. It's just rewarding too. It's nice when you help somebody solve a problem.

Okay, I'm going off track here. So he's a master of tonality, scripting. I agree that both are important. And if you want to learn from one of the best out there, I would highly recommend his book. I guarantee you, if you listen to his book or read his book, you'll come away with three or four or five different really strong ideas that you can put to work. And the way I look at it is if I can get one idea, or one new technique, or one way to improve my performance from a book, that's worth the price of admission right there. And so this is my first book review. So I'm not sure how to wrap it up. But I would just say that, out of all the books that I've read, I like this book because it comes at the sales process and training from a different perspective, different angle. It really focuses on the interpersonal communication, and then the internal mental state of the salesperson before they engage with the customer. And then it talks about the process of moving them along.

I guess one last important thing is he talks about looping, which is you move the process forward, and then if the client or prospect is not all the way to a 10 in terms of whether they're ready to buy, then you loop back, and you start the process again to work on that logic, work on that emotional reasoning, and move them forward. And that chapter is, especially for individual conversations, it can be very effective for a lot of people.

So in conclusion, I would probably give this book, on a five-star rating scale, I would probably give this book a solid 4.5-ish, depending on the type of sales that you're doing. Guaranteed, you'll learn something from this and highly recommend it.

So that's my first book review. And I just looked, I talked for 26 minutes by myself, flying solo. What I think I should do is find a guest that we can have dialogue go back and forth on this. But thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this, please hit the thumbs up button, the thumbs up, whatever it's called. Hit the subscribe button. More importantly, leave some comments and I would be interested in any suggestions in terms of books to read, other trainers out there that I could have on the podcast, or just any ways to make this podcast more effective and better for you. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.

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