The key ideas

Way of the Wolf: Straight Line Selling: Master the Art of Persuasion, Influence, and Success

Jordan Belfort, 2017

Twelve brokers can’t open a single account for a whole month, and one evening their boss draws a straight line on a whiteboard. Jordan Belfort, the original “Wolf of Wall Street”, who pleaded guilty to fraud, takes apart his sales method: certainty, tone, questions and the threshold for deciding. The book is about how persuasion works and why one person decides right away while another never will.

Who it is for

For anyone who sells, negotiates or asks for something important. And for anyone who wants to understand how salespeople nudge them toward a decision.

Either you’re selling or you’re failing.

Twelve brokers and a whiteboard

Long Island, 1988, a Tuesday evening. Twelve young brokers at Stratton Oakmont have spent a month calling wealthy investors and haven’t opened a single account. Their boss, Jordan Belfort, asks them to name every client objection that supposedly can’t be overcome. The brokers are sure there are thousands. The board fills up with fourteen, and half of them turn out to be variations of just two objections: “now is a bad time” and “I need to talk it over with someone”.

That evening Belfort drew a straight line on the board from the first sentence of the conversation to the close. His sales system grew out of that drawing. Later the same firm became a byword for fraud: in 1999 Belfort pleaded guilty to securities fraud and money laundering and spent almost two years in prison. In the book he writes that he lost his money, his dignity, his freedom and, for a time, his children, and that he blames no one but himself.

The book came out in 2017. The author insists that he has removed the pressure and the tricks from the method, and only the reader can judge whether that’s true. But his scheme is useful from both sides: it shows how to persuade, and it helps you notice when someone is persuading you the same way.

The book’s main idea is simple. People buy when they are certain, and almost every excuse hides uncertainty.

Fourteen excuses hide one uncertainty

According to Belfort, a sale happens only when three things come together in the buyer’s mind. They are certain about the product, they trust the salesperson, and they trust the company behind the product. This scheme has a name: the Three Tens. Certainty about each of the three can be rated on a scale from one to ten. If even one rating is low, the person won’t buy, however much they like the rest.

Certainty comes in two kinds. Logical certainty rests on facts: price, benefits, comparison with alternatives. Emotional certainty is like anticipation, when the person already pictures themselves with the purchase. Belfort believes people decide on emotion and then justify the decision with logic. But emotion alone isn’t enough, because the mind is always on the lookout for a catch.

Hence his view of excuses. “I need to think about it” or “call me back later” rarely mean what they say. It’s awkward for the person to admit “I don’t trust you”, so they pick a polite phrase. Arguing with it is pointless: answering one excuse will just bring up the next. Belfort suggests figuring out which of the Three Tens is falling short and going back to it. He named his method the Straight Line: the conversation runs straight to the decision and doesn’t wander off into unrelated topics.

The author does add a caveat: the salesperson’s job isn’t to turn a “no” into a “yes”. People who don’t need the product, he advises, should be let go right away.

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About the author

Jordan Belfort is a former American stockbroker and founder of the firm Stratton Oakmont. In 1999 he pleaded guilty to securities fraud and money laundering, spent about two years in prison, and then began writing books and running sales trainings. His memoir became the basis for Martin Scorsese’s film The Wolf of Wall Street.

All books by this author: Jordan Belfort

Terms from the book

  • Brokers: A broker is an intermediary who buys and sells stocks and other securities on behalf of clients and earns a commission for it.
  • Stratton Oakmont: Belfort’s brokerage firm on Long Island. In the late 1980s and the 1990s it sold stocks to clients over the phone; in 1996 the firm was shut down, and its leadership was later convicted of fraud.
  • Objections: In sales, the reasons a buyer gives for putting off or turning down a purchase: “I need to think about it”, “call me back”, “I’ll talk it over with my wife”.
  • Three Tens: Belfort’s scheme: a buyer decides when they are almost ten out of ten certain about the product, the salesperson and the company. The author’s model, not a scientific law.
  • Straight Line: The name of Belfort’s method: the conversation runs in a straight line from the first sentence to the decision, without wandering off into unrelated topics, while gradually raising the other person’s certainty.
  • Porush: Danny Porush, Belfort’s partner at Stratton Oakmont and the first to master his sales method.
  • Action threshold: Belfort’s term: how much certainty a particular person needs before deciding to buy. In the author’s view, the threshold can be lowered for a time.
  • Perth: A major city on the west coast of Australia, the capital of the state of Western Australia.

All terms

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