one of the things with a straight line system i teach people is that you know you have four seconds now you could say there's three harvard said the second i said this back literally in 1988 you have four seconds to establish that your three things number one sharpest attack enthusiastic as hell this is in a sales setting right expert in your field right and the idea is is that number one that you're sharp you're on the ball you're not going to waste someone's time number two enthusiastic and i don't mean any mistake people make with
that is they think of enthusiastic as like that guy tony little on the gazelle hey come by because i i'm talking about something very different called bottled enthusiasm as you said better than great be like you know listen you know listen how you doing today john like not how you doing today yeah how you doing today means you know that i know that i know that you know i don't give a how you doing today it's a perfunctory greeting we give in english and so i say how are you doing yeah yeah good guy you
for that that's all right but say how you doing today they're like well we really want this the tonality he really wants to know you actually care about that transfer of energy right transfer of enthusiasm and then most importantly though of all though is the third one an expert in your field so what i realized very early in the game here when i was in my early 20s and running the small firm at the beginning is that i was able for some reason to like close people that my kids they were i was 23 they
were 19 20 right they couldn't and i realized what was happening i had a certain way of sounding that people perceived me as an expert and when you are perceived as an expert people will defer to you they'll allow you to control the flow of an encounter so the idea with the straight line system is that you want to be we'll say perceived sound like an expert and when you're perceiving those three things show up on the ball enthusiast expert people will say okay it's a person worth listening to because they can help me achieve
my goals so what's the sort of counterpart to that in your world so i mean the one thing that i guess you could potentially be an expert at is the conversation so we're talking to people who want to just go in communicate better with their coworkers communicate better with somebody at a bar make a friend if they're at some sort of networking event and what we talk about oftentimes is that you can communicate either the news in conversation or you can go a level deeper and talk about values things that you care about so when
somebody asks you in the office what did you do this weekend a non-expert way of answering that is to tell them what you did you know first i watch this movie then i watch this and then i watch the ball game a deeper way that goes to recognize is that this is just some stupid perfunctory thing that we all say because we don't know what to say next to the water cooler is to talk about something that you give a damn about and say you know i watch the ball game because i'm crazy about the
gnats i've been a fanatic since i was six years old and my dad used to take me to the game and he was in town this week and it was so great and when you talk about things that you care about what you do is you go a level deeper and even though that person might not care about the gnats or baseball they can relate to doing something with their dad that they loved and then they can respond and say oh that's crazy my dad's coming to town next week we're going on a snowboarding trip
and so when you go deeper into the values things the things that you care about i don't know that that makes you an expert but what we find is it is it has a broader degree of being able to connect with a wider range of people even when on the surface level there might not be a ton in common with what you did this weekend and what they did weekend the other thing i'd say is i think depending on the context when you're selling expertise is what matters right but if it's something where you're trying
to make friends maybe it's that you make the people around you feel good so just establishing that you're positive or that you're funny and when you're approaching a person that you're attracted to maybe it's about conveying that you're confident or again that you're fun that you're attractive that you're not that you're playful so you're an expert lothario yeah it's kind of like you're not necessarily you guys study any of the dating stuff like that sure and what's your thoughts on that i think there's a ton of bad advice and i think there's a lot of
great advice and i think the hardest thing is when you pick someone to learn from it's very hard to only learn some things and so i think when you have someone who's maybe a little scummy has some good advice it's tough to to pick out the good stuff without adopting some of their bad stuff and i think that's why that industry is so tricky because i do think that like layered in there there's some really good advice i knew neil strauss who's you know wrote the book the game originally very smart great writer by the
way fantastic i think that's his greatest skill yeah and within that book there's a lot of interesting stuff that does overlap with things that i have taught for many many years i think the problem is is that the intent of a lot of the people is not a good intent yeah in other words it's one thing if you're you're looking to you and hey who am i to say about not hooking up with lots of girls i mean i didn't right it's easy now i'm older i'm like oh why are you doing that you should
take it but no but i don't think that's a bad intent but the intent is like i think you want to leave them better than you find it i don't exactly i think there's a problem this whole idea of nagging you know making this sort of like i don't like it's to me it's like i think there's a more positive way to go about connecting with people or making yourself have value to them in their eyes yeah so making them feel insecure let's so there's a great example from the game there's this idea of making
up a fake question to start a conversation that's bad it's lying it's also totally unnecessary though because what it's trying to better version it is exactly don't walk up and shyly say hey you're really pretty can i buy you a drink instead start with an interesting conversation but that can be an honest part of the conversation and so there's this thing it's like lazy thinking in other words you could there's a much better version of that yes to be interesting be be cool right but be congruent and honest and recognizably exclusive recognize that people in
bars specifically are out to have fun and so if you approach them in a way that's low energy and boring you're sucking the fun from they're basically taking value from their night so come in and make it fun but then again the overreach is like and the way you do that is by making up a story about i think there's literally one about like little people having a fist fight outside it's like you don't have to do that just think of your own life and what's interesting or something in the moment that's genuine right so
it's weird the dating industry is weird because it's it's got good stuff but layered in with really uh this is why advice we talk a lot about the mindsets as well because unfortunately what it boils down to is if you give everyone just the tricks just the surface level stuff they will just copy the thing that the cool guy said and it won't be true for them and i assume it's the same in sales which is right if you're selling a shitty product and you're the most confident charismatic sales guy this is gonna work for
you but deep down you know it's not it's like right this went from being something that was amazing you were going to share a great product with someone too now you are screwing people right all of a sudden and if you get one sale you're not going to get any more because once they get the product right that's it they're going to think it's crap yeah well certainly there's a big you know there's two sides to one is you're right so like i always say that you know at the end of the day you know
what makes a sale ethical assuming someone's not outright lying right is that you know are you leaving the customer in a better spot are you actually helping them is there value what you're selling is you know that you're charging them x but the value to them is a lot more well that's in in some sense you know if if you make some mistakes ethically but that outcome has achieved well it's at least a safety gap that you're not hurting people so i would say is your safety gap you want to be selling things that actually
lead people in a better spot but on the other side too there's just this thought that then one of the biggest mistakes sales people make that i see is they lie when the truth will do yeah exactly like it's like and and it's almost like i call it in sales the truth well told mm-hmm which i stole from mccann erickson by the way that was their phrase about you know background advertising the truth well told so the idea with a straight line is what is the absolute best version of the truth those there's many ways
for me to tell you let me tell you a bit about myself there's 50 paths to say well i'm this that there's only one that's the best there's one that's truthful honest sounds amazing people say wow oh boy that's the one you want there's many ways to describe your product only one of them is the actual best way it's interesting it's logical it makes sense it's cool and it's honest so i think a lot of its lazy lack of preparation and what happens with many sales people and people in situations in life is that when
we run out of intelligent smart things to say we tend to say stupid or we'll say we'll default to things that we simply run out of the right things to say and then our brain almost just fills in whatever comes out and for those that aren't naturally adept sometimes some really bad stuff comes out [Music] [Music] you
