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THE
CLOSE
7 LEVEL
SELLING

STEFAN AARNIO

Clovercroft Publishing
The Close: 7 Level Selling

©2018 by Stefan Aarnio

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information
storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Published by Clovercroft Publishing, Franklin, Tennessee

Edited by Tammy Kling and Tiarra Tompkins

Cover Design by Emir Orucevic

Illustrations and Interior Design by Adept Content Solutions

Printed in Canada

ISBN: 978-1-948484-14-5
CONTENTS

FOREWORD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
I Could Feel It in My Bones. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Everything in Business and in Life Must Be Sold. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxi
Everybody Sells, Whether We Want to Admit It or Not. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxi
Love It or Hate It, Everybody Has to Sell! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxiii
The One and Only Way to Make Money in This World. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxvii
The Self-Made Path to Getting Rich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxvii

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxix
Why Do We NEED Selling More than Ever Before?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxix
The Merging of Sales, Service, and Brand Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xl
Selling Will Likely Become One of the Last Professions to Be Replaced
by Machines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xli
The Philosophy of Selling. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xli
The Ethics of Selling. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xlii

PART ONE: THE LANGUAGE OF SELLING—7 LEVELS OF

AGREEMENT—7 LEVELS UP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
What Is a Sale?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
What Is the Basis of All Human Relationships? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
The Power of Words. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
v
vi The Close—7 Level Selling

The Language of Agreement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

7 Core Levels Of Human Agreement “Clichés” to “Needs”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
The 7 Levels of Agreement Explained and How to Transition Upwards
with Stock Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Live Action Script—Opening . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

PART TWO: 7 LEVEL SELLING—THE ART OF A SUCCESSFUL SALES

PRESENTATION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Anatomy of a Sale (Straight Line) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Selling versus Negotiating. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
What a Negotiation Is Structured Like. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
A Well-Structured Sale vs. A Badly Structured Sale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Empowering Words and Disempowering Words. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32
Real Rapport vs. Fake Rapport—Trusted Advisor, Medical Doctor. . . . . . . . . . . 33
Conscious vs. Subconscious Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Tone Training. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
10 Core Influencing Types of Tone. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Disabling the Conscious Mind—The Neocortex. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Irrational Hot Buttons. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
The Risk of Presenting Features and Benefits That Are of No Interest to
the Customer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Speaking Their Language—Four Personality Styles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
DISC—Dominance, Influence, Submission, and Compliance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Analyzing the GAP between Where They Are and Where They Want to Be . . . . . 50
Calculating Their Goal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Presenting Your Offer—Value vs. Cost: Value First, Cost Second. . . . . . . . . . . . 55
A Punishing Amount of Evidence: Testimonials and Whitepapers. . . . . . . . . . . . 56
The Power of a Video Testimonial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Creating Agreement and Momentum Towards The Close. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
The 7 Level Presentation Process. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Live Action Script—Platinum Presentation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
 Contents vii

PART THREE: THE CLOSE—7 LEVEL CLOSING—THE 7 LEVEL LOCKDOWN

SEQUENCE—7 LEVELS DOWN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
The Closing Process. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Everybody Is On Commission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
The Three Tens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
The 7 Level Closing Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
Cracking the Code of Their Buying Strategy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Live Action Script—Closing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
The Action Threshold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Four Ways to Lower the Action Threshold. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
The Line of Money, Upsells and Downsells. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
The Counterintuitive Nature of the Upsell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
Stock Closes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
Standard Closes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
Hard Closing vs. Soft Closing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
The Power of Silence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Buying Questions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
Types of Buying Indicators. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Common Types of Objections. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
All Objections Are the Same—Uncertainty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Asking for Referrals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
The Best Time to Ask . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
Other Unorthodox Times to Ask for a Referral. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .108
8 Elements of Power and How To Increase Your Personal Power. . . . . . . . . . . 109
Other Forms of Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
The Stall—Multi-Call Selling, Setting the Next Appointment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

PART FOUR: TURNING PRO—BECOMING A TOP 1 PERCENT

SALESPERSON—MACRO GAME. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
Why You Need to Be a Pro Or Super-Pro in Today’s World. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
viii The Close—7 Level Selling

Power Prospecting. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136

5 Proven and Profitable Sources of Leads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
Time Management—The Ideal Sales Day. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
The Ideal Sales Day . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
Keys to Ongoing Success (Metrics). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
Personal Business Plan—The Fishbowl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
Top Performers Peak 3 Times a Year and the Pit Of Despair. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
Brand/Marketing/Sales/Product Pyramid. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
How to Make the Sale as Easy as Possible—Pyramid of Making a
Successful Sale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
The Soil Beneath the Pyramid—Clean Ethics “Do What’s Right for the
Customer”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
The Right Marketing and the Right Leads. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
Dress for Success—Three Seconds Buys You Thirty Seconds. . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
All of Life Is a Stage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
The Guide to Commanding Power with Your Appearance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
DISC—Four Types of Salespeople: Your Personality and Balancing
Yourself Out. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
Framing, Frames, and Counters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
Decision Making—How Buyers Make Decisions—Three Parts to the
Human Brain. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
The Power of Scripting and Sales Choreography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
Building Your Sales Funnel and Sales Choreography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
Hierarchy of Sales Skills Retail—Biz Sales. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
The Purpose of a Salesperson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Top Three Traits of a Top Salesperson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
Six Ghosts of Fear. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Seven Deadly Sins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
Dealing with Prospects More Powerful Than You. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194
The Shortest Path Through the Sales Cycle (Without Cutting Corners)
and Still Building Trust. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
Foreword
THE CLOSE—7 LEVEL
SELLING
Stefan Aarnio

I Could Feel It In My Bones

My Journey: How the Commitment to Sales Changed My Life
I could feel it in my bones . . .
When I was a teenager my mother and father always insisted I get a sum-
mer job. Mom was a schoolteacher, and my father ran his own business,
and they wanted to teach me the important lessons of hard work and life
skills.
This endeavor was noble, as I was a young man and needed to learn about
money and work, which makes up much of a man’s purpose in life. Work is
important, and since most people spend 70 percent of their waking hours
working, it’s critical that you eventually do what brings you fulfillment.
Unfortunately a large majority of people do not like their work.
Looking back, I should have probably encouraged myself to work more
throughout the year and even more in the summertime, but the idea around
ix
x The Close—7 Level Selling

our home was to get a summer job when school was out and then quit and
focus on school during the rest of the year. The general idea was to save
up money for university tuition because after all, “Go to school, get good
grades, and get a job” was the Valhalla, the heaven, the Promised Land for
generations of young people since 1930 and a “good job” would solve all of
my problems in life. Every year I would get good grades that would one day
get me into a good university, and the good university would get me a good
job and economic salvation and happiness would be mine!
At least that’s the bullshit story sold to young people every day in the
public schools.
Years later when I graduated at the ripe young age of twenty-two with a
major in English and minor in music, I found that the only work available
to me in my home town of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, was a call-center
job in the middle of the night, selling luxury hotel rooms to rich people.
The job required a degree, and after it was all said and done, being the #2
salesman in the office, I earned a meager $10 an hour which was minimum
wage at the time.
The dream I had been sold on getting a good job and great education was
completely false, and it was indeed an old, outdated idea, a relic of a time
that had passed by the year 2008 when I officially entered the workforce
full time. The pain that I felt in my heart from being sold a false dream put
me in a post-grad depression, and I had to do some major soul-searching to
find the real path to my purpose in life, economic success, and the business
of selling!
Every summer as a teenage boy I would sit down at the kitchen table and
open the newspaper to the “jobs” section and “looking for hire” sec-
tion in the classifieds. I would pour over the ads trying to find a loophole in
the marketplace where I could earn something above minimum wage that
would be fun and exciting. I was a young man and craved an adventure.
 The Close—7 Level Selling xi

I had been a line cook one summer, after McDonalds and Walmart
rejected me (along with every other local business.) I was a young man, sev-
enteen years old, and relatively unconnected in the world. My parents were
modest people: my father ran a T-shirt brokerage he called a business; my
mother was a government, unionized, high school teacher.
None of the jobs made sense to me in the paper.
One was $5 an hour, another $6.25 an hour; painting homes was $10 an
hour. Little did I know, but my own parents were setting me up for abysmal
economic failure in trying to find work that made sense after meeting their
unrealistic demands for an acceptable job. They gave me a list of criteria
under which I could find work to pay my university bills in the fall. The
work I was to find had to be the following:
1. Guaranteed hourly pay—my parents were both left wing socialists who
were terrified of commission based jobs and capitalism in general. They
claimed that in a commission based environment “you won’t make any
money” and “the company will screw you out of your commissions.
They had a negative view on selling and making money in general.
2. My parents encouraged me to “follow my dreams” which meant go
into something with music (my passion at the time that fed my vain
delusion to be a rich and famous rock star)—yet there were no music
jobs, especially music jobs that were guaranteed hourly pay. There was
a small minority of government grant-funded music jobs, but they
were typically reserved for women and minorities as per government
mandate, and as a young single white male, I was excluded from these
positions due to “employment equity” standards. The employment
equity standards were there to include everybody, but the very idea that
was inclusive to some was discriminating to me.
3. “No selling” was a rule for the jobs I was to take: my father was a failed
salesman who was fired from his last sales job in 1988, when I was two
xii The Close—7 Level Selling

years old, right before my younger brother was born. This pissed my
mother off and demoralized my father.
The idea of me taking a career in sales terrified my mother so much
because of my father’s bad experiences, and the idea of selling left a bad
taste around salespeople in my father’s mouth. This was ironic because
my father was a business owner who should have embraced the idea
and profession of selling, but he was a socialist at heart and had limit-
ing beliefs around making and keeping money.
4. “No night shifts” insisted my father! He claimed that night shifts were
too dangerous for a young seventeen-year-old boy, and they didn’t
want me to be mugged or killed in our city of Winnipeg in the middle
of the night. Winnipeg was the official murder capital of Canada at the
time, and my parents did not want me to be become a murder statistic.
This left me with the lowest paid and most meaningless work available. I
was a young man with big dreams in my heart, but I was being treated like
a young kid. All that was left was Tim Horton’s, the famous donut chain
where I had to wear a humiliating hair net to hold my long rock-star hair
together. I stood behind a cash register taking coffee orders wearing an
emasculating unisex tan uniform that was made of plastic so coffee could
not stain the company-owned slacks and golf shirt. This plastic uniform
was their property, so the management informed me I would have to give
back if I quit. I was fine with giving the uniform back at the end of the
summer.
I had always felt a pull to do something different.
At age sixteen I could feel a burning desire in my bones, an intuition to
drop out of school and go sell. But I didn’t listen to this intuition at the
time and instead listened to the artificial advice from my parents. I was a
natural-born salesman, negotiator, and closer, but nobody knew it at the
time. My talents and skills lay dormant under a thick layer of self-doubt
 The Close—7 Level Selling xiii

and loathing towards my natural talents in selling. I stayed in school until I

was twenty-two, lost my way in life and slipped into a post-grad depression
before finding my path in a very rewarding career of professional selling.
The idea of selling to live made sense to me, because both of my grandfa-
thers had been successful entrepreneurs. I just knew that sales, money, and
entrepreneurship pumped through my veins. The money made sense to me,
the idea made sense to me, and every fiber of my body knew and agreed
that selling was right for me. A burning desire coursed through my veins.
I knew selling was right, and that it was in my blood, I could feel it in my
bones. However, my parents loved me, and they tried to protect me from
pain, suffering, and hardship.
I felt like I was being choked out of building any real skills or any real
value in the world. This is demoralizing and confusing for a young man.
In the famous words of Ayn Rand, “Man is the only animal that cripples
his children’s ability to survive.” My parents in their smothering love did
not understand that the job restrictions they placed on me were crippling
my ability to become a useful member of society.
After being hired at age twenty-three for my dream job with a small pri-
vate equity firm selling shares in large real estate investment deals, I was
ecstatic! The elation I felt made me higher than a kite, to finally be doing
something I wanted to do with my life. I had been wandering the hot dry
desert aimlessly up to this point in my life, and I could feel the vultures
circling me overhead waiting for me to give up, drop out of my dreams, and
go back to meaningless hourly work at a job I hated. But instead I found an
oasis in the desert and this new job in professional selling, that I had always
craved, was a long cool refreshing drink of water in an otherwise wasteland
desert of opportunity.
Within two weeks of being hired, the company flew me out to Edmonton.
I packed all my best clothes and hopped on the plane to head west. I didn’t
xiv The Close—7 Level Selling

need to pack much because my burning ambition and persistence seemed

to push me through every obstacle so far.
Flying across the country on a ticket that I had earned by selling myself
into my dream job made me feel invincible. Arriving at the head office
was a stunning experience, and everything was new, polished glass and
shiny. The girls working the desk were gorgeous, young, attractive, and
poised models that men of any age or background would kill to possess.
The men in the office were striking as well. They were tall, handsome, and
extroverted and dressed to kill. They wore sharp tailored suits, shiny black
polished oxford shoes, and crisp starched white shirts. The entire office
dripped of sex, which the company bottled and sold as investment advice.
The company had a winning formula: Hire young hot female models to
work in the office, and the young hot models would attract young aggres-
sive alpha males to work as salesmen. These men were supermen: tall and
bright. They were also ideal for the financial industry—smart, hungry,
and poor. The culture was vibrant and visceral and they only accepted
the best.
I felt as though I had joined a winning team, and it was a team that I
wanted to be a part of. The salesmen were polished, both in the way they
spoke and the way that they looked. If they were diamonds, I was only
rough lump of coal. I couldn’t compete with their image or sharp wit and
vocabulary.
They sat me down in the boardroom with another young recruit named
David who was later nicknamed Buck by some of the alpha males in the
office. Buck was also a rough lump of coal with a shaggy haircut that had
grown wild around his ears and badly needed trimming. However, under-
neath his shaggy hair, Buck fit the description: tall, handsome, athletic
and smart. With the right polish, Buck would make a great salesman. We
sat together in the boardroom until a group of men entered. Two were
 The Close—7 Level Selling xv

executives from the company, and barely a few years older than me. These
executives were different from the visceral alpha male salesmen. They were
more effeminate, polished and nerdy with glasses. The other two men were
much older, either in their fifties or sixties.
I quickly learned that the two younger men were here to train me and
Buck. They were unbelievably young, but they were executives, so we
treated them like the experts. We sat in the boardroom for a full day, learn-
ing how to organize and take notes.
To my surprise, that one full day was the entire extent of the training
program for the company and although I was in Edmonton for seven days
of training, they had no further content to teach me about sales. The two
older men who sat with Buck and myself were newly hired by the company
as sales consultants and were assigned to us as mentors.
There was very little briefing or introduction to our new mentors, but I
quickly learned that these two older men had spent their entire life selling
vacuum cleaners door to door. These men were proven warriors in the art
of direct sales. They had sharpened and perfected their tools selling every
day for their entire adult lives. The moment I learned that my mentors were
professional vacuum cleaner salesmen, I began to cringe.
The nagging voice of my mother entered my brain and I felt as though I
was in the wrong place. My palms started to sweat and my fingers formed
into fists as I felt the urge to stand up and run out the door. I thought I was
selling investments, not vacuum cleaners! What did these men know about
selling investments? I suddenly felt dirty, but at the same time my life had
finally come full circle.
When I was seventeen and looking for a summer job in the newspaper,
I had scoured the classifieds and noticed an ad that read, “Make $85 per
hour!” My heart jumped the minute I saw that kind of pay and I imme-
diately dialed the number in the ad. A young pretty voice answered the
xvi The Close—7 Level Selling

other end of the telephone and she told me to come to the office tomor-
row at 10 am and “dress sharp.”
After I hung up the phone I immediately dialed my grandmother to tell
her the great news that I had a job interview and that I wanted to borrow
her car to drive across town to get the job. I arrived in an industrial part of
town full of derelict homes, train tracks and empty warehouses. I quickly
located the building where my interview was to be held and parked on a side
street. The building was a blank brick industrial bunker with no windows
and only one mirrored-glass door on the front. No sign, no markings, com-
pletely anonymous. I knocked on the door at 10am for my appointment
and no one answered so I went back to grandma’s car and waited for ten
minutes. I went back to the front door at 10:10 am and the door pushed
open revealing a beautiful reception area. A young handsome man in his
late twenties introduced himself to me as “Mr. Ellice.” He had a huge, white
smile from ear to ear and was dressed in a perfectly tailored and pressed
dark navy suit. I felt uneasy about the unmarked building and the fact that
no one was there to answer the door at 10 am, but Mr. Ellice’s appearance
and demeanor made me feel at ease.
I sat in the lobby and filled out the application forms for the $85 per
hour job and surprisingly, there was no one else in the lobby applying for
this position. Maybe I was in luck. Finally, Mr. Ellice called me into his
office around the corner and I handed him the forms I had filled out. He
looked at my résumé and the forms I had spent fifteen minutes filling out
and then quickly pushed the papers aside. Instead, we talked about my
dreams of being a rock star. After about 15 minutes of banter Mr. Ellice
said “I’ve got three positions available in my company, one is for secre-
taries, but you don’t want that . . . two is my warehouse guys, but you’re
smarter than that . . . and three are my sales guys. I overpay everyone and
I think you would be best suited to sales because you’re a great guy to talk
 The Close—7 Level Selling xvii

to! I want you to call me today at 5:00 pm, and I’ll let you know if you got
the job.”
I felt very excited to have made it this far in the interview process and
quickly asked Mr. Ellice what I was going to be selling. He replied, “It’s a
cleaning product about the size of a football and it’s going to change the
world!”
Wow, I thought to myself, I’m going to change the world!
I drove back to my grandmother’s house and as I returned the keys for her
car, I told her that I was going to be selling something: “A cleaning product
the size of a football that would change the world!” My eighty-four-year-
old grandmother lit up with excitement and as a lady who grew up on a
farm, she was always excited when anyone in her family got a new job. My
grandmother was also very curious about my pitch and the cleaning prod-
ucts that would change the world. She was so curious and promised to buy
whatever I was selling. I was so excited; I already had a sale before I even
knew what I would be selling!
I called back Mr. Ellice at 5:00 pm on the nose. He answered the phone
and said “Stefan, I’m so glad you called; out of the eighty interviews I did
today, you were the one guy I wanted to talk to. Come in tomorrow for
training and orientation. It’s a three-day, unpaid training, but on Monday
morning we’ll have you making money right away!”
Then he hung up the phone. I felt as though I had won the lottery. $85
per hour was a lot of money, more than ten times the minimum wage at the
time. I didn’t think about the fact that it would be impossible to do eighty
interviews in one day. I didn’t think that I would be the only one calling
him back at 5:00 pm, but I didn’t care. I felt like I had won the lottery.
The next morning I showed up at the unmarked bunker and was ushered
into a back room. Inside the room were five young sales candidates sitting
in chairs wanting the same job I did. They were young, good looking, and
xviii The Close—7 Level Selling

dressed to kill. Out of the five sales candidates, one was a former Xerox
salesman, one was an ex-car salesman, one was a med student, one was a
single mother, and the other was a student like me. Mr. Ellice greeted us at
9 am, and we all waited eagerly to see the product we would be selling, but
first, we were introduced to Clancy.
Clancy was the owner of the company, in his mid-forties, with skin
that was so tanned that he looked like a baseball glove. He had a pen-
cil-thin mustache and was balding with a bad black greasy comb-over.
He wore a yellow dress shirt that was unbuttoned far too low, and he
had a beer belly that hung over his belt. I wasn’t sure if his beer belly
was from drinking beer or just working too hard and living the sales-
man life. He had multiple gold chains around his neck and far too many
gold rings on his fingers. He looked like a wrestling promoter, a low-level
pimp or a Mafioso. His black intense eyes fixated on us from behind his
horn-rimmed glasses, and he took the stage from Mr. Ellice quietly and
intensely.
“Are you guys ready to see what you’re going to be selling?” Clancy asked.
“YES!” We cried out in unison; we were all high on the idea of making
fast easy money.
“Alright, let me show you.” Clancy pointed to a box behind him that was
covered with a black sheet the size of a large microwave. Like a magician, he
grabbed one end of the black curtain and whipped the curtain like he was
pulling a rabbit out of a hat. The excitement peaked, and suddenly, we were
all staring at a generic, brown, cardboard box.
The room was silent. We were all looking at this box, but no one could
identify what was inside. Mr. Ellice, Clancy’s magic show assistant, got
down on his knees and opened the box quickly, as if the magic was wearing
off of the presentation. Finally he pulled out a shiny, metallic, space age
looking machine.
 The Close—7 Level Selling xix

Mr. Ellice held up the machine like a prized fish that he had caught in a
fishing championship. We all stared at it, mystified at its beauty, but unable
to identify what we were looking at until finally someone said:
“It’s a vacuum!”
A vacuum? I thought to myself. I can’t sell vacuums! Vacuum cleaner
salesmen are slimy and I’m not slimy!
My internal dialogue was outraged. I had driven across town twice and
sat through meetings, and now I was being sold on selling vacuums. I knew
that everyone in the room wanted to leave the minute we realized that
Clancy and Mr. Ellice had tricked us into watching their vacuum presen-
tation, but we were too polite and we were already committed, so no one
dared to leave.
Mr. Ellice dazzled us with the unbelievable features and benefits of this
space age vacuum. It was a truly impressive machine, built with a mini jet
engine inside that would last for forty years. He told us the backstory of the
machine and the fact that it was built in a re-tooled jet engine factory from
World War II. He told us about the magnesium finish that was nearly inde-
structible and that it would bounce but not dent if you threw the vacuum
across a cement driveway (which Mr. Ellice informed us was one extreme
way to close a sale). The hose of the machine was made of neoprene, the
same material that they make deep sea diving wet suits out of, and finally,
Mr. Ellice dumped fifteen pounds of sand into the vacuum, opened the
door, and dumped the sand on his head, but magically, the sand did not fall
out. The amazing jet engine flow of air was flowing so strong through the
machine that it held the fifteen pounds of sand magically in place when a
lesser machine would have the sand dump onto Mr. Ellice’s head. When I
saw the sand trick, I was sold—I wanted to be a vacuum salesman!
After nearly an hour of watching the magic show, we were all sold on
selling vacuums, and Clancy took the stage as things began to get serious:
xx The Close—7 Level Selling

“How much money do you want for selling one of these things?” Clancy’s
tone was confrontational and he stared us down like a thug while he slowly
walked over to a sales flip chart.
No one said anything. We were too intimidated.
“$600?” Clancy barked. There was no response. The room was silent.
“Six hundred bucks for selling one of these things?” Clancy asked rhe-
torically as he continued to stare us down. He wrote a big $600 on the flip
chart without breaking eye contact with us, and still no one moved.
We had no idea about what was a fair commission to sell a vacuum, but
$600 did sound appealing to me. If I only sold one vacuum a week I would
be making way more money than my other summer jobs painting houses.
“How about $700?” Clancy wrote $700 in huge numbers on the flip
chart and we began to squirm.
$700 sounded even better.
“How about $800?” Clancy wrote a huge $800 on the flip chart and we
began to look at each other and began to smile. I couldn’t believe it. Selling
vacuums suddenly seemed to be the best thing since sliced bread.
“Listen, you guys sell one in a week, I’ll pay you $600 a sale. You sell
two in a week, I’ll pay you $700 per sale, and if you sell three in a week,
I’ll pay you $800 a sale!” Clancy began to circle the $800 on the flip chart,
and I began to grin thinking that I was going to make more money than I
ever had in my life by selling vacuums. Suddenly, my enthusiasm for this
machine began to swell, and my beliefs about selling vacuums began to
instantly change.
I spent the next three days in training and every half day, one of the sales
candidates would drop out. We would come back from lunch and there
would be one less person in the room. After three days, I was the only one
left.
 The Close—7 Level Selling xxi

“It’s time to do some real live demos.” Clancy said at the end of the third
day. “If you do six demos, whether you sell or not, I’ll give you a hundred
and fifty bucks . . . It’s not much, but it will help you buy some bread and
sandwich meat on Monday morning.”
I pictured myself buying a few loaves of rye bread and deli ham to survive
the week. Getting into sales was becoming real for me. I could even imagine
tasting the ham, rye bread, and yellow hot dog mustard that I had earned
by selling.
I had worked for three days for no pay and was beginning to get hungry
from not earning any money. The idea of $150 appealed to me greatly, and
I knew that it wouldn’t be that difficult to show this vacuum to my friends
and family. The idea of buying some bread and meat also seemed appealing.
I wanted to earn my sustenance for the week instead of living on handouts
from mom.
I took one of the vacuums home and called everyone I knew to make
my six presentations. My mother fought me every day when I came home
from sales training: “Sales is a hard life! Your father always wanted to sell
but he didn’t make any money! Sales companies always screw you out of
commissions!” All along the way my mother relentlessly barraged me with
negativity until the third day when I emotionally collapsed.
For those three days I had attended sales training eight hours each day,
came home and fought with my mother for several hours, and then slept for
eight hours. Life became a grind.
Finally, on Monday I showed up at the office and gave my demo vacuum
back with tears in my eyes. I was frustrated and wanted to see if I could
make it in sales. “Mr. Ellice, I quit. My mother doesn’t support me doing
this, and every day when I go home she fights with me. I’m exhausted and
I just can’t do this . . .”
xxii The Close—7 Level Selling

Mr. Ellice looked me in the eye and said, “That’s fine, maybe this isn’t
for you. Just let me ask you one question. Will your mother stop you from
doing other things you want to do in your life?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I said meekly staring at the floor. I told Mr. Ellice
with my words that my mother would never hold me back, but in my heart,
I wasn’t sure. I returned the vacuum in the same cardboard box I had bor-
rowed it in and left the sales office forever.
Years later when I was assigned my mentor in the sales office in Alberta, I
knew I was in the right place in my life. I had wanted to sell vacuums years
ago and now I was right where I belonged, back with the vacuum salesmen,
earning my bread and ham. Some people believe in fate, I believe that there
are certain people in life that you are destined to meet, and sometimes you
just don’t meet them right away. Somehow, through fate, everyone ends
up where they belong. My heart had wanted to sell vacuums years ago, and
now my current mentors were vacuum salesmen. Steve Jobs said, “You can
only connect the dots looking backwards,” and now I could see that there
was a bigger reason why my vacuum dreams were put on hold. In the big
picture, my place was to sell real estate investments instead of vacuums. I
just couldn’t see the big picture when I was younger.
There is a cost to your life if you fail to learn to sell!
Love it or hate it, we all sell every day. Some of us have nothing to sell, so
we sell our time hourly to our boss at a wholesale rate that is barely above
the poverty line for most people. J.O.B. is an acronym that stands for “just
over broke” because what your employer is paying you hourly will never pay
you what you are worth. Instead he will only pay you enough to keep you
“just over broke,” enough to keep you working, but not enough to be able
to live life on your terms!
Selling is one of the last noble professions that allows for upper class
movement in our society. Throughout human history, the only social
 The Close—7 Level Selling xxiii

upward mobility was from the military. You fought wars, won wars and got
rich. Today we live in a world where the only real professions that give you
a chance at becoming affluent, wealthy or rich are:
1. Straight commission sales
2. Investment banking
3. Business ownership and entrepreneurship
All other professions, I would argue—even law and medicine—have such
horrendous taxes and controls on your time to stop you from really earning
and becoming affluent, wealthy or rich. You also need loads of student debt
and up to ten years in school where you do not produce a dime of money
for yourself until you graduate. Ten years of nonearning for a young person
can set you back financially because anyone can become a self-made mil-
lionaire in five years, so ten years for med school doesn’t even really make
sense if you are truly driven to succeed economically.
Sadly, most people avoid sales like the plague. Ideas like sales is grimy,
sales is unethical, and the worst limiting belief of all “selling is bad” or
“money is the root of all evil” keeps more people poor and middle class
than I could ever count.
Don’t be seduced by the idea that you can live a comfortable life in the
middle class in the modern Western world. For the last forty years, the mid-
dle class in America, Canada, and every other Western country has been
systematically getting financially murdered by inflation, rising housing
costs, rising debts, rising taxes, stagnant wages, educational inflation, and
a myriad of other financial systems designed to fleece the middle class like
sheep shorn for their wool. The middle class dream is dead; it’s gone, it’s
a relic from the 1950s and 1960s in America, and if you want to be mid-
dle class these days, you need to move to India, Brazil, China, Mexico, or
other up-and-coming nations that are growing their middle classes. If you
xxiv The Close—7 Level Selling

are going to live in Canada or the USA or any other Western or European
nation, you must make the conscious choice and effort to be rich.
First-world countries are defined as having a rich class, middle class, and
poor class. Third-world nations only have the rich and poor with no middle
class. Canada, the USA, and Europe are slowly becoming third-world nations
with the eradication of the middle class, so you must choose which side you are
going to be on: rich or poor? The choice is up to you and your daily actions!
All of these negative beliefs around selling and making money that I
inherited from my parents were toxic and poisoned my mind, body, and
emotions when it came to achieving economic and financial freedom.
Friends and family continued to poison me and would continue to poison
me to this day with average and middle-class thinking if I would choose to
speak to them about my dreams. Sometimes the most negative people in
your life have the same last name as you.
In the words of Confucius, “The man who says it cannot be done must
not interrupt the man doing it.”
These negative beliefs had pointed me towards a life of poverty as a “poor
musician,” and in 2008 after graduating from the University of Manitoba, this
wrong thinking manifested as a poverty situation for myself. In 2008 I was:
1. Effectively broke. I made $1,000 a month teaching guitar out of my
mother’s living room and had very little cash.
2. I had a useless degree with a major in English and minor in music from
the University of Manitoba which virtually opened no new economic
doors in life for me. I quickly realized after graduation that I was mak-
ing more money painting houses in the summertime than I could make
with my degree. I viewed this as a major failure in my own decision
making and my parents’ life advice.
3. My mother told me to get a “real job”; now that I had a degree and I
ended up with a $10 an hour call center job in the middle of the night
 The Close—7 Level Selling xxv

selling luxury hotel rooms for straight commission—this was not what
I imagined I would be doing after graduation. This job required a
degree to work there as well.
4. I had a $10,000 a year annual income from teaching guitar lessons in
my mother’s living room, but had done that side job since I was sixteen;
at twenty-two this job was not fulfilling my economic needs of being
a young man.
5. I spent most of my time living on my mother’s couch in her living room,
devouring books, trying to find an answer to my economic problems,
which was perilous, especially as I tried to avoid selling and sales.
6. I could not afford a car, so I rode the bus
7. I had no cell phone and relied on my mother’s landline, which was
embarrassing.
8. I had long hair and a bad self-image: long hair, with a dark trench coat,
big black headphones, and big black boots. I was scary looking.
9. I had a failing rock band that was supposed to be my business and life
raft towards a chance at economic salvation.
10. Because of my situation, I couldn’t get a date with a girl although I
wanted a girlfriend badly.
11. I didn’t know what a mortgage was or anything about money or finance
because they don’t teach that in school.
In essence the difference between the rich and the poor is three types of
capital:
1. Real capital also known as real money, cash, credit, and investors; this
is obvious.
2. Intellectual capital also known as intellectual property and having spe-
cialized practical knowledge that will yield higher earnings than the
middle class and poor.
xxvi The Close—7 Level Selling

3. Social capital also known as a large network of other powerful and use-
ful people from which real economic opportunities come.
I had none of the above at age twenty-two and felt desperate to change my
situation. If I had failed to make a change to become a student of professional
selling, my life today would be a life of “scraping by” and perpetual poverty.
So what was my turnaround point?
My turnaround point was when I embraced the idea that I must
become a professional salesman to reach my economic dreams.
I read a book on my mother’s couch in my post-grad depression called
Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kioysaki. I owe much of my success to Robert
today for opening my eyes to real estate investing, selling, and the virtues of
owning a business and being an entrepreneur. This book was like rediscover-
ing rock’n’roll or hearing Jimi Hendrix or Led Zeppelin play for the first time.
The book completely changed my world view on money, business,
finance, and selling. I became obsessed with business and investing and shut
down my vain musical rock star dreams and traded my instruments, home
studio recording gear, and PA system in for seed capital to start a business
of my own.
I drove across the country to meet Kioysaki and hear him speak when I
was just starting out. I was new, I was weak, and I thought that the Guru
Robert Kiyosaki could fix all of my problems with a few words from his
magical mouth like Jesus would cure lepers.
Robert Kiyosaki is the #1 personal finance author in the world and has
sold over 40,000,000 copies of Rich Dad Poor Dad officially and several
million more of pirated copies in circulation.
I stood in line at a convention to meet my guru, my sage, my savior to
drink the manna of his wisdom for only a brief moment. As I stood in line
to have my book signed, I thought of an intelligent question to ask him at
the table. In Kiyosaki’s journey, he didn’t start to become successful with
 The Close—7 Level Selling xxvii

money until he learned to sell by working at Xerox after serving in the US

military in the Vietnam War.
As I approached my guru, my sage, for some advice on what a young man
could do to be rich one day, I asked him “Robert where is the best place to
learn to sell these days? I know you went to Xerox for the training back in
the day, but where would you go today?”
He looked up from his book signing table, unimpressed with my ques-
tion, then signed my book and looked away. “Anywhere,” he muttered as he
pushed me along in the line.
“Anywhere . . .”
That was anti-climactic and disappointing advice to me at the time, but
Robert was right: You can learn to sell “anywhere.” Sales is a lifelong study,
and the highest paid people in the world are actors, athletes, and salespeo-
ple. You can truly learn to sell—anywhere!
I began to dedicate my time to my profession in sales and studying how
to become an effective questioner, presenter and closer.
My life after acquiring a degree of mastery in sales today looks much dif-
ferent than my pre-selling days.
Today as I write this book at age thirty-one, my life is 180 degrees differ-
ent from age twenty-two.
I give you this list of benefits not to brag, but to show you that if you
commit to make a study of sales much like a medical doctor studies med-
icine over ten years in his life, you will make income in excess of a doctor,
lawyer, or any other white-collar professional.
The benefits I enjoy today in my life because of my dedication to the pro-
fession of sales:
1. I am the owner and operator of two multi-million dollar companies
and continue to start and grow companies all the time.
2. I am a self-made millionaire before the age of thirty.
xxviii The Close—7 Level Selling

3. I live in one of the nicest addresses in my city.

4. I am a 7-figure earner at a time when $250,000 is a top 1 percent rate
of pay in my country and for my age of thirty, a top 1 percent income
earner has only $120,000.
5. I am the author of several books on money, business, and real estate.
6. I have won several awards for investing and entrepreneurship including
Rich Dad International Hall of Fame. Rich Dad Education only gives
out one award a year in Canada. To give you some perspective, there
are more people in Canada with Olympic gold medals than in the Rich
Dad Hall of Fame.
7. My real estate students have gone on to win national awards including
“investor of the year” from a Canadian real estate wealth magazine.
8. I coach and train several MBA grads, doctors, award winning investors,
authors, and other very successful people into becoming more success-
ful even though I do not have an MBA or doctorate of my own.
9. I have enough passive income from my real estate to cover my living
expenses and don’t have to work but rather choose to work every day
because my work is my passion.
10. I do work only that I love.
11. I fly all over the world training others to become successful in real
estate and business because I believe it is my purpose.
12. I bill out $1,000 to $2,000 per hour for my time in consulting and have
a successful consulting practice.
13. I have a growing client list that grows on autopilot everyday through
internet marketing and brings me customers every day for a predictable
price per customer.
14. I usually take at least thirty days off at Christmas time to reflect, reset
my body, and focus on my life and my health. I can take four vacations
a year but get bored sitting on beaches.
 The Close—7 Level Selling xxix

15. I can afford to pursue passion projects and things that do not serve my
business economically but are things I have always wanted to do (like
publishing books unrelated to my business, especially fiction books).
16. I have the goal to publish twenty books in my lifetime; as I write this
book, my fourth. I also own all my own intellectual property and pub-
lishing rights. This is a major key to getting rich and staying rich as so
many people lose their intellectual property and rights over time.
17. I can get dates with beautiful women easily; in fact sometimes I go on
too many dates. This is a real change in self-image and confidence from
being broke nearly a decade ago.
18. I own and drive a car, but do not care for cars. If I could live in my city
without owning a car I would.
19. I have raised millions and millions of dollars for my own real estate
deals, have flipped over 100 homes, my company purchases on average
a home a week for flipping, holding or wholesaling purposes. These
homes are all purchased with none of my own money.
20. I have been solicited three times for a TV show on flipping houses, and
have been under option with several production companies. I admit-
tedly have not earned a TV spot yet, but there are several more years
left to land an official show.
21. I have other people operating my key businesses so I can do the most
important things in life.
22. I have money in the bank and sleep like a baby at night.
23. I have a maid and a personal shopper and do not cook or clean because
I don’t like to do those things, don’t do laundry, or generally any tasks
I don’t enjoy doing including shoveling snow and mowing lawns. The
work is not beneath me, but I understand that it’s better to make $1,000
an hour than to do $10 an hour labor.
24. I order whatever I want at restaurants and don’t have to check the prices.
xxx The Close—7 Level Selling

25. I have people calling me to invest in my companies and offering me

money at decent rates even though I don’t need the money and will
turn them down. I am considering opening a private equity fund to
absorb this money into a new business opportunity.
26. I read fifty-two books a year and write one book per year.
27. I know in my heart “every day in every way I am getting better.”
28. Although I am older today than ten years ago, I still fit my suits from
when I was younger and thinner, and consider myself healthier today
than ten years ago.
All of these benefits or similar benefits of your choosing can be yours if you
can commit yourself to becoming a professional in the field of sales. Sales is
the highest paid hard work in the world and the lowest paid easy work in
the world. If you can commit, train, learn, read, and grow through a career in
professional selling, you will enjoy a life beyond your wildest dreams.
The life I am living today could not even have been imagined when I was
twenty-two. All I could think about was playing the local venues with my
band and maybe moving out of my mother’s house one day. When you have
a career in professional sales and you train like a professional, you will reach
heights that others can only dream of.
Sales and entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life in ways that
other people won’t, so you can live the rest of your life in ways that other
people can’t.
I salute you in the pursuit of your highest and greatest self, being
self-made!
Respect The Grind,

Stefan Aarnio
 The Close—7 Level Selling xxxi

Everything in Business and in Life Must Be Sold

Contrary to the old adage, “The product sells itself!”
The truth is, that’s a lie. No product sells itself, and if you believe that,
you have no business in sales. What’s the truth about sales? The truth is that
the world is full of competition, and every year your competitor is going
to try to make things a bit more difficult for you, to refine their product
and services and to sell to your prospects. Your competitors aren’t going to
let the product sell itself; they’re going to create a sophisticated sales plan.
And even if you’re protesting right now and think that you don’t have any
competitors—a product can’t sell itself.
Everything must be sold at some point and whether you are in business
or not, you are selling every day. The mother sells her children on getting up
in the morning and getting dressed to go to school, the young man sells the
young woman on going on a date with him, and of course, there are agents
selling real estate, insurance, financial services and commodities every day
all around the world.

Everybody Sells, Whether We Want to Admit It or Not

Selling is about influence. How influential are you?
One of the world’s legends, convinced royalty to allow him to embark
upon a global journey. He’s a legend because he influenced (sold) the queen
of Spain on his trip and financing his venture into the new world. He also
sold his men on an adventure in which they would perhaps die at sea and
never return home to their families. Christopher Columbus was not just
an explorer, he was a salesman.
Another legendary salesman first sold paper cups back in the days when
diners only had glass cups to save money, and then he sold milkshake mix-
ers door to door. He was an excellent visionary and unafraid to sell. This
xxxii The Close—7 Level Selling

salesman finally sold one of the ultimate American business opportuni-

ties—McDonalds, a franchise that literally transformed the industry of fast
food as we know it. Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonalds, will forever be
remembered as a legendary salesman but also a visionary entrepreneur.
Other legends include the following:
George Lucas, who had to sell the idea of a new movie called Star Wars
to his producer—who hated the idea—but the producer agreed because he
wanted George to make other movies for him. The sale was made, and the
producer vastly underfunded him. The original Star Wars was destined for
failure, only originally showing at forty theatres in America. It later went
on to becoming a multibillion dollar earner and one of the most successful
movie and merchandising franchises of all time!
Sales legends come in all ages and nationalities, and before you think it’s
too late to become a sales success, let’s look at another well-known visionary
who used his influential sales ability to create a business late in life.
Colonel Sanders had failed at nearly every business he started at until
he began selling his famous chicken recipe. The colonel travelled across the
country establishing KFC’s and selling his chicken recipe well into his sev-
enties and his face is one of the most recognized faces around the world. .
Still not convinced of the need to sell? Even talented rock starts need to
be persistent and overcome the “no.” Rejection and learning how to over-
come it is a part of true selling.
The Beatles had to sell their music to countless record companies before
finally landing a record deal. The A&R men of their day (arts and reper-
toire) said, “I don’t like their music, I don’t like their sound, and guitar is
on its way out.” Today the Beatles remain the biggest rock band of all time.
The list goes on and on.
 The Close—7 Level Selling xxxiii

Love It or Hate It, Everybody Has to Sell!

For a long time selling has been viewed as a seedy profession, yet that was
before the emergence of a strong and solid entrepreneur workforce. In the
past when parents had children they often said, “Go to school to get good
grades so you can get a good job as a doctor, lawyer or dentist!” You can
insert any type of profession into that sentence; we have all heard it before.
But today’s world is different. With more entrepreneurs working from
home than ever before and the resurgence and creation of new entrepre-
neurial ventures, MLMs and “mompreneur” type businesses, the one who
knows how to sell wins. Great sales people are winners.
In reality, today the highest paid professions in the world are actors, ath-
letes and salespeople. If you’re an entrepreneur in any industry, you know
you’ve got to sell in order to make things happen. You can either embrace
it or fail. It’s not just real estate agents or car salesman that sell anymore it’s
everyone—when the CIO must sell to the board or the CEO; it’s actors, it’s
athletes, and of course it’s people with the title of salespeople as well who
all sell every day.
So if selling is the highest paid profession in the world, then why don’t
parents encourage their children to become salespeople?
There are several reasons:
1. Sales is a profession that demands professional skills, yet is filled
with amateurs. Where a doctor will go to college or university for ten
years and spend $250,000 on his education to make $250,000 as a pro-
fessional, most sales people do not do any training in addition to the
mandatory company training at the beginning of their career. In effect,
most salespeople do not get the professional incomes that doctors and
lawyers get because they don’t train like doctors and lawyers. Assuredly,
salespeople who train to become the top 1 percent of their field, make
xxxiv The Close—7 Level Selling

outstanding incomes that are much, much more than doctors or law-
yers and are indeed the highest earning professionals in the world.
2. Sales is a profession with no barrier to entry: There are no professional
papers required to operate as a salesperson; it is not a government-pro-
tected profession like a lawyer or doctor, and thus, the profession is
filled with people who typically didn’t fit into the status quo. The good
side to having a low barrier to entry is that selling is “the great economic
equalizer” and one of the only professions left on the planet where one
can achieve upward social and economic mobility. Countless people
throughout history have climbed their way out of poverty and the
middle class to achieve financial freedom and great riches by virtue of
selling. If you are born poor in sales, it’s not your fault, but if you die
poor in sales, it is your fault! No other profession has unlimited earn-
ing potential and a lack of a “glass ceiling” like selling. The profession
of selling is a true meritocracy where merit rules. If you have the skills
and the results, you are the golden goose who lays the eggs, and you call
the shots in business and in life.
3. Sales is the highest paid hard work and lowest paid easy work in the
world: Too many people fear the idea of working on commission, when
in reality, we all work on commission. If you have a job sweeping floors
at the supermarket, you are being paid 100 percent of your wage to
sweep 100 percent of the floor. If you only sweep 50 percent the floor,
you will be fired and will earn 0 percent of the pay. Sales works the same
way; if you only do 50 percent of the work required, you will make $0
in commissions and will eventually be fired by the company, or you will
be forced to fire yourself and get another job (perhaps sweeping floors).
Sales is a profession where you can put in 95 percent of the work and
earn 0 percent of the money. In sales you must put in 100 percent of the
work to get 100 percent of the money. In many ways, sales is the most
 The Close—7 Level Selling xxxv

honest profession on the face of the planet because you make exactly
what you produce, nothing more, and nothing less.
4. A few bad apples spoil the barrel:—Every now and then you hear of
a sales organization that has bad ethics, no ethics, immoral activities,
high pressure tactics, failure to pay out sales commissions to salespeo-
ple, and overall general fly-by-night business activities. Unfortunately,
a few bad sales organizations have spoiled the reputation of the entire
sales industry. Most companies that operate in the field of sales (which
is all of them) are generally well-behaved corporate citizens, and the
ones that operate badly towards their customers or employees go out of
business and are replaced by better organizations.
5. Sales is a humble and honorable profession: Too many people have
a negative idea of knocking on doors, ringing phones, and asking for
money. It is visceral and humble to call on people, and often the fear of
rejection, fear of criticism, and the fear of failure is too much for most
people to bear, which scares them right out of the profession. On the
good side, sales is one of the fastest ways to develop yourself as a person
and learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Everything you
want is on the other side of fear, so I encourage you become great at
something you are doing anyways when communicating and persuad-
ing the people in your life—which is sales!
Don’t forget that many greats have come before you, and even those
famous people didn’t have a clue what they would become before they
became famous. But it all began with the ability to sell. Let’s look at a few
examples of why you want to work hard today to overcome subtle fears and
subconscious self-limiting beliefs.
Arnold Schwarzenegger had to sell his way into the movie business.
First they said “your accent will never work” and yet Arnold overcame
that and made his Austrian accent a trademark. Then they said the
xxxvi The Close—7 Level Selling

“Schwarzenegger” name will never work; no one can remember it. Today
Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of the most successful actors of all time,
and the Apple iPhone even has an autocorrect function to properly spell
“Schwarzenegger” so that no one will ever forget his legendary name.
If you’ve got a limiting belief that you’re not good looking enough, don’t
have the right name, or will never make it in a market that doesn’t under-
stand you, it’s time to examine and then dismantle those beliefs. The only
thing standing in the way is yourself. Another example of someone who
overcame the odds and external criticism and limiting beliefs is Oprah.
Oprah Winfrey was told she would never make it on TV, yet she sold her-
self into a job working at a radio station in Chicago and later sold herself into
her own talk show! Not only was she one of the first African American women
to dominate the talk show scene, she became a mega brand, known for her first
name alone—“Oprah”—and she is also one of the richest women in the world.
Selling is about influence, and persistence. Even horrible humans have
used influence as a tool to manipulate the masses. When you learn to sell
after reading this book, this will be your greatest challenge. Will you use
your newfound sales superpowers for good, or evil?
Adolf Hitler used his for evil and sold his country, Germany, likely one
of the most sophisticated countries on the planet at the time, into a brutal
three-front war for world domination. He also sold his people into follow-
ing his views down the path of annihilation, genocide, destruction of the
Jewish culture, concentration camps, and other atrocities.
Joseph Stalin sold his country, Russia, a brutal communist regime with
millions of his own people imprisoned or killed at the hands of the state.
This regime was sold so well that it lasted decades even after he died.
Jesus Christ sold the dominant religion in the western world for the last
2,000 years, and his book “the Bible,” means “book” in Greek, indicating
that he had the only book to be read for nearly 2,000 years.
 The Close—7 Level Selling xxxvii

The One and Only Way to Make Money in This World

There is only one way to make money in this world, and that is to SELL!
You can be a highly skilled accountant, but you’ll be a poor one if no one
knows that’s what you do. Again, it all comes down to selling.
You have two options when it comes to selling. The first is to sell your
time, which you may already be doing. Most people sell their time for $10,
$20, $30 or $50 an hour. If you are selling time, you will always be limited
in your earnings because you are selling a finite resource—your time! We
all are equal in time and only have twenty-four hours in a day. You have to
sleep a minimum of six hours, so you have eighteen hours left to sell. If you
are selling time, you will always be limited when it comes to money.
The other option when it comes to selling is to sell “something else”
which may be a product, a service, in the case of real estate it may be a space,
a lease, a property. Most people wish to sell something else and wish to have
passive income that comes in every month whether or not they are work-
ing, but they hold themselves back by failing to master the art of selling.

The Self-Made Path to Getting Rich

Every self-made person who has ever become rich (and stayed rich) in his-
tory has followed the same process:
1. Phase 1—They got a job, (any job will do)—One of the problems
people have starting out is that they have literally no money. Getting a
job anywhere, even at minimum wage will solve this first problem.
2. Phase 2—They entered professional selling and became a master
of the art and science—Once you have a job and an hourly income,
the next step is to enter the world of professional selling. I encourage
you to get into sales and when choosing an opportunity, typically, the
more difficult it is to sell, the better. Commission is better than salary
xxxviii The Close—7 Level Selling

and you want something that can allow you to become a top 1 percent
income earner in society. Once you find a profession in selling, you
must stay at that profession until you become a top 1 percent income
earner.
3. Phase 3—The third phase of getting rich usually ends up with start-
ing your own business and because you learned to sell as a professional,
your company grows every year and revenues are strong. People who
skip learning the art of professional selling and go to phase 3 usually
end up anemic and struggle to make the sales required to stay in busi-
ness or grow a business. Ninety percent of new businesses fail in the
first five years, and 90 percent of the survivors fail in the second five
years. If you are a top 1 percent salesperson who starts his own business,
you have a much higher chance of success than anyone else because you
know how to put cash in the bank!
4. Phase 4—Sell your business for cash, become a professional inves-
tor, and live off your returns. If you decide to sell your business one
day and retire, this is the last phase of getting rich. At this point, usually
most people enjoy their business and are passionate about what they
do, but if you choose to sell your business and move on to pure invest-
ing, congratulations: you have won the game!
INTRODUCTION

T oo many people try to start their own business without committing

and practicing in the world of professional sales. If you are reading
this book, there is a strong chance that you are considering becoming some-
one who operates in sales as a professional, and I salute you in your pursuit
of greatness.

Why Do We NEED Selling More than Ever Before?

The world is changing at a faster pace today than ever before, and what this
means is that companies, products, and services are coming into the market
faster than ever, and they are also leaving the market faster than ever. The
companies that can’t survive failed to sell enough to stay relevant, and the
new companies coming into the market must sell to survive. Companies
today need less people to operate due to technology and many companies
have an “everybody sells” policy.

xxxix
xl The Close—7 Level Selling

The Merging of Sales, Service, and Brand Experience

With the proliferation of e-commerce and people buying online, the world
is becoming more competitive. Competition is good for you because it
means there is money to compete for. The new trends in the world of sell-
ing are seeing sales, customer service, and brand experience merge into one
role. For example, at the Apple store, the sales people there provide service,
sales, and brand experience. The same goes for Best Buy: when the “geek
squad” comes out to your house to service your electronics, they are also
there to enhance the brand experience and make further sales.
The markets of the future will belong to the companies that sell by giv-
ing the strongest service and the strongest brand experience, and by virtue
of service and experience they will become the champions in their market
when it comes to sales.
Sales is too competitive today to be a transaction-focused activity; that
may have worked in the 1970s when one company could buy up all of the
TV ad space or radio ad space and dominate. Today and into the future, ser-
vice reigns supreme, and customers are looking for experiences that cannot
be commoditized by giant companies like Amazon.
Even companies like Disney are severing themselves from Netflix to con-
trol the customer experience. Disney has been a champion of sales, service,
and experience and has recently lost ground to Netflix. Disney is smart
enough to take back lost ground through opening their own online media
portal to compete head to head with Netflix.
Selling has changed throughout the ages and will continue to change into
the future. We have gone from a time where the sellers had all the power
and we lived in a “buyer beware” society to now living in a “seller beware”
society where the buyers of products and services have more power due to
the internet and social media.
 Introduction xli

Selling Will Likely Become One of the Last

Professions to Be Replaced by Machines
Due to the complexity of tone, body language, the words to use and the
“human touch,” selling will be one of the last professions to be replaced
by machines (if ever). We live in an age where the “noncreative” jobs
such as flipping burgers and driving cabs are quickly being replaced by
robots. I don’t believe that selling will ever become nonhuman. Why?
A great relationship is an asset, and people will do business with people
they like, trust, can talk to, and have a bite to eat with. You can’t do that
with a robot. There are a lot of great ways and methods to automate
sales, but the sales role itself is the greatest job security you can have.
Why?
Selling, I believe, is the strongest job security you can ever have because of
the infinite complexity of human interaction and the fact that most people
buy with their “gut” and still want the promise, delivery, and relationship of
a real live human. The day when robots or artificial intelligences can make
the prospect smile and change their thinking, their heart flutter, and per-
form complex and long cycle multi touch sales, is the day when every job
ceases to exist. If you are a professional in selling, you have job security for
life.

The Philosophy of Selling

Selling—Art or Science? Mechanics vs. Delivery
When was the last time you read a book or watched a video on sales?
There are several books, courses, tapes, audios, classes and seminars on
selling and rightfully so. Selling is the oldest and most lucrative profession
in the world and the only way to make money in this life is to sell something.
xlii The Close—7 Level Selling

Some of these sales resources focus on the mechanics of the sale such
as right words, scripts, ratios, percentages and numbers. Other resources
rely on delivery, energy, enthusiasm, tone, neurolinguistic programming
(NLP), and generally sounding great. Typically extroverted or natural sales-
people will rely too much on their delivery, energy and enthusiasm to sell
while neglecting mechanics—this is less than ideal!
On the flip side, introverted salespeople will rely too much on mechanics
and will miss the humanity behind the sale such as the delivery, the energy
and enthusiasm. Selling is both an art and a science and the strongest sales-
people develop themselves into becoming ambiverts (right in the middle of
introverted and extroverted).
The top 1 percent salesperson will have strong mechanics and strong
delivery and will continually hone their craft by focusing on both the art
and the science where most average salespeople will rely on one half of the
equation.

The Ethics of Selling

The base of a career in professional selling lies in having clean ethics. In
short, clean ethics in selling can be summed up as “always do what is right
for the customer.” If you do what is right, and what is sustainable, you will
afford yourself a long and profitable career in the highest paid profession in
the world. If you violate your ethics and do what is right for you, but not
right for the customer, your sales career and perhaps the lifespan of your
company or brand will be cut painfully short. Sometimes doing what’s right
means you have to do what’s wrong for you.
Companies like Zappos who sell shoes online will refer a prospect to a
competitor if they cannot offer the right shoe to their customer. The good-
will earned by doing what is right has made Zappos an incredibly strong
brand.
 Introduction xliii

Zappos and several other companies have offered “Pay to Quit” programs
for years! Amazon borrowed it from Zappos and offered fulfillment-center
employees one-time payments to leave Amazon. Every employee gets the
offer once a year. The first time, it’s for $2,000. The offer increases by $1,000
each year after that up to a maximum of $5,000.
Zappos started it as part of their new recruit program, in order to weed
out the short-term thinkers who would take the easy money over hard work,
and a commitment to the culture. What a great way to determine whether
a team member is going to be the right fit for a company culture and to
cement bonding, and long term engagement. By implementing this type
of internal program, the company leaders are selling a unique experience
and culture. The message? Each and every individual employee eventually
gets to face their own personal decision and determine—is this department
truly a place I want to be? Do I value this culture and my team members
enough to resist the temporary short term gain?
What a great way to show who you are and your commitment to ethics
and standards as a leader.
Several companies violate their ethics, which in turn poisons their brand
and those unscrupulous companies are forced to “rebrand” their company
or simply go out of business. Your personal brand and your company brand
take a lifetime to build and can be destroyed in five minutes. To paraphrase
Warren Buffet, the world’s richest investor, “When you think of things in
those terms, you will make decisions differently.”
Never sell the customer something he does not need or cannot use
is the first rule of ethics. Once you learn the powerful techniques in this
book, you will become a master influencer and the dark side of influence
can be called manipulation. You will be able to push people to do things
that they should not do and so. “With great power comes great responsibil-
ity” (Uncle Ben from Spiderman).
xliv The Close—7 Level Selling

Never lie also known as always tell the truth is the second rule of eth-
ics. In selling, you must always tell the truth. This principle holds strong
in both business and personal life. The beauty of always telling the truth is
that you never have to remember anything. Too many salespeople get lazy
in their product knowledge or in their presentation and start telling small
lies at first out of convenience that later turn into big lies that can be fatal
to the company. If you make a commitment to always telling the truth, you
will sleep better at night and stay in business for a long time.
Even if the truth is uncomfortable or you make a mistake, be upfront
with people; they will appreciate your honesty, and you will maintain your
relationship. A word of caution: avoid the phrase “let me be honest with
you,” for it implies that everything you said previous to the statement was
dishonest. Instead offer to “be upfront” and get all of the issues out on
the table. People appreciate it when you are upfront and tell the truth, no
matter how uncomfortable the truth is. As a salesperson you will be com-
pelled to tell the good sides about your product or service and downplay
the downside of your product.
A smart customer will ask about the downside, and it’s your job to be
upfront. Your job is to ethically sell for your company while also avoiding
“unselling” for your company at the same time. It’s okay to focus on the pos-
itive side of your product or service because a real customer will likely bring
up the negatives before the sale is made. Stay positive and avoid unselling.
Never force someone into buying when it’s clear that he should not.
We live in a world today where it is no longer “buyer beware”; instead the
world has become “seller beware,” and consumers and customers in most
industries have all of the power.
The power has shifted in the new millennium to buyers having the power
with the proliferation of the internet and social media. If you force some-
one into a sale, they will just as likely cancel on you, complain and wage war
 Introduction xlv

on your brand through the internet and social media. Your brand is your
#1 asset in this new world, and the only thing that separates you from a low
profit is a commodity like coffee or sugar. The market is constantly forcing
great products and services down to commodity status, and your brand is
what protects the profit for you in your company. If you destroy the brand,
you can never get it back.
There are no morals or ethics in negotiation but in selling, the cus-
tomer, when negotiating for price and terms will lie, cheat, and steal to
get what he wants. This is clear in human nature and in my book The
Ten Commandments of Negotiation. I state that in negotiation there are
no ethics or morals; people simply do whatever it takes to get what they
want. Your customer may lie to you with the first objection out of his
mouth, usually a smokescreen for the real objection. And he lies about
his financial situation and lies about needing to “speak to his wife.” This is
okay for him because we understand and embrace his human nature. On
the other side of the table, you, representing your company, brand, prod-
uct, and service have to operate with the cleanest ethics possible to stay
in business indefinitely. Yes it is unfair; the customer will play dirty, and
you play clean, but playing clean will be the only way to stay in business
indefinitely.

Stop selling, start serving (seller

beware) CARING vs. HARDNESS
“They don’t care about how much you know until they know how much
you care” (Zig Ziglar).
With all of this being said about ethics and doing what is right, I am a
believer in the hard close. To define, a “hard close” is close the sale, also
known as ask for the money and feel the situation turn from soft to hard,
also known as: uncomfortable. Experienced salespeople, natural closers,
xlvi The Close—7 Level Selling

and great negotiators can sit through a hard close and come out on the
other side. I recently bought a property at a steep discount that was worth
$230,000, but the vendor wanted $170,000 for the house. I offered
$110,000 and the vendor held firm at $125,000. The “hard close” took
three hours, the seller kicked me out of his house three times, and he left
once, but after three hours we closed the deal at $125,000. I was able to sit
through the hardness of the close because I knew that his selling the prop-
erty to me was right for him and that I was the right buyer. I was justified to
sit through the discomfort because of a strong feeling of service and caring
for him and because of this justified feeling I was able to reach the reward
on the other side.
In contrast, most amateur salespeople will deploy only dead end soft
closes such as “so what do you think?” which is likely the worst soft close
of all time. They are afraid of getting into a hard conversation with the cus-
tomer or breaking rapport. This is a mistake and will only yield in fewer
sales closed and less revenue for you and your company.
The key with closing hard is to stop selling and start serving. If you are
approaching your customer from a strong service standpoint and offer-
ing truly the right service and massive amounts of genuine caring for his
wellbeing, you can close incredibly hard in an ethical way. However, your
hard close can never outpace your level of caring. If you do not care about
him enough, you have not earned the right to be hard. Too many amateur
salespeople try to get hard without showing a deep caring and appreci-
ation for their customer first. These sales agents are labelled as “pushy
salespeople” or “high pressure tactics.” These companies will not last in
the modern world, and the internet and social media will destroy them
almost instantly. If you can show them how much you care and truly mean
it, you have earned the right to close as hard as required. In the past, some
of my customers have broken out in tears in a hard close, I’ve even had a
 Introduction xlvii

customer divorce his wife because she was holding him back. These cus-
tomers thank me after the sale is made because I cared and stuck it out
through the hard moments.
Remember: Your success in life is directly correlated to your ability
to have hard conversations. The better you are at lasting and persisting
through hard conversations, the more successful you will be in business
and in life.
PART ONE
THE OPENING—
THE LANGUAGE OF SELLING

1
I.

What Is a Sale?

A sale is a transfer of feeling from one person to another and it also

is a relationship. We live in a relational world where no matter how
much technology gets in the way, human relationships will always remain
to be one of the core human needs. To have relationships is to have a rich
life and to have no relationships is to live a poor life.

Tony Robbins defines the six human needs as:

1. Certainty
2. Uncertainty or Variety
3. Significance
4. Love and Connection
5. Growth
6. Contribution

3
4 The Close—7 Level Selling

A great salesperson will make his prospect feel four of the six needs being:
certainty, uncertainty (or variety), significance, and love and connection.
Most people do not buy on logic although they may claim to. Instead,
they buy on emotion: “How did this make them feel?” Even large corpora-
tions will make decisions based on the gut feeling of a few decision makers
and that is why human decision making is usually irrational.

What Is the Basis of All Human Relationships?

The answer is agreement. Anyone you have ever had a relationship with
in your life shared a high level of agreement with you, and if there was a
disagreement somewhere, that’s likely where the relationship stopped
developing. If you enter enough disagreement or become disagreeable
enough you might get divorced, have a business partners split up, or friend-
ships collapse.
To create an accelerated relationship with your prospect, you must always
agree with whatever he says, no matter how nonsensical. In improv acting
they call this the “yes and” technique, and it’s your job to create agreement
with the prospect and never break it. If you and the prospect break agree-
ment, the relationship will break down, rapport will break down, and your
chances of a sale will go to zero. Throughout the entire sales process, the most
skilled salespeople only get “yesses” out of their prospects and never a “no”
CHALLENGE: When selling aim to get all yesses throughout all parts
of the presentation, the opening, the presentation and the close. If you can
stay in agreement the whole time, you are very likely to win the sale.
Words to eliminate from your vocabulary: No, But, However. These
words create disagreement, create the “no” feeling, and can start an argu-
ment. Replace these words with “Yes and”
As a salesperson you will always be making additions and deletions to
your vocabulary, and we want to eliminate weak words like “basically,” and
 I. 5

introduce glamour words like “Tremendous” or power words like “explo-

sive” and “powerful.”
What words can you use in your own sales negotiations and process?
Take a moment to think and write down five powerful words you’d like to
start using today.

The Power of Words

In his book Messages in Water, Dr. Masaru Emoto conducted experiments
with words and how they affect water under a microscope. He conducted vast
experiments with words spoken to water, written on papers taped to jars of
water, and played music to water and observed the effects under a microscope.

What Dr. Emoto found through his research was that words had a pro-
found effect on water and the energy behind the words of “love,” “thank
you” and other positive emotions formed the water into beautiful crystal-
line shapes. Whereas negative words or phrases like “I hate you” or “I’m
going to kill you” create cancerous looking amorphous blobs that reflect the
negative energy behind words.
This has a profound effect on the human body, considering humans are made
up of 70 percent water or more. It also explains the power of choosing the right
words and more important emotions behind the words to create a pleasing rela-
tionship between two people in selling or any other situation. Whether you
6 The Close—7 Level Selling

believe that or not, we can all agree that words are powerful and drive success. If
you become a master of words you elevate your chances of becoming successful.

The Language of Agreement

Human relationships are founded on agreement, and the brain has built-in
mechanics of letting someone get close or intimate to them. If you follow this
wiring and circuitry you can create a relationship with someone at a rapid
pace in a matter of sixty seconds or less. All of the switches are flipped on in
the mind that says “this person gets me, he understands me.” When you are
in agreement, your internal narratives will be working together rather than
the prospect’s internal narrative resisting you and disagreeing silently.
In the words of the famous poet John Donne:
“No man is an island.”
Whether you are a new-born baby or the president of the United States,
we all rely on relationships and our networks for our basic survival and our
ability to thrive.
For those of us who are pursuing entrepreneurship, business, or real estate
investing, our relationships are our one and only asset.
We all hear the guru’s say, “Your network equals your net worth,” but how
do we build, grow and maintain a rich network of people?
The most successful people in society are the ones who can establish,
build and maintain a large number of significant, intimate, relationships.
But how do we connect on a significant level?
Most people are fairly adept at establishing relationships with people
who are similar to themselves. They can find similar interests and form
“intimacy” and bonds with people who are the same as them over time.
However, most people do not understand the rudiments of establishing
a relationship. Further, most people do not know how to master intimacy
and bring people closer to them quicker.
 I. 7

Mastering the core 7 levels of agreement can make or break you when
meeting someone COLD and you know nothing about them. Many of us
are talented at working with WARM meetings, but COLD meetings have
higher requirements for establishing connection.
I am naturally a “people person” and can connect very easily with people.
However, it’s not enough to know HOW to connect . . . we must under-
stand WHY we connect and HOW connection is established.

7 Core Levels Of Human Agreement: “Clichés” to “Needs”

Level 8 - Mission -
The Greater Good
Level 7 - Needs -
Hidden by Fears
Level 6 - Fears and Weaknesses
Deep Emotional Language
Disagreement

Agreement
Level 5 - Feelings -
Emotional Language
Level 4 - “Hopes and
Dreams”, Future
Level 3 - Opinions-
“Common”
Level 2 - Facts -
“Common”
Level 1 - Clichés -
“Meaningless”
Level 0 - Ego -
“I Language” “Me”

The seven levels of agreement work in a sequence. You cannot jump to the
next level of agreement without succeeding on the previous level.
For example, real natural conversations flow through the levels of inti-
macy in sequence from level 1 to level 7 and they do not deviate from this
rule. It’s very hard to jump to the “next level” without satisfying the previ-
ous level. Furthermore, if you create a disagreement and blockage at a level,
you will not advance into the higher levels until you remove the blockage.
8 The Close—7 Level Selling

These levels need to flow and creating conflict at one level will stop the
sequence of connecting.
For illustration purposes, I will artificially construct a conversation
between two hypothetical people that could accelerate from level 1–7 in
less than three minutes:
1. LEVEL 1: Clichés—ME: “hey, how are you?” YOU: “I’m good!”
2. LEVEL 2: Facts—ME: “Did you get caught in the rain today?” YOU:
“Yes I did, I can’t believe the amount of rain outside!!”
3. LEVEL 3: Opinions—ME: “What do you think about the Winnipeg
Jets coming back to town?” YOU: “I think it’s great for the city, it really
helps put us on the map.”
4. LEVEL 4: Hopes and Dreams—ME: “It sure does put us on the
map! Why were you running around in the rain today? What would
you rather be doing?” YOU: “Ugh, I was running around in the rain
because I’m making deliveries for my office, I’d rather be travelling!”
5. LEVEL 5: Feelings—ME: “How would you feel if you didn’t have to
run around in the rain anymore and could travel the world in the way
you want?” . . . YOU “I would absolutely love that. Nothing excites me
more than travelling.”
6. LEVEL 6: Fears/Weaknesses—ME “What is stopping you from pur-
suing your dream? What’s holding you back?” YOU “I have a family; I
can’t put my dream selfishly before them. I need to support them and
pay the mortgage. “
7. LEVEL 7: Needs—ME “Hmmm . . . What would your family need
to survive so that you can pursue your dream and everyone remains
happy?” YOU “Well . . . etc.”
No matter where you are in the conversation you want to know which level
you are on and how to transition up to the next level using a transition question.
 I. 9

NOTE: If you are selling or negotiating, you cannot “close” until you are on
level 7.
Everyone has needs, and if you can find another person’s needs, you can
truly help them and create life lasting bonds and relationships.
The majority of the population are preprogrammed to be socially guarded
and will conceal weaknesses and needs until you have successfully moved
through levels 1–5. This is why prospects lie when retail sales people say
“Can I help you?” (Level 7, let me fill your needs) and instead should say
“Hey! (level 1 cliché) Have you been here before? (Level 2 Fact). The retail
salesperson hasn’t earned the right to ask a level 6 or 7 question about needs
and things that prospect’s problems, so they deflect the communication
and send you back to level 0.
In general, levels 1–3 are easy to create an agreement on, but getting to
level four (hopes and dreams) is where the rubber hits the road for most
salespeople. This is where you want to have your stock transition questions
ready to go as well as a well-thought-out script and presentation to navigate
the levels and agreement.
Once you create agreement on Level four (hopes and dreams) and transi-
tion up to level 5, an emotional connection starts to form, and that is where
the sale can start to happen.
Many newbie networkers, salespeople, or negotiators will ask right off the
bat, “What are your needs, what do you need?” I especially see this in the net-
work marketing community when I get pitched by new network marketers.
The response to these dead end questions is, “I’m fine, go away” (level 0 ego)
Trying to connect on level 7 without building rapport, connection or inti-
macy through levels 1–6 is nearly impossible. You will get concealment of facts
and lies about levels 6 and 7 until you have established a proper base connection.
At best, your prospect will feed you a lie to deflect your inquiry about their
higher level needs and will likely say: “I’m fine; I really don’t need anything.”
10 The Close—7 Level Selling

How often do salespeople all over the country hear that on a daily basis?
Everyone needs something, including your prospect, and we are all look-
ing for things, and we all have needs all of the time, but the question is,
what does the prospect in front of you need? Understanding and identify-
ing this is critical. Can you make a true connection? Can you make a client
feel as if you are a trusted advisor instead of a salesperson?
“Hey! (level 1 cliché) Have you been here before? (Level 2 Fact). The
retail salesperson hasn’t earned the right to ask a level 6 or 7 question about
needs and things that are prospect’s problems, so they deflect the commu-
nication and send you back to level 0.
The 7 Levels of Agreement come from a counselling background where
counsellors would have to peel back layers and layers of emotional armor
and protection to get to the core needs of a client. As human beings we
protect ourselves from exposing weakness and by using the 7 levels of agree-
ment, you can counsel or “coun-sell” your way into the heart of the matter.
Only from the heart of the matter can you find understanding and reach a
true agreement or make a sale.
Connection happens when you are able to navigate the conversation
through levels 1–7 in the proper sequence. You might be in real estate sales
and through following this sequence, you may discover that, for example,
“their father just died and they’re feeling vulnerable. They are the executor
of father’s house and don’t know who to talk to anyone about real estate
right now. They are looking for an expert. They don’t like realtors and need
to sell immediately but are afraid of contracts, contractors, salespeople, and
commissions. They also don’t want to pay for repairs.”
Opportunities come from connecting and being intimate with the peo-
ple we come into contact with.
All people, rich or poor want one thing: we all want to connect. If you
can connect with a person, and move them through the levels of agreement
 I. 11

without creating conflict or blockage in the sequence, you will find: what
motivates them, what scares them, what their concerns are and finally what
they need to feel secure to work with you and your company.
The 7 levels of agreement has identified a brilliant pattern in social behav-
ior and has cracked the mechanical code for human connection. If you can
memorize or learn a few key questions to “move through the levels,” then
you will never be stuck in a conversation with nothing to say ever again.
You will never be stagnant and will be a master of connection.

The 7 Levels of Agreement Explained and How

to Transition Upwards with Stock Questions
Level 8 - Mission -
The Greater Good
Level 7 - Needs -
Hidden by Fears
Level 6 - Fears and Weaknesses
Deep Emotional Language
Disagreement

Agreement

Level 5 - Feelings -
Emotional Language
Level 4 - “Hopes and
Dreams”, Future
Level 3 - Opinions-
“Common”
Level 2 - Facts -
“Common”
Level 1 - Clichés -
“Meaningless”
Level 0 - Ego -
“I Language” “Me”

Level 0—Ego
The lowest level of human communication is that of the ego. Speaking from
a place of ego will always eventually break connection with your prospect
and can potentially harm all the relationships in your life. People who speak
12 The Close—7 Level Selling

at Level 0 are usually in victim mode or survivor mode and have little to say
that is relevant to other people because they are self-absorbed. People do
not care about you; they care about themselves. As a salesperson you want
to ask them about themselves and not about yourself.
You will find yourself in the language of the ego when you say words like:
1. I
2. Me
Talking about yourself in an “I, I, I” way will turn off a prospect faster
than a light switch; the same works for “me, me, me” when what the pros-
pect wants to hear is “You” (also known as them). If you are in a sales rut, or
are getting negative, or are in victim mode, the quickest way out is to prac-
tice gratitude for the things you have—write them down: “I love my life,” “I
love my family,” “I love my job” (even if you don’t). By telling yourself you
“love” (a form of gratitude) it will rewire your brain out of negativity, into
positivity, and out of the ego.
If you meet a prospect who can’t get out of Level 0 ego, victim mode,
you must do your best to bring him up through the levels of agreement to
connect with him and create connection by feeding his ego. “As an expert
yourself Bob, you would know.” Play him up, make him feel like the boss,
and agree with his ego.

Level 1—Cliché
Clichés are defined by Google as:

cli·ché
klēˈSHā/
noun
noun: cliché; plural noun: clichés; noun: cliche; plural noun: cliches
1. a phrase or opinion that is overused and betrays a lack of original thought.
“the old cliché “one man’s meat is another man’s poison.””
 I. 13

synonyms: platitude, hackneyed phrase, commonplace, banality, old

saying, maxim, truism, stock phrase, trite phrase;
old chestnut
“a good speechwriter will steer clear of clichés”
• a very predictable or unoriginal thing or person.
“each building is a mishmash of tired clichés”

but in a nutshell, a cliché is something so common that it’s meaningless.

Everyday people have meaningless conversation with others on the cliché
level “What’s up?” “Hey,” or “How are you?” (without really caring).
Any basic human being can create agreement with a cliché and we are so
used to it we don’t even think of it:
“Hey!”
Response: “Oh hi, how are you?”
Oftentimes once you are engaged in a conversation, you blew past level
one seconds ago, and it didn’t even register with your brain. That’s how
meaningless a cliché is, so common it’s meaningless.
Note: Intergenerational clichés don’t mix. Saying “Wassup?” to a ninety-
year-old WWII veteran will not go over so well, just as much as if the war
vet gave you slang from the 1930s. It’s best to avoid slang at all costs. People
who do not speak English as their first language will also have trouble with
street clichés too, just as much as they have slang words in their language
that are untranslatable, meaningless, clichés. Move out of clichés as fast as
possible.
1. Cliché Transitioning Questions
⚬⚬ Hey!
⚬⚬ Hello.
⚬⚬ What’s up?
⚬⚬ How are you?
⚬⚬ What have you been up to lately?
14 The Close—7 Level Selling

Level 2—Facts
Once you have agreed on clichés you will naturally move onto facts. Facts are
typically unemotional statistics that are barely more meaningful than clichés.
25 percent of the population wants to be right over all other things, typ-
ically people in the professions of engineering, law, medicine and science.
They will debate you over the most mundane facts, so it’s best to create
agreement and move on.
2. Facts Transitioning Question
⚬⚬ Nonpersonal
◆◆ What was the score of the game?
◆◆ What is the weather forecast?
⚬⚬ Personal
◆◆ What did you do today?
◆◆ What have you learned recently?
◆◆ What have you been reading lately?
◆◆ What is your favorite color, food, song etc.?
⚬⚬ Business
◆◆ How did you hear about us?
◆◆ What made you contact us?
◆◆ Did you receive your service as promised?
◆◆ Did you order the product I suggested?
◆◆ Who did you bring with you to the event?

Level 3 Opinions
Opinions is where most poor conversationalists fall apart. Opinions can be
light or they can be heavy. As long as you typically stay away from the heavy
belief system threatening ones like religion, sex, politics, and money, you
should be able to navigate through this section easily.
 I. 15

Here is where you can start asking some questions about what the client
thought about the product they received in the past—what they like, what
they don’t like. Typically you want to ask open ended questions that follow
the WWWWWH pattern (who, what, where, when, why, and how).
It’s important in keeping the agreement that you only ask questions that they
know the answer to in level 3; otherwise, you will put them into a state of weak-
ness that will break the rapport. Keep it basic at this level. As a rule in sales, only
ask questions you know the answer to and that they know the answer to avoid
getting the “no” feeling or making the prospect feel stupid, which will disable
their decision-making abilities and your ability to close the sale.
3. Opinions Transitioning Questions
⚬⚬ What are your preferences concerning . . . ?
⚬⚬ What are your beliefs about . . . ?
⚬⚬ What do you think about . . . ?
⚬⚬ Why do you prefer that product over another?
⚬⚬ How did you make your decision in the past?
⚬⚬ What have you purchased before?
⚬⚬ Why did you decide to contact us today?
⚬⚬ Who do you usually make decisions with? Your wife?
⚬⚬ How can I serve you best?

Level 4 Hopes and Dreams

Transitioning up to hopes and dreams properly is where the amateurs and the
professionals are quickly separated. Creating agreement on the opinions level
usually ruins most amateurs and they do not know how to transition into level
4—hopes and dreams. Hopes and dreams is future looking and if people are
not comfortable at levels 1, 2, and 3, they will not answer level four truthfully.
Level four is where you find out about what the prospect wants ideally
in your product or service; if they could have it their way, what would that
16 The Close—7 Level Selling

be? Some salespeople will say, “If I could wave a magic wand, …” which is
kind of hokey but can work. At this point the client has connected with
you enough to reveal what they want, or what they think they want (some
men walk into car dealerships wanting a Porsche deep down but think they
want a minivan as their wife instructed them to purchase).
Hopes and dreams is where you can get the client’s goals, six, twelve, or
eighteen months into the future, what the perfect solution would look like,
what their “wish list” of benefits and features is.
4. Hopes and Dreams Transition Questions

Business
⚬⚬ Where do you want to be in the next six, twelve, or eighteen months?
⚬⚬ If you could design the perfect package, what would it have in it?
⚬⚬ If you managed to hit that goal how would it change your life?
Your business?
⚬⚬ What kind of result are you looking to emulate?
⚬⚬ What goals do you have for your business?

Personal
⚬⚬ If you could live any way you liked, how would you like to live?
⚬⚬ If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you like to live?
⚬⚬ What goals do you have for your life?
⚬⚬ What area of study would you like to become an expert in?
⚬⚬ If you could be famous for something, what would you like to be
famous for?
⚬⚬ What would you like written on your tombstone? In your obituary?
⚬⚬ What one thing would make you truly happy?
⚬⚬ What personal qualities do you hope to develop in the future?
⚬⚬ What skills do you hope to develop in your lifetime?
⚬⚬ What do you dream about being the best in the world at doing?
 I. 17

⚬⚬ What are things you dream about having?

⚬⚬ What are things you dream about doing?
⚬⚬ What are things you dream about being?
⚬⚬ What would you do if you knew you could not fail at it?

Level 5 Feelings
Once you create agreement on Level 4, Hopes and Dreams, it’s time to
transition into Level 5—feelings. This is where the sale starts to get emo-
tional and you can hook the dream, the hope, the wish, and the goal with
the feelings it’s going to produce from having the dream fulfilled.
You can stay on Level 5 to create a euphoric state of good feelings by future
pacing what life will be like once the buyer has the result he wants. Paint a
picture for the prospect, show them how awesome it’s going to look in their
mind, or how amazing others will think of them. Create a vivid picture that
makes the client say “I want it.” This is a very powerful tool for bringing the
emotions up right before the crash in level 6 into fears and weaknesses.
5. Feelings Transition Questions
⚬⚬ If we were able to deliver that result on time and on budget, how
would that feel?
⚬⚬ How would it feel to tell your family that you got this accomplished?
⚬⚬ How are you going to feel when your boss recognizes that you
made the right decision for the company?
⚬⚬ How’s it going to feel to put your head on the pillow tonight and
know that you handled this today and it’s all behind you?

Level 6 Fears and Weaknesses

This is where you transition out of the euphoric feelings of achieving the
result into the pain and suffering, fears, weaknesses, deficiencies and the
reality that the prospect has without your product or service.
18 The Close—7 Level Selling

If you have flowed nicely through levels 1–6, you will start to get some
connection and some truth out of the prospect because you have followed
the 7 level process properly.
Level 6 questions are meant to inflict some pain on the prospect and cre-
ate a need. Excellent sales people understand how to do this as a natural
part of the process. You can stack level 6 questions to create more and more
pain before you relieve it in level 7.
6. Fears, Failures, Weaknesses, Sample Questions
⚬⚬ Why hasn’t this happened for you yet?
⚬⚬ Why haven’t you achieved that goal already?
⚬⚬ What’s stopping you from having that result right now?
⚬⚬ Why haven’t the other programs worked for you so far?
⚬⚬ What are you missing to have that goal right now?
⚬⚬ What’s your biggest fear that is stopping you?
⚬⚬ What would the worst case scenario be? Walk me through it.
⚬⚬ What makes you feel like a failure?
⚬⚬ What makes you feel inadequate?
⚬⚬ What is your biggest fear in life?

Level 7 Needs
Once you drill down on the pain in level 6 and get the buyer to see that
there is clearly a gap between where he is today and where he wants to be,
this is where you start asking about his needs to relieve the pain.
Ideally, you want to get the client to say that he needs your product or
service, or he needs what you are offering. If you offer coaching, you want
him to say “a coach.”
 I. 19

Once you have agreement on his needs you are at the top of the 7 Levels
of agreement and you are in position to make your presentation and close
the deal.
7. Needs Sample Questions
⚬⚬ What do you need to bridge the gap between where you are and
where you want to be? (Ideally get him to say your product or
service)
⚬⚬ What do you need to be able to make a decision today?
⚬⚬ Of all the factors we spoke about today, what is the most import-
ant one to you?
⚬⚬ Have I asked you everything that’s important to you?
⚬⚬ What do you need in order to be secure in this transaction?
⚬⚬ What do you need in order to be safe?
⚬⚬ What do you need in order to be significant?
⚬⚬ What do you need in order to be competent?
⚬⚬ What do you need in order to be powerful?
⚬⚬ What do you need in order to belong?
⚬⚬ What do you need to be clear about?
⚬⚬ What do you need in order to build something of lasting value?
⚬⚬ What do you need to feel special to others?
⚬⚬ What do you need in order to feel like you are understood?
⚬⚬ What do you need in order to do something great?
⚬⚬ What do you need in order to achieve something that will last?
⚬⚬ What recognition do you need?

Post Level 7- Level 8—Mission and The Greater Good

If you are selling in a one-to-many situation, such as a stage speaking sce-
nario, you will have to connect on level 8 as well which is the greater good.
20 The Close—7 Level Selling

Level 8 is the mission, the thing that is bigger than each individual, for
the sum is greater than the parts. All great speakers and leaders throughout
history have banded together groups based on Level 8. For the scope of this
book, we are going to keep the agreement between levels 1–7 as it’s mostly
designed for one-on-one sales situations.
Now, let’s pause for a moment and talk about emotional quotient (EQ).
Each one of us know someone who just doesn’t get it when they’re in a
conversation, talks without listening, or talks over the client. What about
those people—can they learn? The answer is, yes, if they’re aware of their
weaknesses and willing to. If that described you, it’s time to realize you may
not be as emotionally intelligent or “intuitive” as some of the natural born
sales people around you, and that’s okay. It’s never too late to learn. In the
pages to follow I’m going to give you a step-by-step guide into the propri-
etary process I’ve used in selling.

Live Action Script—Opening

<<Have energy and enthusiasm right from the start, be one notch above
your prospect—not two notches, just one>>

LEVEL 1, 2, 3 clichés, facts and opinions

CLOSER: Hi, is _____________ There?

BUYER: This is he.

CLOSER: This is [[YOUR FIRST AND LAST NAME]], the senior

strategist from the Stefan Aarnio High Performance Company, how are
you today? [[SETTER NAME]] set up this meeting today for [[TIME]]
and I reviewed your application . . . Do you have quiet space, pen and paper
and a computer with internet access? (If no, reschedule the meeting—this is
 I. 21

a very powerful call __________________ and it could potentially be life

changing so I would appreciate it if we could schedule another time to do this
call; it takes anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour usually, and we need
those three things: a quiet space, pen and paper, and a computer with internet
access. Do you make business decisions alone or with a spouse or business part-
ner? ((If yes, please ensure [[PARTNER NAME]] is on the call as well so we
don’t waste your time. ) )When would be better for you and I’ll reset this call
into my calendar).

BUYER: Yes I do

CLOSER: Fantastic, this is going to be a powerful call today, we are going

to review some of the goals that you have for real estate investing as well
as some your life goals, and then if we have a fit, I’m going to go ahead
and show you some of our award-winning programs that can dramatically
improve your financial life; sound fair enough?

BUYER: Yes

CLOSER: Great, you are in good hands. Do you mind if I ask you a few
questions so that I can learn more about you, where you are today, and
where you want to go?

BUYER: Go ahead,

CLOSER: Fantastic, __________________, how did you hear about us?

BUYER: STOCK ANSWER—FACEBOOK

CLOSER: Great, and what do you like about our material so far? (level 3
opinions)
22 The Close—7 Level Selling

CLOSER: Have you ever purchased any high-level coaching or mentor-

ing programs before? What did you like or dislike about those programs?
(IF he has done a program before, find out what worked and didn’t and most
importantly—how did you make the decision to move ahead with that pro-
gram over others?)

LEVEL 4—HOPES AND DREAMS

CLOSER: Where do you want to be in real estate in the next six, twelve, or
eighteen months? (Get them to name a number of deals, or a dollar amount
they would like to be earning actively in real estate. Try to nail that number
down. Common numbers are $30,000, $100,000, $200,000, $250,000 and
$300,000. Qualify that number with what they are earning right now, try to
bring it as close to reality as possible. You can’t go from $20,000 to a million
overnight)

CLOSER: If you managed to hit that goal, how would it change your life?
What would you do differently?

LEVEL 5 FEELINGS
CLOSER: Imagine we got started today, and you were able to achieve that
goal: how would it feel to come home and show your family the money that
they earned? What do you think they would say? How would that feel?

LEVEL 6 FEARS AND WEAKNESSES

CLOSER: So ____________________, what has stopped you from
achieving that goal in the past?
 I. 23

CLOSER: What’s your biggest headache with your life and your business
right now?

CLOSER: What would be your ideal program if you could design it?

LEVEL 7 NEEDS
CLOSER: Of all the factors we spoke about, which one do you feel is most
important to you?

CLOSER: Have I asked everything that’s important to you?

CLOSER: What do you need to bridge the gap between where you are
today and where you want to go? (Get them to say a coach, once they say
coaching, now it’s time to show them the presentation . . . you might have to
follow up with: Would you say you need a coach to hold your hand and walk
you from point A to point B making sure you are doing it right?)

Note: You should now have their financial goal written down and now be
calculating how to hit it with our programs.
PART TWO
7 LEVEL SELLING—THE ART OF A
SUCCESSFUL SALES PRESENTATION

25
II

Anatomy of a Sale (Straight Line)

Your sales presentation should be scripted for mass control from opening/collec-
tion to the presentation to the close. The stronger the script, the tighter control
you have over your own process, and if you are on a sales team, the management
has a better time controlling the sales force and quality control in general.

A Proper Sale
The Straight Line

1) Opening/Collection 2) The Presentation 3) The Close

27
28 The Close—7 Level Selling

A good sale is straight from open to close offering no room to get off track.
Jordan Belfort, the real Wolf of Wall Street, invented the Straight-Line
system that follows the correct theory of pursing the shortest path to
money from opening to closing.
The salesperson controls the outcome and everything is preplanned.
NOTE: Some salespeople will violently oppose the use of scripts mak-
ing claims that it makes them sound “wooden or lifeless.” Scripts are 100
percent necessary for selling. You must write out your script in advance,
polish it to perfection, and then keep it with you if selling over the phone.
If selling in person, you must have it memorized to be effective. Natural
salespeople and natural closers typically follow a framework in their head
anyways. If you are a natural, you will take your sales game to the next level
by scripting out your entire presentation and polishing the words until they
pop from the page.
First: Write your script: opening/collection, then the presentation, then
the close.
Second: Practice reading your script until you sound natural and like you
aren’t reading from a script
Third: Memorize and internalize your script so it becomes an uncon-
scious competency and you don’t even have to think about the mechanics.
You want to be on script to conserve your improvisational energy. A
salesperson, or any person for that matter, only has a limited amount of
improvisational energy a day, also known as creative or emotional energy.
If you are going without a script day in and day out, you will burn out,
cut corners in your presentation and eventually fail to sell anything at all.
Always use a script.

Selling versus Negotiating

Selling and negotiating are closing related.
 II 29

In my book The Ten Commandments of Negotiation, a negotiation has

three phases like a sale and will look similar. But the main difference is that
a negotiation is two-sided, and each side pushes and pulls, whereas a good
sale is one-sided and goes in one direction. If you are unscripted, you run
the risk of turning your sales presentation into a negotiation where the
other side starts fighting back and typically, if at all, you want to reserve any
negotiation for the closing sequence of the sale.
The 3C system for negotiation Collect, Clutter, Close, creates a cre-
scendo of possibilities that balloon out in the middle of the negotiation,
and that is precisely what you don’t want to do in a sale. In a sale you want
extreme control, so the best thing to do is have a well-scripted, rehearsed,
and polished presentation to keep you on the straight line structure.

What a Negotiation Is Structured Like

Note the bulge of possibilities in the middle.

1) Collect 2) Clutter 3) Close

30 The Close—7 Level Selling

A Well-Structured Sale vs. A Badly Structured Sale

GOOD STRUCTURE—Extremely limited possibilities,
closed, control, can be a lower skilled salesperson
with great tools and training. Strong structure.
A Proper Sale
The Straight Line

1) Opening/Collection 2) The Presentation 3) The Close

BAD STRUCTURE—Too many possibilities, too open, no control,

must be a natural or excellent negotiator to close with no structure.

1) The Opening 2) The Presentation 3) The Close

The 7 levels in a presentation: open, create pain, and leave them better than
you found them.
To follow the 7-Level Style you used in the opening and collection, once
you are on Level 7 (needs) with the prospect, it’s time to build value in
your sales presentation. Your presentation needs to follow the logical and
emotional curve starting with clichés, building into facts, opinions, hopes
 II 31

and dreams, feelings and finally plunge into a pit of despair called “fears and
weaknesses.”
Every great salesperson is a master of creating pain and a need for what they
are selling, and you are no different. Of course whoever you’re selling to is in
pain, because there’s a gap between where they are and where they want to
go and your offer (product or service) is the bridge over the gap, the medi-
cine to their sickness that will get them to a better life.
Always leave them on a high note at the end with the feeling that future will
be better than today if they would only take your offer and leave fear of loss and
scarcity for not taking the offer today.

The 7 Level Presentation Curve

Your offer must be the bridge over the gap

The medicine to their sickness.
7

Need is Realized by Prospect Result and

er
Prospect realizes his problem, r Off Guarantee Fulfilled
enters market You “A better life than today”
5
4
3
2
1

1 Level 1 - Cliché
2 Level 2 - Facts 6
3 Level 3 - Opinions The Gap
4 Level 4 - Hopes & Dreams What’s he missing between
today and better tomorrow?
5 Level 5 - Feelings
Answer: Your Offer
6 Level 6 - Fears & Weaknesses Pit of Despair
7 Level 7 - Needs Pain, Suffering, Uncertainty
32 The Close—7 Level Selling

Empowering Words and Disempowering Words

As a salesperson you are a wordsmith, and like a poet, you want to be con-
stantly polishing, pruning, and trimming your vocabulary of weeds so you
can let the true flowers grow. This is the way it is with every craft on your
life’s journey. You can become better if you want to.
In other words, make it your mission to remove the following words from
your vocabulary:
Disempowering Words—These words are generally weak and will
weaken your agreement with your prospect. They will not position you for
power or influence, so eliminate them and replace them with empowering
words below:
No Pretty much
But Sign
However Contract
Basically Buy

Empowering Words—These words will empower your position and will

make you appear more certain and powerful while handling the prospect.
Yes and Without a doubt
Yes and Endorse
Yes and Agreement
Certainty Move ahead

When describing your product, service or offer, get used to using power
words and glamour words that will make your offer seem more powerful
and glamorous rather than run-of-the-mill boring words. Be intentional
about your selling process, your scripts, your words and your body language.
Intentionality is a process of thinking and planning in everything you do.
 II 33

Insert List of Power Words

Powerful Dramatically
Unparalleled Award winning
Dynamic Unheard of
Innovative National Award Winner
Explosive Exclusive
Fastest Growing Hand selected
Best in class Proven

Insert List of Glamor Words

Tremendous State-of-the-art
Marvelous Exciting
Dazzling Artisan
Unique Inspired
Fantastic Unforgettable
Outstanding Champion
New Unbelievable

Real Rapport vs. Fake Rapport—

Trusted Advisor, Medical Doctor
Old traditional sales books dating back almost a hundred years like How To
Win Friends and Influence People will advise a salesperson to build rapport
by finding commonality. They want you to talk about fishing, or what-
ever hobbies the prospect has, but at the end of the day this is fake rapport
because you don’t care about the prospects hobbies and they don’t care that
you are asking. What is common among all people looking to buy things is
that they want to work with an expert.
34 The Close—7 Level Selling

An expert is someone who is 1) sharp as a tack 2) enthusiastic as hell 3)

an expert in their field.
Think of going to see the medical doctor, who is typically a specialist who
has spent ten-plus years in school and hundreds of thousands of dollars on
his or her education. He or she has the shiny degrees and plaques on the
wall, went to the best school—medical school—and is the undisputed mas-
ter of his office.
The doctor makes you show up at 9:30 am for your appointment at
10:00 am, and at 10:15 they let you into one of the examining rooms and
you wait another thirty minutes to see the doctor.
You were scheduled for 10 am, but of course the doctor is king so the
doctor shows up at 10:45 am, forty-five5 minutes late!
The doctor asks you a short list of questions, pokes and prods you, makes
a diagnosis, writes you a prescription, gives it to you, and leaves. The doctor
has made a sale, and typically most people will listen to whatever the doctor
said because he/she is an expert—typically sharp as a tack, enthusiastic as
hell, and an expert in their field, and you don’t dare question the diagnosis
or the drugs they are pushing on you.
You are in rapport with the doctor because you came to see an expert and
they acted like one.
Could the doctor be wrong? Absolutely, doctors are frequently wrong,
but we still obey and treat them like experts and listen intently. Be the doc-
tor. Build the rapport and be the expert. What if you entered every sales
negotiation or scenario with that level of authority? In this scenario, you
expect to win.
In your selling practice you want to be as specialized and as professional
as a medical doctor (but never show up late for meetings) only better.
Top level salespeople in every field, whether it’s real estate, financial
services, insurance, car sales, etc. who run their practice to the level of
 II 35

professionalism of a medical doctor, study sales like a medical doctor, and

invest in themselves like a medical doctor but earn money in excess of a
medical doctor.
You want to be the expert and trusted advisor in your field so that your
recommendations are taken like medicine just as a doctor would make a
prescription.

Conscious vs. Subconscious Communication

To get into rapport with the prospect, you must be 1) sharp as a tack 2)
enthusiastic as hell 3) an expert in your field.
Now you can’t just come out and tell them that you are all of the above,
because they would never believe you. Instead you must communicate the
essence of being an expert through three things: your body language, your
tone, and the words you choose to say. Walk and talk with authority. Share
wisdom with authority.
A well-thought-out script can handle the words you must say, but follow-
ing a script won’t make you sell without proper delivery.
58 percent of communication is body language
33 percent is tone
8 percent is words used
These numbers are approximated from several sources and you may see
variances on those numbers, but what remains undeniably is that words
and conscious communication account for a small fraction of human
communication.
What is much more important is the physiology of how we present our-
selves and our body through body language and the effect on our tone of
voice.
If you are selling over the phone, you eliminate body language as the
prospect cannot see you (but he can hear your posture) so communication
36 The Close—7 Level Selling

becomes nearly 80 percent tone and 20 percent words! The human brain is
made up of three parts: the thinking brain or the neocortex, followed by the
mammalian brain or the emotional brain, and in the middle ruling the entire
brain stem is the reptilian brain which only knows fear and greed. How does
this impact your sale? Your body language and tone speak emotionally to
the midbrain and lower brain and thus control the actions of the body.
The thinking brain, the neocortex cannot by itself make decisions. It can
analyze, it can think, it can imagine, it can create, but it does not have deci-
sion-making power. The lower brain, namely the mammalian and reptilian
brains control our decision making and our limbic system, which causes us
to take action (or lack of action) on certain offers.
To master subverbal communication, you must master your tone and deliv-
ery of your pitch. A great sales presentation is both logical and emotional,
and no matter how beautifully you craft the words, if you do not perform
them like a professional actor would deliver a script on stage, the words won’t
matter without delivery. Delivery is everything. Do you pause at just the right
moment? Do you ask questions? Do you give the human in the other end a
moment to share, and make small talk—which is a nervous function but also
an autopilot function of nearly every human when they talk?

Neocortex:
neopallium
Rational Brain
[Higher Thinking]

Intermediate:
paleopallium
Limbic System
[Emotions]
Primative:
archipallium
[Survival,
Aggression]
 II 37

Tone Training
All top salespeople have one thing in common—they all sound amazing!
Whether you are a natural salesperson or worked hard to become profi-
cient, all salespeople share the same commonality of having tremendously
shaped tone and almost a musical sound to how they communicate over the
phone and in person. It’s almost as if they could sell an Eskimo an igloo in
the Bahamas. You want to listen to their voice and tone forever.
This makes logical sense when you consider that the tone of voice is
subverbal communication which accounts for nearly all of the brain’s emo-
tional decision-making power, and people buy on emotions, not logic!
Consider the opposite—poor salespeople with low charisma and a low
likability factor usually misuse tone. They may be too flat, too wooden, too
forced, too fake, wrong amounts of energy at the wrong times, and over-
all the words, tone and body language do not create a congruent picture.
Congruent means it must line up in the prospect’s mind. If things don’t
“line up” or “make sense” or “something is off,” the bad gut feeling will start
to creep in, and the emotional brain will want to fight or take flight. In
sales, your prospects will flee if you have bad tone, or they will “call you
back later,” which they never will.
Tone allows you to communicate the emotion that you care about the
prospect, you care about his situation, you are a human being too, you
understand his pains and struggles and rather than being tossed aside like
some kind of-cheap overseas telemarketer with a canned, robotic “Hello sir,
may I speak to Mr. Smith?” You will rather be welcomed as an “old friend”
on a subconscious level.
Tone is so fundamental to mammal communication that babies, dogs,
children, people who do not speak your language, and other life forms that
don’t have a grasp of “words” of the English language can still communicate
38 The Close—7 Level Selling

effectively with tone and gestures alone. Tone is the key to speaking to the
emotional brain, and if you want to be a master salesperson, you must mas-
ter your use of tone.
Overall there are twenty-nine types of tonality used in human communica-
tion, but ten core influencing types of tone. In your sales career you must study
and master these types of tone to give your scripts and presentations the warm,
musical, “I care” feeling, that the majority of salespeople fail to ever achieve.

10 Core Influencing Types of Tone

As identified by Jordan Belfort
1. “I care,” “I really want to know”—upbeat enthusiasm, genuine curiosity
2. Declarative as question—Raise the inflection at the end of a statement
to imply a question. This forces the listeners mind to “listen in” because
tonally they have been asked a question, but in words, they have been
told a statement. Used frequently in opening scripts: “Hey, is this
John? . . . Hi my name is Bill Smith, calling from the ABC Company,
in Winnipeg, Manitoba.”
3. Mystery/intrigue—Lower your voice as if to tell a secret that are only
letting them in on.
4. Scarcity—Lower your voice just above a whisper, with a sense of
urgency and scarcity.
5. Absolute certainty—A firmer, more definitive tone of power and cer-
tainty from the solar plexus, conviction.
6. Utter sincerity—Velvety smooth, almost apologetic, calm, confident,
low pressure, sincere at the highest possible level.
7. Reasonable man—I’m reasonable, your reasonable, this is a reasonable
request.
 II 39

8. Hypothetical money-aside—hypothetically speaking, money aside,

does the idea make sense to you?
9. Implied obviousness—It’s beyond obviousness that your product or
service is a winner.
10. “I feel your pain”—Complete and utter sincerity, used to identify pri-
mary and secondary pain points. The “Bill Clinton” tone.
Learn, master, and memorize these types of tone and apply them to your
opening, presentation, and closing scripts like a musical composer would
add dynamics like “loud, soft, quickly, slowly, staccato, etc.” to his music.
Mastering the right tone at the right time is something that the clear major-
ity of salespeople completely ignore, especially if they haven’t scripted their
presentation and are using mental energy to improvise. When it comes to
selling, delivery is more important than mechanics. Master your tone, and
you will master delivery.

Disabling the Conscious Mind—The Neocortex

As a salesperson, you can only speak between 100–200 words per minute,
but the subconscious human mind races at 500 words per minute. This is
called the internal monologue your prospect is having with himself during
all parts of your sales encounter. Always be mindful of his fears, hesitations,
and limiting beliefs.
You might say “Our product is best in class” and the prospect will nod in
agreement, but his subconscious says, “Says who! Yeah right, this thing is
probably a piece of crap and this is just another sales guy.”
You cannot speak fast enough at 100 words per minute to compete with
the 500 word per minute subconscious mind, so a master salesperson does
not compete with the subconscious mind; instead he disables it in one of
three ways.
40 The Close—7 Level Selling

1. Tell a story—Facts tell, stories sell. When you begin presenting your
offer your prospect’s analytical neocortex will be racing against you to
refute and challenge any claims you make. You may get someone so
wrapped up in facts that they are operating completely in their neo-
cortex and “have to think about it” or “have to crunch the numbers.”
This is called an analyst frame, and it is death to your sale because the
neocortex is unable to make a decision; those decisions are controlled
by the mammalian and reptilian brains. To disable the analyst frame,
you can put it to bed by telling it a story. The most powerful type of
story is a third-party story about how others had success, perhaps a
case study, client testimonial, how others made decisions in the past,
the story about the client who missed out, the story of the client who
waited too long, the story of the old widow who never got married
because she waited until it was the right time. For millennia, humans
have remembered and told stories to transmit major tribal and life
information. The Vikings had the Sagas, the Christians have the New
Testament of the Bible, the Greeks had the Odyssey, the Romans had
the Aeneid, and inside these epic stories were lessons on life. Many
of these epic stories are still around today because human brains are
wired to remember complex information through stories. Analytics
and numbers will always be forgotten at some point, but stories are
forever.
2. Ask a question—One of the fastest ways to disable the conscious mind
is to ask it a question. When you are speaking, the conscious mind of
your prospect is hammering away at 500 words per minute, but when
you ask it a question, the words per minute goes to zero, and all of their
processing power goes into finding an answer, not judging or chal-
lenging you and your claims. Questions are powerful because they not
 II 41

only disable the conscious mind but also make the prospect feel more
involved in the process and engages them.
Two rules about asking questions:
Rule #1: Never ask a question they don’t know the answer to: this
threatens the prospect, creates the “no” feeling, challenges them, breaks
rapport, breaks agreement, and can send your sale into a death spiral where
the prospect feels stupid and can’t find enough confidence to make a deci-
sion. A confused mind doesn’t buy. If they don’t know the answer to the
question, feed it to them subtly in advance. For example, “My dear old
friend, John Smith, has eight kids . . . How many kids does he have?” The
prospect says, “Eight.” You say, “That’s exactly right!”
Rule #2 of asking questions: Never ask a question you don’t know the
answer to and the prospect doesn’t know the answer to. This can com-
pletely derail and destroy your sale. Many amateur salespeople will ask a
question that neither they nor the prospect know an answer to, and this can
send the presentation into chaos. Don’t take the risk; choose your questions
well. If they don’t know the answer, give it to them in advance or give them
options to choose from: “Would you prefer red or blue?”
3. Speak to their internal monologue—Now obviously you cannot
only ask questions and tell stories throughout the entire sale; there
are parts to the sale like the closing process, the opening process,
the presentation etc. where you do not have the luxury of telling
pure stories or asking pure questions. So instead, to control the con-
scious mind, you want to tailor your presentation and your close to
what the prospect is likely to be thinking anyways. This can take
some practice; you may have to record yourself presenting and
watch yourself over and over again from the other side to develop
the internal monologue that the prospect will have. If you can speak
to their concerns and objections as they form during a presentation
42 The Close—7 Level Selling

or during a close, the prospect will say, “Wow, this guy is reading my
mind! He knows exactly what I want and he gets me, I trust him, I’m
in.” This is a major trust builder: if you can get your presentation
to the point where you can read the prospects mind in advance, the
same way a chess grandmaster sees eight moves ahead, you can see
the future as well with a well scripted, rehearsed, and planned sales
presentation.

Irrational Hot Buttons

In the movie Saving Mr. Banks, Tom Hanks, who plays Walt Disney, is try-
ing to purchase the movie rights to the famous book Mary Poppins from
P. L. Travers during the 1960s when Disney as an empire is rolling out hit
after hit and Walt Disney appears to be on a conquest to own every single
great children’s story across the landscape, musicalize it, and turn it into a
movie. His young daughter loves the book Mary Poppins, as it brings her so
much joy, and Disney, as a good father, promises his daughter that he will
bring that small children’s story to the big screen. For twenty years, Disney
pitches Travers persistently over and over again in different ways trying to
buy the script through any means necessary.
The movie opens with Travers entering financial hardship: her bank
accounts are running out, she lets her staff go, and she is in jeopardy of
losing her house. Financially, her book royalties have dried up, and a movie
deal with Disney is the next logical business and financial move for her.
The movie deal would not only be logical, but it would be a windfall and
catapult her to even greater success.
Finally, Disney flies Travers to his offices in Los Angeles and in good
faith, has the entire movie script for Mary Poppins made in advance: char-
acter and scene sketches are done, and he has a great poet and composer on
staff to make the iconic songs for the movie. All Travers must do is agree
 II 43

to sell the movie rights by signing one piece of paper, and she will get the
biggest financial windfall of her life.
Travers shows up and she is a miserable, old, crusty English lady who is
completely disagreeable to everything America and the core beliefs Disney
stands for. In fact, she seems to have a hate for musicals, music, cartoons and
everything Disney—even Mickey Mouse! Walt Disney spends the entire
movie selling, negotiating, reselling, reselling, and reselling the vision and
the idea until finally the real issue is revealed. Travers loves her characters
and doesn’t want to give up Mary Poppins because she loves “her” but more
importantly Mr. Banks who represents her father in real life, who was a nice
guy, but a horrible drunk that ruined her family.
Disney wanted to portray Mr. Banks as his own father figure, a banker
with a moustache who was stern, not fun, took care of the family but was
absent. Travers wanted Mr. Banks remembered as a fun loving, nice guy
with no facial hair, like her father.
The crux of sale happens when Travers refuses to sign the movie rights and
flies home to England to sit in her house as her money runs out and she slowly
lose everything. Disney, on good faith, flies to England, shows up at the door,
and realizes that Travers’s hot button is that she wants Mr. Banks to be remem-
bered as a nice and fun man, so finally a Disney changes the ending of the movie
from a cold Mr. Banks ending to an alternate where Mr. Banks comes home a
nice guy and flies a kite with his family, thus the hit song “Let’s Go Fly a Kite.”
Travers is sold, she remembered her father as being the kind of guy who
would do such a thing, and reluctantly she sells the movie rights.
The moral of the story is that people do not make rational decisions.
Travers, the author, was broke, almost bankrupt, and on the edge of los-
ing her house, and still she refused to sign her movie rights over to one of
the most successful film makers of all time because of her hot button—her
love for her father. In fact, her real name was Helen Goff but changed her
44 The Close—7 Level Selling

name to (P. L. Travers) with Travers being the name of her father. The entire
sale was made and the negotiation was won because Disney understood the
value of Travers’s hot button, and when he found it, it he pushed it as hard
as he could and made movie history with the hit movie Mary Poppins.
People never buy on rationality; they buy rather on “hot buttons” and
irrational thinking. Therefore if you can understand their triggers immedi-
ately, you will understand their underlying drivers or needs.
People put their dogs in “doggy spas” to make them feel good about their
dog. The dog does not care or maybe even know he’s in a spa. The dog won’t
say “thank you” or express his gratitude, but the owner does it because the
dog is a hot button.
They say the man in the church and the man in the bar are looking for the
same thing—to belong to something. It’s the salesperson’s job to provide
that belonging and meet that need.
Hot buttons can be anything, and if you can identify what they are in the
questioning phase, you can satisfy the irrational need.
Some hot buttons might be color, size, brand, shape, white glove
service, guarantees, warranties, pets, children, spouses, girlfriends/boy-
friends, to belong, to contribute, to be remembered, get laid, get paid,
live forever, youth, health, beauty, loyalty, a relationship, and too many
more to list.
Hot buttons typically come from the prospect’s desire for status,
respect, recognition, personal prestige, or enjoyment. However one of
the most common mistakes a salesperson makes is to view the prospect
through the lens of their own thinking. Rookies do this all the time.
Do not assume you know a person’s hot button in advance, because
you will only find it through proper questioning, and once you find it,
push it!
 II 45

The Risk of Presenting Features and Benefits

That Are of No Interest to the Customer
By default, most average salespeople overtime without a script degrade their
presentation down to a series of features, benefits, and price and will rely on
a guarantee to close. In general no one cares about the features—ever. What
we all want are the benefits.
Getting stuck on features is a trap and typically, unless the prospect asks
more about a certain feature or benefit, he doesn’t care. What is paramount
above all things is the result and the guarantee.
This does not mean that you don’t explain any of the features to your
prospect, but you need to find out what is important to him, not to you.
Too many salespeople are thinking about what is important to them, rather
than what’s important to the customer.
In the wise words of Warren Buffet, “What you love about you is your
hobby; what others love about you is your business.”
You don’t want to go ranting about the ease of online access when the
customer replies, “I’m old, I don’t go online.” In that case you want to talk
about written materials, hard media, and something the customer can
actually use. When you present features of no value, you will quickly lose
rapport with and the interest of the customer.
To quickly assess what type of person you are dealing with, generally
there are four types of buyers who speak four different languages:

Speaking Their Language—Four Personality Styles

Understand that there are four types of buyers out in the world, and each
buyer has a specific language that he speaks. If you approach the right buyer
with the right language, you will be able to communicate. In contrast, if you
46 The Close—7 Level Selling

have the wrong language for the wrong type of person, you will have major
difficulties in striking a deal.
Typically speaking, when making a sales presentation, you need to appeal
to all four personality styles at once because you do not know who you are
really dealing with. This applies in a magnified way with selling to groups of
people. You have no idea who is in the audience and your ability to check
in with every single person becomes impossible.

DISC—Dominance, Influence, Submission, and Compliance

The DISC system was created by William Moulton Marston in 1928 when he
published the book “Emotions of Normal People. The History of DISC began
with the elements of Fire, Earth, Air, and Water. The theory behind these four
quadrants of personality style was originally written by Empodocles in 444 b.c.
Intuitively we know that there are four different types of people. If you
watch any TV sitcom or any movie there are always these same four types of
 II 47

characters played over and over again. Whether it’s the Simpsons (Homer,
Marge, Lisa, Bart) or Seinfeld ( Jerry, Elaine, George, Kramer), there are
always four types of people that are balanced out by one another.
Dominance—5 percent of the population. These are your fire, police,
military, and business leaders. They are outgoing and task oriented, and D
is for direct. These people are results focused and want to get down to the
bottom line immediately. They are task focused and seek to control their
surroundings. They also believe that they are more powerful than their
surroundings and believe that their surroundings are hostile. Dominance
types are not interested in making friends, nor are they are not interested
in holding hands and singing “Kumbayah.” They ask straight questions
and want straight results. When you communicate with a D-type, deliver
straight communication, give it to them straight, and give them results. If
they were to choose a vehicle they would likely choose a Mercedes, and
their favorite color would be black—the color of dominance.
Influence—35 percent of the population. High I-types are your nat-
ural sales people, advertising, marketing, public relations, tourism, retail,
comedians and onstage performers. These people are outgoing and peo-
ple oriented, I stands for Influence. I-types want to see and be seen and
they want to be friends, want to be liked, drink wine, have lunch, drive
the convertible around, live a great lifestyle, have fun, and speak in public.
I-types believe they are more powerful than their surroundings and believe
that their surroundings are friendly. When communicating with an I-type,
deliver them the sizzle, not the steak. They want to know how fast, fun,
exciting and cool looking the new idea is. They also want everyone to know
how great it will look for them to make this new decision. If they were to
choose a vehicle, they would choose the sexy convertible and their favorite
color would be red—a hot, flashy, look-at-me color.
48 The Close—7 Level Selling

Submission—35 percent of the population—S-types are your teach-

ers, nurses, administrative, supporters, finance, HR, manufacturing, and
generally nice people. They want stable, steady, supportive, and sincere
communication. S-types also love guarantees, want to feel safe, secure, and
legitimacy in a transaction. They perceive the environment to be more
powerful than they are and perceive the environment to be friendly. They
are reserved people-people and are not necessarily outgoing like the high
I-types. When doing business with S-types they want the right thing and
they want to make sure that no one is getting hurt. If they were to choose a
vehicle it would likely be a minivan that could fit all of their friends and pets.
Their favorite color of choice would be blue because it is calm and steady.
 II 49

Compliance—25 percent of the population—C-types are engineers,

accountants, attorneys, doctors, accountants, architects and computer pro-
grammers. These people want statistics, facts, and figures. They do not want
to know that roughly half of the time the program is successful; they want
to know that 48.34 percent of the time the program is successful. These
people perceive the environment to be more powerful than them and that
the environment is hostile. They are reserved, task oriented individuals who
want to make decisions based on facts, figures, and statistics. When they
make a decision, they want to back it up with cold hard data and logic. If
a compliance person were to choose a vehicle it would be a van or a truck
because of the utility and usefulness and ability to haul things (even if they
rarely haul goods), and their favorite color is irrelevant because it isn’t sta-
tistically measurable.
When you meet the prospect, you must very quickly determine what
type of person you are dealing with so that you can speak their language.
Very quickly you can determine if they are outgoing or reserved and if they
are people oriented or task oriented. From those to quick questions you can
determine where they fit on the DISC axis.
50 The Close—7 Level Selling

Analyzing the GAP between Where They

Are and Where They Want to Be
When you are moving your prospect up through the levels of agreement
from 1–7:

7 Levels of Agreement
1. Clichés 5. Feelings
2. Facts 6. Fears and Weaknesses
3. Opinions 7. Needs
4. Hopes and Dreams

When you get into Level 6 and drill down on fears, weaknesses, things
that are missing, pain points, and problems, that is where the gap between
hopes and dreams, what they really want, and where they are today emerges.

The 7 Level Presentation Curve

Your offer must be the bridge over the gap

The medicine to their sickness.
7

Need is Realized by Prospect Result and

ffer
Prospect realizes his problem, rO Guarantee Fulfilled
enters market You “A better life than today”
5
4
3
2
1

1 Level 1 - Cliché
2 Level 2 - Facts 6
3 Level 3 - Opinions The Gap
4 Level 4 - Hopes & Dreams What’s he missing between
today and better tomorrow?
5 Level 5 - Feelings
Answer: Your Offer
6 Level 6 - Fears & Weaknesses Pit of Despair
7 Level 7 - Needs Pain, Suffering, Uncertainty
 II 51

Ultimately, the prospect realizes the gap between where he is now and
where he wants to be and you can see the gap as well.
So you might feed him a level 6 question like “Why hasn’t this result
happened for you yet?”
The prospect may be forthcoming enough to answer honestly, but typi-
cally, they will blame an outside force: “It wasn’t a priority,” “I never focused
on it,” “Haven’t had the time/money/education etc.”
The prospect in most cases does not say, “Because I need your service
now; here’s my credit card.”
So you might probe him with a few more level 6 questions to really get to
the root of the pain and then you will ask a level 7 question, “What do you
need to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be?”
The ideal answer to the question for you would be “A system,” “A path
to follow,” “A coach,” “Your product,” “Your service,” or something along
those lines. If they say your product or something in your industry, even
better.
The trouble with closing the gap is that it means different things to all dif-
ferent people; to get the gap into common terms you need to convert it into
time and money. A certain amount of money and time goes in, and a cer-
tain amount of time and money is saved or generated in return. Everybody
understands time and money, which are essentially interchangeable and in
some ways the same thing—stored human energy.
People do not buy products or services; they buy results and guarantees.
A product will get you a result. For example, you may go to the hardware
store to buy a drill because you need a hole to put a screw in to hang a new
piece of art you bought. You don’t want the drill, you want the result—the
picture hung! And while you are searching for this result you are looking
for the greatest guarantee against risk of loss.
52 The Close—7 Level Selling

Rule: Never Be the Lowest Cost Provider

Instead Be the Lowest Risk Provider.
You never want to fight for the bargain basement; discounting is a flawed
strategy and usually a race to the bottom of low profits. The key to selling
and closing the gap is to not be the lowest cost provider of that result and
guarantee, but rather the lowest risk provider.
Warren Buffet, world’s richest investor, has a portfolio of not just com-
panies he invests in, but typically he invests in the preferred brands and
tastes of the customer. For example he owns Coca Cola, McDonalds, Dairy
Queen, Snickers, and branded items that are intimate with the customer.
Customers are intimate with those items because they put them in their
mouths, smell them, taste them and know they deliver a strong promise of
delivery. The customer does not want the risk of drinking a No Name Cola
or eating at Jim’s Burger Dive, or going to Dairy Ice Cream Shop or eating a
no-name candy bar. People buy the brands because of the low risk provided
and typically pay a price premium for that brand guarantee.
Maybe you have a brand and a relationship with trust and a guarantee to
the prospect, or maybe you don’t have an established brand, but either way,
you want to have a strong promise, guarantee, or warranty behind your result.
So the equation in the prospect’s mind is:
Cost (Money + Time + Energy) in + Value (Result + Guarantee) = Life
will be better tomorrow (More Future Money + Time + Energy for the
Customer)
Your job when closing the gap is to get in the cost of the problem at hand,
the pain into monetary terms. You can try a level 6 question like “What’s it
costing you right now to not implement this system?”
 II 53

You also want to get the future value into monetary terms and build the
value so that it is ten times the cost if possible. That creates an airtight log-
ical case for the value of your offer. You can get your value to ten times by
talking about lifetime value of your result—not only in terms of savings
from the pain, but time, money, and energy saved, found, and created by
having the proper result today.
By default, if you haven’t built the value, analyzed the gap, and estab-
lished the result and the guarantee in monetary terms, your offer, no
matter how good, will always be viewed as 10/10 costly and 3/10 valuable
on its own.

Low Value High Cost

10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
Cost Value

Your job as a salesperson is to reverse the cost and value so that the value
is built in analyzing the gap and getting it into real money terms so that the
prospect can compare the lifetime costs of not having the result today and
future earnings/savings from having the result.
54 The Close—7 Level Selling

High Value Low Cost

10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
Cost Value

Work on your presentation, your value stack, and putting your prospect’s
gap into real money terms. This will help you close the gap.

Calculating Their Goal

Average Median Home Price (get them to say the number, help them if they
are off ) * 10 percent = Net profit using our system

You can google the median home price while on the phone with them or know
it beforehand

CLOSER: So _____________ From what have told me so far, your goal is

to make $200,000 in the next twelve to eighteen months to get out of your
job. Now what do you think the average home price is in your local market
of [[THEIR CITY]]?

BUYER: $300,000

CLOSER: Exactly! The median home in your city is $300,000 and that’s
just a run of the mill average single family home. Now using our exact
 II 55

system of buying real estate at 40–60 cents on the dollar, fixing it to 70

cents on the dollar, selling at 100 cents on the dollar, costing you ten cents
to sell, and making you 20 cents on the dollar, after everything is said and
done, you should be able to put at least ten cents in your pocket, so what’s
10 percent of $300,000 . . . ?

BUYER: $30,000 of course.

CLOSER: Exactly right, so from my quick analysis, we are going to need

between six to twelve deals a year to hit your income goal of 200k. Make sense?

We now have all of the necessary information to move into the presentation
phase and later into a strong closing position because we ended up on level 7.

From this information we can find the right program for the prospect.

Presenting Your Offer—Value vs.

Cost: Value First, Cost Second
“Price is what you pay, value is what you get.”
—Warren Buffet
When it comes time to present your offer in real money terms, you are ask-
ing the prospect to give up something of value to him for something of
value to him in return. Price is what you pay, value is what you get, and if
the value is not built or understood, prospects only hear cost.
Cost is time, effort, energy, and money in, and thus you always want to
present your offer so the value is first and the cost is second.
When the customer inquires, “How much is it?” the wrong answer is
“$3,000.” This answer is weak because the customer only sees price; he
doesn’t see the value.
56 The Close—7 Level Selling

A better answer is “For a cash outlay of only $3,000 john, my company

will be delivering over $10,000 of results over a period of X time in Y
method with Z guarantee/warranty.”
When the value is higher than the cost, people buy. When the value is
lower than the cost (or risk) they don’t buy.

A Punishing Amount of Evidence:

Testimonials and Whitepapers
Bill Bartmann was the founder of a company called CFS based out of
Oklahoma, USA. CFS, which stood for “Commercial Financial Services,”
was at the time the biggest collection agency in the USA with 3,900 employ-
ees and revenues in the billions. Prior to Bill’s career in collections, he was a
family lawyer and knew the power of written evidence. Bill’s USP—unique
selling proposition to the market place with his company—was to be “the
good guys” of the charged off debt collection business. At the time, most
collection companies in the industry, except for Bill’s, would use abuse,
scare tactics, yelling, swearing, name calling, threats, and anything nasty to
collect a debt. Bill had been bankrupt himself and had seen the dark side of
this industry when a debt collector called his house and his little daughter
picked up the phone to hear that her “daddy was a deadbeat.”
Something had to change. Bill reversed the collection process and went
from being the meanest to the friendliest. Rather than working against peo-
ple, he worked with good people to get them back on their feet. The way
Bill operated was 180 degrees different from the corrupt and dirty industry
and because he served the public in a different way, for which he would o
collect love letters and testimonials.
Bill, as a lawyer, compiled all of the testimonials into a binder called the
“5-pounder” (he in fact had several of them) and of course being in the
 II 57

collection business, people would try to sue Bill and his company often. He
would get attacks, and when he would show up to court, he would “bring
out the 5-pounder” and lay it down on the desk in front of the judge with
a line-up of satisfied customers who would testify in his defense. Bill knew
the power of overwhelming evidence and that you need more than one case
to deliver your point; you needed 1,000 cases to create absolute certainty to
the public that he was the good guy.
You don’t need one case to prove your point; you need 1,000 cases and an
overwhelming amount of evidence. Do whatever you need to do to collect
testimonials from every customer; all it takes is one attack against you, your
company, or your name, and you will need to pull out your own “5 pounder”
of overwhelming evidence that you are everything you claim to be.
When showing prospects testimonials in a presentation, I would rather
show too many than too few. Presenting more evidence—and especially
overwhelming evidence—is one way to silence the doubts in a prospect’s
mind that you are able to deliver on your result and guarantee.
Sales literature to back up your claims is one of the most powerful sales
tools you can have when presenting. Everything you say is heresy, and every-
thing the prospect says is reality in the eyes of the customer. To add an aura
of legitimacy to your presentation it is almost essential, even in the modern
digital world, to have printed materials. For whatever reason, the power of
the written word—and namely, the printed word—is more powerful than
the digital word or any other word, for that matter.
Here are the three most powerful types of sales literature you can have in
your arsenal:
1. A published book—The most effort required and resources to gen-
erate—This book could be about you or your company; several
companies are now getting books into their sales and marketing to help
them sell their services
58 The Close—7 Level Selling

2. Whitepapers—The second most effort required and resources to

generate—Case studies of successful clients filled with how the
product and service worked for them. Prospects love to see “some-
one just like them” succeeding with your product or service. Their
mind needs to find evidence that not only “this works,” but “this can
work for me,” and people seem to always think they are different. In
your white papers, case studies, and testimonials show all different
types of people succeeding, different ages, genders, backgrounds,
races, advanced customers, starter customers, etc. so there is some-
thing for everyone.
3. Glossy sales materials created by the marketing department—
Virtually no effort to generate—Anything your company creates will
immediately be taken as untrustworthy. It all looks nice and commands
legitimacy, but people no longer trust marketing also known as: what
you say about you. They are more interested in what others have to
say about you in today’s current market economy. Still with all the
downsides, the customer will find you to be more legitimate if you have
the glossy brochure to visually “show them what they get.” Spending
money on print is still (and likely always) will be worth it.

The Power of a Video Testimonial

In today’s market the leading edge of technology is digital video, and
nothing is more emotional than watching an actual customer express the
gratitude, the pain they felt before the result, and hearing their story first-
hand. Videos can tell stories visually, and they put people into “story mode”
and out of analytical mode especially if they are well done and profession-
ally produced.
There are two types of video testimonials that are valuable to you:
 II 59

1. Quick, dirty, easy, guerrilla style videos of prospects telling you about
their experience in an authentic “real” way. We live in an age where
there is too much polish on too many presentations, and sometimes
a quick and dirty video testimonial can be refreshing. However, the
picture and sound usually isn’t great, so if it’s all you have, you look
unprofessional
2. High production professional videos—These will cost you money;
offer to pay to have them done. Camera crews today are cheaper than
ever before, and equipment is cheaper than ever before. The guy who
shoots my video also shoots professional footage for Chrysler-Dodge
commercials, and he can be hired for a couple hundred dollars. The
advantage to using polished video is that the audio quality is perfect,
you can add music to pump the emotions, and you can cut and control
the shots and show not just the customer but also create an emo-
tional montage. You can display stats such as “cash invested” and “cash
earned,” and you can write down key benefits on the screen. Having at
least a few high-production testimonials will immediately set you out
from the pack as few salespeople are willing to spend the money to have
an outstanding testimonial.
TIP: You can create a sales tool website of just testimonials, video, written,
screen shots, amateur video—everything you collect becomes your own “5
pounder” and overwhelming evidence that you can deliver on your promises.
When I first got into business and selling I used to think that testimonials
were cheesy, manufactured, and that no one really cared or believed them. I
was wrong! There is an entire subset of customers that are exclusively look-
ing for testimonials, and if they can’t find any, they won’t buy. On the flip
side, there are customers who do not care about testimonials. When present-
ing, you never know who you are dealing with, so you are better to be on the
side of overwhelming evidence rather than underwhelming evidence.
60 The Close—7 Level Selling

Creating Agreement and Momentum Towards The Close

All effective sales presentations need stopping off points where you can
“check in” with the customer to make sure he’s following so you can gain
commitment. In a one-on-one setting, this is easy because you can see him
nodding or read his body language and gauge interest from there. In a
group or over the phone, you are going to have to ask for agreement with
a series of close-ended questions that are going to bring you into a series of
“yesses” that build momentum towards the close. The more yesses the cus-
tomer gives you before the close, the harder it is for him to say no and kill
the rapport of the sale. This is where you want to have two major special
devices to create agreement and hit the close with as much momentum as
possible.
Tie Downs—Create agreement by using statements followed by
shouldn’t it, wouldn’t it, couldn’t it, isn’t he, isn’t she, aren’t they?

Example 1:
Salesperson: Most of our clients see results in eight weeks or less; that
would be great, wouldn’t it?

Prospect: Yeah, of course!

Example 2:
Salesperson: John was able to see fantastic results from our program
and was able to take his two little girls to Disneyland this past winter for
Christmas, and he sent me this picture of his family. They sure do you look
happy, don’t they?

Prospect: Yeah, they do look great.

 II 61

Example 3:
The Nested Tie down—Put your tie down at the middle of the statement
instead of the end.

Salesperson: The average profit you should see would be $30,000 per
transaction; wouldn’t it be great to take that to the bank today?

Prospect: Ha ha, I’d love it!

Example 4:
Reverse Tie Down–

Salesperson: <opens the car door to a brand new BMW and the client sits
down in the brand new leather interior> Doesn’t it feel amazing?

Prospect: Yeah, it’s amazing . . .

Trial Closes—The second type of tool to use are trial closes, which are typ-
ically close-ended questions to gain commitment and see if the prospect is
on board before going for the final close, which is very simply asking for the
business.
Some examples of common trial closes:
a. How does this sound to you?
b. Does this make sense to you so far?
c. Would this feature be useful to your current operations?
d. Do you like this color?
e. Would this be an improvement on what you are doing right now?
f. Is this what you had in mind?
g. Do you like the value?
h. Do you like the idea?
62 The Close—7 Level Selling

The 7 Level Presentation Process

The 7-Level Presentation Process needs to show the product or service also
known as the offer as the perfect fit for the client’s needs both logically and
emotionally. It must fit in with all seven levels of agreement, clichés, facts,
opinions, hopes and dreams, feelings, fears and weaknesses, and lastly needs.
The presentation must be scripted to avoid salespeople from destroying
the sale by saying “stupid things.” Scripts are one of the most powerful sales
tools because they allow anyone in any region in the company to give a
standard presentation and avoid saying stupid things. How else would a
rookie salesperson know? Even the most seasoned salesperson needs solid
training and coaching. A script helps alleviate unknowns.
When salespeople run out of intelligent things to say, they start saying
stupid things, which are either 1) true and sound stupid or 2) untrue and
are lies. When there is no script in place, you run the risk of sales people
saying stupid things, which can get you into major trouble with regulatory
bodies if you are in a regulated industry like investments, real estate, mort-
gages, insurance, etc.

Live Action Script—Platinum Presentation

CLOSER: Now _____________, you told me that your goal this year
was to become a fulltime real estate investor and you also told me that the
amount of money you needed to make was $200,000 to make that happen,
right?

BUYER: Yes.

CLOSER: Okay, well if you could open up a webpage for me, StefanAarnio.
com/coaching I’ll show you some of the coaching options that would work
for you. Let me know when it’s loaded . . .
 II 63

BUYER: It’s loaded.

CLOSER: Do you see where it says “implementation coaching”?

BUYER: Yup, I see it.

CLOSER: Scroll down a little more to where you see the Harvard Principle.
See it? Great, before we get started I want to tell you a little bit about the
Harvard Principle. You see _____________ Harvard is the best university
in the world because they attract the best students. Our program is very
similar, and in fact, we make sure that we only attract the very best to our
programs. You can see there is a three-step process to qualify for coaching
and we are on step 2 right now. I’m trying to find out on this call if you are
the right guy for this program and if you can actually succeed with what we
give you.

Do you think you’re the right guy? (either answer yes or no) Okay, we’ll
see. Now our program has a success rate that is nearly ten times the industry
average. Most companies in our industry have a 3–5 percent success rate,
but ours is hovering around 47 percent because we deliver a superior train-
ing program and attract superior people; make sense?

BUYER: Yup.

CLOSER: Now there are two programs I had in mind for you that would
help you bridge that gap from where you are now to where you want to be
at the $200,000 of earnings. (Always show the higher ticket program first and
down sell to the lower. This prospect qualifies for Gold or Platinum packages.)

CLOSER: The one I want to start with is the absolute best we have to offer,
the Platinum program. Do you see it on the screen there? Fantastic. Now
64 The Close—7 Level Selling

the Platinum program is our award-winning professional program because

in 2016 Dan Nagy was the winner of Investor of the Year by Canadian Real
Estate Wealth magazine. Since then, we have had several other graduate
Platinum students nominated for awards!

CLOSER: I want you to write this down, __________________. The

program is designed to be delivered in a twelve-month time frame, but
some students stretch it out to eighteen months; it’s up to you and it’s ses-
sion-based, so there is no time limit once you are in the program, but we
recommend you get everything done in the shortest timeframe possible. It’s
kind of like when the doctor prescribes you a bottle of medicine to take in
a week—if you take the pills in a week, you get the result, but if you drag it
out too long, the medicine doesn’t work.

CLOSER: How we deliver the value to you is through forty-eight weekly

accountability sessions over the phone with one of our coaches who is a
full time professional real estate investor. These people are full-time busi-
ness people and part-time coaches, so you don’t have to worry about some
bum coach in a call center coaching you for $10 an hour who doesn’t know
anything. These coaches are hand selected by Stefan himself, and they have
been trained in our program.

CLOSER: The beauty with the calls every week is that we never let you get
off track; you might have a bad week or two, but the momentum keeps you
going; makes sense?

BUYER: Yes.

CLOSER: Fantastic, now with that, we give you four full days on site with
your coach, and typically you want to take one of those every quarter so
 II 65

that you can take your business to the next level. The one-day sessions are
really powerful because you get to go onsite with your coach into the field
and see how it’s done, and most people don’t believe it until they see it.
Usually after a student has a one-day, there is a huge breakthrough, and
many get their first deal or go to the next level. Makes sense?

BUYER: Yes.

CLOSER: Now we also give you our full set of mastery classes and box sets, and
if you scroll down a little more can you see where it says “Self-Made Academy”?

BUYER: Yes.

CLOSER: That’s our five-course curriculum of live classes that you get
included to sharpen your skills so that you can hit your goal. You get all
five. With Raising Capital, most people who take that class raise at least
$1,000,000 within the year and many of the Platinum students raise
between $3,000,000 to $5,000,000. Negotiations are for learning how
to buy at 40–60 cents on the dollar, and Marketing, Sales and, of course,
Advanced Buy-Fix-Sell. We focus on the soft skills and the core skills that
are going to get you to six and seven figures fast rather than the nuts and
bolts of real estate in those classes. Makes sense?

BUYER: Yes.

CLOSER: For each of those you get two tickets to the three-day class held
every six months and we run it on a 2.5 year rotation so you will be taking
classes with us for the next 2.5 years, but we also send you the box set with
the CDs, DVDs, manuals, hard copies, etc. if you want to do it from home
or online.
66 The Close—7 Level Selling

CLOSER: Now, do you see where it says “The System” to the right? That
is our online library of everything you need to do this business effectively.
This is where the nuts and bolts are, all the contracts, forms, how to vid-
eos, it’s over 100 hours of content and we are always expanding it to add
more tools for our students to use. Anything you ever need will be in THE
SYSTEM and the system comes with 1 year of online group coaching with
Stefan and all the students so once a month you have a group coaching
session to see what other students are asking, so you essentially have two
coaches, your accountability coach and Stefan your group coach.

CLOSER: Does it all of this make sense to you so far ______________?

BUYER: Makes sense.

CLOSER: Okay, so let’s talk about the result and the guarantee. The
projected result that most students achieve by joining the Platinum pro-
gram is completing twelve deals in a twelve to eighteen month timeframe.
We worked it out earlier that the average deal in your market was worth
$300,000 and you would net about 10 percent of the sale price in profit,
do you follow?

BUYER: Yes.

CLOSER: So that leaves how much per deal for you?

BUYER: $30,000

CLOSER: Fantastic, okay, so if you made $30,000 a deal and did 12 deals,
that would be $360,000 of profit, right? Okay, great, now let’s talk about
the tuition. The tuition for the Platinum program is—grab a pen and write
this down—<<pause>> Okay, so I want you to write 12 x $30,000 =
 II 67

$360,000, got it? Now below that, the tuition for the platinum is $72,000.
But, what we have found in the past, __________________, is that our
best students are able to make decisions fairly quickly and move ahead with
a contract and a deposit on a VISA or MASTERCARD, so if you move
ahead today with a deposit to reserve your pricing and place in the pro-
gram, it’s only $60,000.

BUYER: . . .

CLOSER: So ________________, we’re looking at a $60,000 investment

to make $360,000 over the next twelve to eighteen months. Do you like the
value; do you like the idea?

BUYER: Yeah of course, but OBJECTION ONE.

CLOSER: Yeah, I understand. Typically people who like the value and
like the idea move ahead with a small deposit on a Visa or MasterCard to
reserve their pricing and place in the program. We can take partial deposit
today and work out the financing. Would you want to make that deposit on
a VISA or MASTERCARD?

BUYER: 1st REAL OBJECTION TO BE DEFLECTED, ENTER

CLOSING PROCESS.
PART THREE
THE CLOSE—7 LEVEL CLOSING—THE 7 LEVEL
LOCKDOWN SEQUENCE—7 LEVELS DOWN

69
III

The Closing Process

What does it mean “to close”? To close is to simply ask for the business
directly. Simply ask for the money: ask the buyer to buy, and you will find
out if he really likes your product or service or not. The customers who say
“great presentation,” “great information,” “I really liked it” but didn’t buy in
reality didn’t actually appreciate your offer enough to take it.
There is a story about two salesmen sitting on the curb, defeated after a
long day of selling and one of them says to the other one, “I did some great
presentations today.”
The other one looks at him and says, “I didn’t close anything either.”
If you believe in your product or service, if you own your product or ser-
vice, it is your ethical duty to deliver it to everyone who is qualified to solve
their problem with it.

71
72 The Close—7 Level Selling

When you meet a prospect who has a problem and you fail to sell him
on your offer, you have done him a disservice because 1) He didn’t get his
problem solved, 2) you wasted his time and yours, and 3) he is now going
to go to the next competitor and buy something potentially inferior to your
offer, and this is your fault because you didn’t communicate the value well
enough and didn’t close him.
In the hit Disney movie The Little Mermaid, there is a famous song
called “Kiss the Girl” in which the Little Mermaid and Prince Eric are
in a small rowboat on date, and Sebastian the talking crab begins to sing
“Kiss the Girl” to tempt Eric to kiss Ariel and lift the curse upon her
soul.
Your prospect is like Ariel the Little Mermaid, and you are Prince Eric.
She has a problem, a curse upon her soul, and when you are meeting her on
your “sales date” if things go well, you will close and “kiss the girl.” Just like
a date, there is a perfect moment when a kiss could happen. In this perfect
moment, if you go in for the kiss, or the close, you can fix and help your
client’s problem or curse. If you go in for the kiss too early, then you are
violating her and could be accused of sexual assault. If you go in for the kiss
or the close too late, then she doesn’t feel pretty and is wondering why you
hesitated.
The nature of sales is like the natural world of dating. To close is to find
the perfect moment to “kiss the girl” and lift her curse.
A shockingly high percentage of professional salespeople make presen-
tations without ever asking for the business. Many salespeople don’t close,
because they simply don’t ask.
Sales is the only job in the world where you can do 99 percent of the
work, presenting, traveling, prospecting, and following up, but if you don’t
close, you get 0 percent of the money.
 III 73

In sales it’s 100 percent or 0 percent, you are either the Rainmaking God
in the office who makes it shower money whenever you walk in the door, or
you are the dirt beneath management’s feet.

Everybody Is on Commission
In truth, everyone, regardless of their job, base pay, salary, benefits, com-
missions, incentives, etc. is on commission. If you don’t do the prescribed
amount of work, you get fired.
If you work at McDonalds and only cook half the hamburger, you are fired.
The same works in sales; if you half bake the sale enough times you will be
fired, and either you will run out of money to live on, or the company you
work for will make room for someone who actually produces.
This book is called The Close: 7 Level Selling because closing is the result
that everyone wants from selling. No one wants to sell; everyone wants to
close. Closing is where you get paid, the company gets paid, the customer
gets served, and the economy goes into motion. If you let the customer
down, the customer doesn’t get served, you don’t get paid, the company
doesn’t get paid, and no one goes to work in the economy. Salespeople are
heroes who put entire economies into motion and without them, there
would be no prosperity.

The Three Tens

As identified by Jordan Belfort
In order for a customer to buy, he must believe in the three 10’s: Your offer
is a 10/10, You as a salesperson are 10/10 and the company you work for
(doing the delivery) is a 10/10.
A 10 means that he thinks you are the best thing since sliced bread, a 5 is
he’s uncertain but likely closable, and 1 means that he thinks you are crap.
74 The Close—7 Level Selling

Whenever someone is not buying it’s because they have not reached10 in
all three categories, and it is your job to get them there.
Most objections people give you are nonsense; they do want to buy, but
they feel uncertain about the offer, you, or the company.
Statistically speaking most sales are not made at the end of a presentation
without resistance. True buyers have real money and real time at risk and
will always put up some resistance before buying.
nexperienced closers will give up after one to three objections and let the
prospect go.
Professional closers will drill down on the key issues and will circle the
buyer at least five to seven times, which studies show is the effective amount
of closes before winning the business.
Using the 7 level lockdown system below, many of the objections are han-
dled before they happen so we will only loop a maximum of three times
around, but you can loop as many times as necessary. You don’t want to be
perceived as a high pressure salesperson so three loops should be enough if
you follow the system.

The 7 Level Closing Process

The 7 Level Closing Process works because all objections are the same. The
buyer has uncertainty somewhere in the three 10s; they have a high action
threshold, or they are not put into enough pain. The 7 Level Process is
inspired by Jordan Belfort’s Straight Line Closing Process, which, through
my own study of that process, I was able to put my own natural closing
practices into words. As a natural closer, I was performing several advanced
sequences on my own, but until I studied Belfort, I was unable to put them
into words to teach other people. The 7 Level Closing process follows the
same language patterns and frameworks as the 7 Level Opening Process :
Clichés, facts, opinions, hopes and dreams, feelings, fears/weaknesses, and
 III 75

needs. By using the 7 level opening, 7 level presentation and 7 level clos-
ing you will have ran the prospect through the 7 levels three times giving
you an opportunity to use their familiar language patterns and have control
throughout the entire sale until the close.

LEVEL 1 - CLICHÉ
Deflect the
token objection

LEVEL 2 - RESELL
the fact that they
like the offer

LEVEL 3 - OPINIONS
Resell you and
your belief systems

LEVEL 4 - HOPES
AND DREAMS
Resell the brand

LEVEL 5 - FEELINGS
“How’s it going to
feel?” Lower the
action threshold

LEVEL 6 - FEARS
AND WEAKNESSES
Increase the
pain threshold

LEVEL 7 - NEEDS
“How can I help you
in the meantime?”
THE CUTOFF
76 The Close—7 Level Selling

The 7 Level Closing Process, when executed properly, will run the buyer
through at least 7 objections and will prevent novices from giving up too easily.
When to stop the 7 Level Process is if the prospect repeats the same objec-
tion two times in a row or has a change in demeanor, such as starting to laugh.
Then it’s time to go to level 7, the cutoff line, and set an appointment if there
is interest or simply say, “How can I help you in the meantime?” and let the
prospect reach back out to you, which means you lost the sale because buyers
rarely reach out again ever. If the buyer is legit, you can set a future meeting.

Cracking the Code of Their Buying Strategy

The buyer will never tell you what their buying strategy is. In the question-
ing period you may uncover things like, “Have you made a purchase like
this before?” or “How have you made decisions like this in the past?” and
you may get some clues, but each buyer is a five digit combination lock, and
you need to crack each digit one at a time to get the lock to open.

The Buying Combination

10

0
Certainty Certainty Certainty of Action Pain
of Offer of You Company Threshold

The buying combination is a 10–10–10–3–10 combination with high cer-

tainty on the offer, on you, on your company, a 3 on the action threshold,
 III 77

and a 10 on pain. This buyer will buy every time if he is in this combination.
Certainty and pain must be higher than the action threshold.

The Stall Combination

10

0
Certainty Certainty Certainty of Action Pain
of Offer of You Company Threshold

** Certainty must be higher than the action threshold to close

What happens more often than not is a stall where the buyer is some-
thing like an 8–7–7–8–6 where his certainty is not high enough for him
to move forward, and his action threshold is too high, so he will throw up
a smokescreen or a stall to avoid moving forward. Humans want to avoid
uncertainty at all costs, so this is a natural defense.
The only way to pick the lock is to methodically go through each piece:
3. Certainty in your offer
4. Certainty in you and your belief systems
5. Certainty in your brand and belief systems
6. Lower the action threshold
7. Increase the pain threshold
One at a time and slowly, change the numbers to the right combination
to win the sale. Rather than fumbling around in the dark trying to find the
“real objection” or giving up after one or two objections like novice sales
78 The Close—7 Level Selling

people in a rapport-destroying death spiral that breaks all agreement, you

are much better off taking a methodical approach towards handling each
digit of the lock one at a time.

Live Action Script—Closing

CLOSER: So the projected result you will see from doing twelve deals in
a year at roughly $30,000 of profit per deal is $360,000 net profit to you; is
that too much money for you, ______________?

BUYER: No, no, it’s not (laughs).

CLOSER: Okay great, now, the tuition for the Platinum, I want you to
write this down . . . The program is typically $72,000 but if we move ahead
today on the phone with a contract and a deposit, it’s only $60,000 . . .

<<silence>>

CLOSER: So $60,000 should get you around $360,000 in twelve to eigh-

teen months if you follow the program and do the twelve deals that you set
out to do. Do you like the value? Do you like the idea?

BUYER: Yeah, I do like the idea.

CLOSER: Okay great. Typically people who like the value and like the
idea move ahead with a deposit on a VISA or a MASTERCARD to reserve
their pricing and their place in the program; which would be better for you
today, _____________? VISA or MASTERCARD?

BUYER: Let me think about it and get back to you.

 III 79

LEVEL 1 Cliché—Deflect the Token Objection

The first objection is hardly ever the real objection; simply deflect it with a
trial close: “Does the idea make sense to you?” or “Do you like the idea?” to
disable it and move on to the real objections. The first objection is Cliché
and often meaningless.

CLOSER: I hear what you are saying, ______________. Let me ask you
a question: Does the idea make sense to you? Do you like the idea? (money
aside tonality)

LEVEL 2 Resell The Fact That They Like The Offer

Level 2 is about reinforcing the fact that they do like the value and the idea,
this is a fact that you need to test for validity and get them to a 10/10 on
enthusiasm for your offer.

BUYER: Yeah, I guess it’s okay.

DECIDE: (Gauge the level of certainty in the product 1–10) Enthusiasm

means a 10, 1 is utter disgust, 5 or a 6 is positive and can be closed. You will
need to loop around and resell the product. If he’s a 5 or 6 do not ask for the
close, he’s not certain enough. Pick up where the logical case of the presentation
left off and frame the product airtight logically and emotionally.

CLOSER: Exactly! It really is a great buy here! In fact, one of the true beau-
tifies of the program is . . . RESELL THE KEY POINTS THEY LIKED

CLOSE OUT PATTERN: You see what I’m saying here, ____________ ?
Do you like the idea?

BUYER: Yes! I see it

80 The Close—7 Level Selling

Enthusiastic yes = 8, ready to move onto the next piece

If the buyer responds below a 3 enthusiasm, end the encounter; they
aren’t a real buyer
If the buyer is below a 2 in enthusiasm, repeat his answer back to him in
an incredulous tone, challenge him to get him to an 8

LEVEL 3 Opinions—Resell You And Your Belief Systems

CLOSER: Pause (mystery and intrigue tone) Now, ___________________,
let me ask you another question . . . (money aside tone) If I had been your
strategist for the last three or four years making you money on a consistent
basis (switch tone to implied obviousness) then you probably wouldn’t be
saying, “Let me think about it right now, ___________” You’d be saying,
“Get me started with the next program!” (switch to reasonable man tone)
Am I right?

BUYER: Yeah, well, then I would . . . OR Obviously! I mean, who wouldn’t

want that right?

(This admits that trust or lack of trust in you is the cornerstone issue 5 percent
of prospects fit into this category)

CLOSER: (mocking tone mixed with incredulous tone) Wait a second,

________________, you mean to tell me that if I put you into the Bronze
program at $18,000 and made you $30,000 , and I put you in the Silver
program for $30,000 and made you $90,000 and put you in the Gold at
$40,000 and made you $180,000, then you wouldn’t be saying, “Get me
started with the Platinum program” right now, on the spot, come on?

BUYER: Yeah, well, in THAT case I would (slightly defensive as if it wasn’t

their fault for flip flopping on the answer; it was your fault for flip flopping on the
 III 81

question. They have been called out on their bullshit, and now they are trying to
backpedal and save face. This avoids the stupid counter, “What’s there to think
about?” That is a dead-end question and will threaten his mind and break
rapport. The real objection is he doesn’t know you and therefore has no basis
for trusting you and you brought that to light in a very elegant way without
threatening him. You now have sixty seconds to sell yourself and build trust.)

CLOSER: (sympathy tone) Now, that I can understand. You don’t know
me and I don’t have the luxury of a track record; so let me take a moment
to reintroduce myself.

CLOSER: My name is [YOUR FIRST AND LAST NAME], and I’m a

[YOUR TITLE] at the [NAME OF YOUR COMPANY], and I’ve been
there for [ACTUAL NUMBER] years and I pride myself on . . . (tell them
a little bit about yourself citing):

✓✓ Degrees
✓✓ Licenses
✓✓ Special talents
✓✓ Awards you’ve won
✓✓ What your goals are with the company
✓✓ Where you stand in terms of ethics, integrity and customer service.
These are the belief systems that the customer wants to tap into.
✓✓ How you can be an asset to him and his family over the long term. A
long term relationship with you is a major asset to the customer going
forward especially if you sell your belief systems strongly.

NOTE: Also create a secondary version of yourself and a tertiary version of

yourself so you can loop and resell as you need if the sale drags on and you need
to talk about yourself intelligently.
82 The Close—7 Level Selling

LEVEL 4 Hopes and Dreams—Resell The Brand

Based On Belief Systems of the Company
You have finished selling yourself and now transition into reselling the
company with the transition, “As far as the brand XYZ goes . . .”
CLOSER: Now only am I going to guide you into the idea, but I’m going
to guide you out as well. As far as the brand, [XYZ COMPANY] goes, it’s
one of the most respected . . .”

✓✓ We stand for X belief system

✓✓ We are #1 in this
✓✓ We’re the fastest growing that
✓✓ We’re the foremost experts in this
✓✓ The chairman of the board, a man named so and so has one of the most
astute minds in the ABC industry
✓✓ He’s accomplished X
✓✓ He’s accomplished Y
✓✓ And he’s built this company around one thing above all: [WHATEVER
THAT IS]

CLOSER: (complete the pattern with) So, ____________, why don’t we do

this . . . OR all I’m asking for is . . . (then transition into the close, or if allowed,
try to downsell them a bit to dip their toe and get started with something small;
after they’ve seen what a great job you do, you can work on a much higher level)

✓✓ If you give me 1 percent of your trust, I’ll earn the other 99 percent
✓✓ Frankly, on such a small sale like this, after I split my commission with
the firm and the government, I can’t put puppy chow in my dog’s bowl.
✓✓ I’m obviously not getting rich here, but, again, this will serve as a
benchmark for future business.
 III 83

People with low action thresholds will start to close here. 20 percent will
close right here.
You may need to run additional loops to:
1. Increase their level of certainty for one or more of the three tens
2. Lowering their action threshold
3. Increasing their pain threshold

LEVEL 5 Feelings—“how’s it going to feel?”

Lower the action threshold
If the buyer isn’t closed, he is now going to objection-hop and suddenly
need to “talk to their wife or accountant” or “send me an email or some
information” or “it’s a bad time of year”
Most salespeople hit with one objection have a problem handling it; get-
ting hit with two objections is overwhelming.
Most salespeople are trained to handle the first objection with a canned
response to an objection which is fake or a smokescreen, and then re-ask
for the order. The first objection is usually a smokescreen so the salesperson
wasted his time and energy handling a non-objection.
You cannot deflect the second objection, as it would look too evasive and
would break trust.

The Action Threshold

The brain runs two separate movies through the mind: a positive one and a
negative one. The positive one is filled with all the benefits and wonderful
things that will happen if the product turns out to as great as it was sold.
The negative movie contains all the downside risk, painful things you’ll
experience in the future if it turns out that the salesman misled you and the
product is garbage. What’s the best case? And what’s the worst case?
84 The Close—7 Level Selling

A person with a high action threshold has a beautiful positive movie that
is much stronger in their mind, and a person with a low action threshold
has a negative movie that is much stronger in their mind. The threshold is
determined by which movie is dominant.
A person with a low action threshold can be 7–8–7 on the certainty scale
and a person with a high action threshold will need 10–10–10 to buy.

Four Ways to Lower the Action Threshold

1. Money-back guarantee
2. A cooling off rescission period also known as cancellation period of X
number of days
3. Key phrases and promises: “I’ll hold your hand every step of the way”
“We pride ourselves on long term relationships,” or “We have world-
class customer service.”
4. Temporarily reverse the parallel movies in their mind, get them to
abandon the long intense negative movie and enjoy the positive one.
CLOSER: (agree with the objection) loop around to version 2 of “you”
and version 2 of “the company”

Resell You in Way #2

✓✓ Your belief systems about why you are in business
✓✓ Degrees
✓✓ Licenses
✓✓ Special talents
✓✓ Awards you’ve won
✓✓ What your goals are with the company
✓✓ Where you stand in terms of ethics, integrity and customer service
✓✓ How you can be an asset to him and his family over the long term
 III 85

Resell The Brand in Way #2

✓✓ We stand for X belief system.
✓✓ We are #1 in this
✓✓ We’re the fastest growing that
✓✓ We’re the foremost experts in this
✓✓ The chairman of the board, a man named so and so has one of the most
astute minds in the ABC industry
✓✓ He’s accomplished X
✓✓ He’s accomplished Y
✓✓ And he’s built this company around one thing above all: [WHATEVER
THAT IS]

CLOSER: _____________, let me ask you an honest question: what’s the

worst that can possibly happen here? I mean, let’s say I’m wrong and the
program is only half as good as I say it is and you end up losing a few thou-
sand bucks: is that going to put you in the poorhouse?”

BUYER: No (begrudgingly).

CLOSER: Exactly: of course it won’t! And, on the upside, let’s say I’m
right—like we both think I am—the program works as well for you as it
has for so many other people and you make only a hundred grand in real
estate. I mean, it’ll feel good and everything, but it’s not going to make you
the richest man in town, now, will it?

BUYER: No, definitely not.

CLOSER: Exactly! Of course it won’t. It’s not going to make you rich, and
it’s not going to make you poor, but what this program will do is serve as
benchmark for future business. It’ll show you that I know how to put you
86 The Close—7 Level Selling

into the right program at the right time and get you the results you want. So
why don’t we do this: since this is our first time working together, why don’t
we start off a bit smaller this time. Instead of picking up the Platinum pro-
gram, let’s pick up the Gold instead, which is cash outlay of only $40,000.
Of course, you’ll make a bit less money as it’s a shorter program and you
won’t get as much done, but your percentage gain remains the same, and
you can judge me on that alone; and believe me, _________________, if
you only do even half as well as the rest of my clients in this program, the
only problem you’re going to have is that you didn’t buy more. Sound fair
enough?” [then shut up and wait for a response]

NOTE: If you stay quiet, 75 percent of prospects will buy right here. If you
close the high action threshold prospect, you have earned a prize because
these people are loyal for life to a salesperson and will pay more for you just
because they like you to avoid risk from other companies.

LEVEL 6 Fears and Weaknesses—Increase the Pain Threshold

People who are feeling significant pain tend to act quickly while people in
denial of their pain act slowly.
Introduce pain in the questioning and intelligence gathering phase in
level 6 and in the third loop. You can play off the pain during the presenta-
tion and use it for perspective.

Two Ways to Put the Buyer in Pain

1. They are already in pain from a life occurrence
2. Language patterns
 III 87

CLOSER: (re-introduce the buyer’s pain from level 6 of the questioning

period) Now, ___________________, I know you said before that you’re
worried about your retirement in terms of having nothing to fall back on . . .
(and so forth.) What do you think is going to happen to your situation if
you fail to take action to fix it?

CLOSER: (empathetic tone) ______________________, let me ask you

a question: given how things have been deteriorating over the last twelve
months, where do you see yourself in a year from now? Or, even worse,
five years from now? Are things going to be even more intense, in terms
of all the sleepless nights and the worrying?” (maintain sympathetic tone
throughout the pattern)

BUYER: I’ll be in the same spot I’m in now, but probably a lot worse.

CLOSER: (I feel your pain tone) I get it, _____________________. I’ve

been around the block a couple thousand times now, and I know that these
things typically don’t resolve themselves unless you take serious action to
resolve them.

CLOSER: In fact, let me say this: one of the true beauties here is that . . .
(resell the 3 tens in the short concise tertiary pattern focusing almost exclusively
on the emotional side of the equation. Then future pace him into what his life is
going to look and feel great after he receives the exact benefits he was promised
and from the emotional high, transition into the soft close ask for the order
again.)
88 The Close—7 Level Selling

Resell You in an Emotional Way

✓✓ Your belief systems on why you are in business
✓✓ Degrees
✓✓ Licenses
✓✓ Special Talents
✓✓ Awards you’ve won
✓✓ What your goals are with the company
✓✓ Where you stand in terms of ethics, integrity and customer service
✓✓ How you can be an asset to him and his family over the long term

Resell The Company in an Emotional Way

✓✓ Your brand’s belief systems especially on customer service
✓✓ We are #1 in this
✓✓ We’re the fastest growing that
✓✓ We’re the foremost experts in this
✓✓ The chairman of the board, a man named so and so has one of the most
astute minds in the ABC industry
✓✓ He’s accomplished X
✓✓ He’s accomplished Y
✓✓ And he’s built this company around one thing above all: [WHATEVER
THAT IS]

LEVEL 7 Needs—“How can I help you in the meantime?” THE CUTOFF

If the buyer repeats the same objection again two times in a row, thank him
for his time to avoid being a high-pressure salesman looping him to death.
Have intuitive sales ability.
If your prospect’s demeanor changes, by laughing or getting edgy, it’s
because they feel pressured and you have gone too far.
 III 89

CLOSER: _______________, please don’t misconstrue my enthusiasm

for pressure; it’s just that I know that this is truly a perfect fit for you (two
options follow):

OPTION 1: Loop back around into the sale one more time and give it
one more shot, paying close attention to the tonality and body language of
your prospect. If they are showing interest, and buying body language then
continue; if not, continue to option 2

OPTION 2: Second meeting

CLOSER: ___________________, please don’t misconstrue my enthusi-

asm for pressure; it’s just that I know this is truly is a perfect fit for you (tone
of utter sincerity). So why don’t we do this: let me send you the information
you are looking for (or whatever the last objection was) and give you a few
days to look through everything and also discuss it with your wife, and then
we can set a time next week to speak again once you’ve had a chance to
really get your arms wrapped around everything. Sound good?

DECIDE: Set the meeting if they are serious, or let them call you back and
give them your number if they aren’t. A great way to end a non-sale or a stall
is “How can I help you in the meantime?” this implies that you are here to
fill their needs, whether you can or not.

The Line of Money, Upsells and Downsells

At the time of the close and once the sale has been made, you have brought
the prospect over the line of money, and he is now a customer. Turn him
into a client (a repeat customer) by offering upsells, bundles and downsells.
90 The Close—7 Level Selling

Once the client is over the line of money, he is seven times easier to close
than someone who has never given you or your company money. That
could be because he already knows you, knows your company, has a track
record, trusts you, and really it just comes down to the new product and
new offer and whether it make sense for him.
In the 7 level closing sequence, we started at the bigger offer that would
totally fill the client’s needs and went for the downsell to “test the waters”
and earn the relationship. You may not want to rock the boat if the client is
still a little uneasy or uncertain, but if the sale was easier and on a low action
threshold individual then you can try.
“Hey, I almost forgot, we just came out with this new program. It does
XYZ benefit in ABC Result in Q Time, it goes great with the package you
just purchased, and it’s only $797. Should I write it up in the order now
too?” You typically want to do this after all the payment details have already
been written down and you can simply say, “I’ll just change the charge on
the card by a few digits and put it in the order.”
When people are finally making purchase is when they feel best about
you, your product, and your company, so the moment of “crossing the
money line” is a magical moment where you can really maximize sales and
profits with almost zero extra effort.

Nested Loops
When making an upsell you may want to enter into a nested loop pattern
where a loop represents an idea or a pitch you are offering. You have already
made the sale, and now you are opening three additional loops with other
offers.
 III 91

A Nested Loop Pattern

Start Here for Nested Pitches End Here
or for Nested Stroytelling

1) Open 1) Close
Loop #1 Loop #1
2) Open 2) Close
Loop #2 Loop #2

3) Open 3) Close
Loop #3 Loop #3

Loop #1 opens with your first upsell “By the way, I wanted to tell you
about our XYZ program, I know it might not be for you, but it’s on special,
and if I didn’t mention it to you and you found out later, you would be
mad . . .” followed by a short presentation and a soft close: “Should I add
that into your order?” You may open to enter a second pitch or loop with
Loop #2 “By the way, most people who purchased the package you have
today typically add on this complimentary product. . . .” Whether you are
successful with the second Loop, you may enter a third looping pattern:
“Hey, I almost forgot . . .” with a third upsell and another offer.
Once you have opened your nested loops, you must then close them out
in reverse sequence from Loop #3 to Loop #2 to Loop#1 to have the high-
est chance of success in upselling multiple sales on one call.
These loops are best closed with soft closes instead of hard closes as you
are simply taking the easiest and most natural “second” and “third” money
available and offering easy natural complimentary offers.
You can open a multiple loop sequence with storytelling, which can be
powerful in presenting or objection handling. Nested loops are an advanced
technique to present multiple ideas, stories, and offers to the human mind,
which can typically only operate with one idea at a time.
92 The Close—7 Level Selling

The Counterintuitive Nature of the Upsell

If you are having objections about the price, for example, or maybe you
are pitching a lower priced program $1,000 item with a lower result, or
something too entry level to someone who is too high level, they will object
on price. The answer to this objection is to offer him a high value offer at
$50,000 that might actually fit his needs.
You will see this often with consulting firms where they offer a lower
price “do it yourself package for $1,000 to $3,000” and often the real high
ticket buyers won’t even bother because they want a much better, white
glove service. Do not be afraid to go on a mega upsell if price becomes the
sticking point and the buyer is a little more sophisticated.
A good rule of thumb is to size the product to his ego and what he thinks
of himself and his company so that you can bring something relevant to the
table.

Stock Closes
Although I’m a firm believer in highly precise language and execution
through polished scripts for every sales presentation, there is value to hav-
ing a collection of standard closes at your fingertips. They may be useful to
try experimentally or in situations where the script isn’t quite dialed in yet.
The major problem with stock closes is that they can be executed
unpracticed, and some of them are pure nonsense. There are books out
there containing 100+ closes and novice salespeople can get drunk on the
Kool-Aid idea of memorizing a bunch of nonsensical closes out of context.
Novice salespeople will go into a rapport-building death spiral answering
objection after objection and either 1) give up after two or three attempts or
2) start to turn off the client and turn the close into an argument. You always
want to close as elegantly as possible to avoid those two common mistakes.
 III 93

Besides systematically locking down on closes by having an airtight script

and process, a good method for keeping in your back pocket is this:

Standard Objection Isolation Process

1. Feed it back (followed by a pause)
2. Acknowledge the objection, agree
3. Besides this, would there be any other reason to not move ahead today?
**Get the new objection (loop that sequence until you get down
to the core issue)**
4. Get commitment on the objection, “If I could show you a way to afford
it today, would you move ahead?”
5. Defeat the objection
6. Pattern interrupt
7. Close

Standard Objection Isolation Process

Live Action Example
CLIENT: Yeah, sounds good, let me think about and get back to you.
1. Feed it back (followed by a pause)—slowly with pause and

CLOSER: “ . . . Think about it and get back to me?”

CLIENT: Yeah . . . I’ll get back to you

CLOSER: . . . (pause to wait to see if the silence changes their mind)

Note: This first move is to test the validity of their knee-jerk objection,
which is similar to a deflection. Often when the client hears the absurd
nature of their own words, they sometimes retract or refute the objection.
94 The Close—7 Level Selling

2. Acknowledge the objection, agree–

CLOSER: “I understand, John. Sometimes I feel like I need to think about

things too, but let me ask you this”:

3. Besides this, would there be any other reason to not move ahead today?
a. **Get the new objection (loop that sequence until you get down
to the core issue)**

CLOSER: “Besides wanting to think about it, would there be any other
reason to not move ahead today?”

CLIENT: “Well, I haven’t spoken to my wife . . . we make decisions together.”

CLOSER: “Mmmhmm, and besides that would there be any other reason
stopping you from moving ahead today?”

CLIENT: “I’m not sure if I can afford it. I don’t have $10,000 cash today!”

CLOSER: “Okay and besides the cash would there be anything else stop-
ping you from moving ahead today?

CLIENT: “No, that’s it; my wife is concerned about the cash. I don’t want
her to think I was making decisions without her.”

4. Get commitment on the objection, “If I could show you a way to

afford it today, would you move ahead?”

CLOSER: “I understand, John; so the cash is the main issue then?”

CLIENT: “Yeah, we don’t have it.

 III 95

CLOSER: “I can understand that; not everyone who works with our com-
pany has all of the cash upfront; in fact, most of them don’t. If I could show
you way to afford it today would you move ahead?”

CLIENT: Sure, how?

5. Defeat the objection (show financing program for dollars a day vs.
big cash up front)

CLOSER: “I’m glad you asked, John. I completely understand your situa-
tion. Using our in-house financing, I can get that cash outlay reduced to $0
out of pocket and installments of only $79 a month, which really anyone
can afford . . .”

6. Pattern Interrupt—Before you ask for the business you can break their
mental thought process by asking an unrelated question to get their
mind off the sale.

CLOSER: “What did you have for breakfast yesterday, John?”

CLIENT: “Eggs.”

7. Close—Now you follow up by defeating the true objection once and

for all, in this case; financing breaks the product down into smaller
monthly payments.

CLOSE: “Fantastic, all you have to do is fill out this short application, and
I can get this product to delivered within the week,; let’s get started.”

CLIENT: Okay. Lets do it.

96 The Close—7 Level Selling

Standard Closes
The following is a list of standard sales closes that are used in a variety of
environments to close the deal. There are literally hundreds of closes but
you should get to know and memorize a few basic ways to ask for the busi-
ness, especially if you are suddenly caught without a script.
Puppy dog close—“Why don’t you take it home today John and give it a
try. Keep it for a week, and if you don’t like it, bring it back at no cost to you.”
This close was supposedly used in pet shops to sell puppy dogs. Apparently
no one ever had the heart to return a puppy after having him for a week. If
your product or service allows this sort of trial period, this could be gold.
Ben Franklin close—“Those are excellent points you make John. Let’s
grab a piece of paper and write down all of the reasons why we should do
this and all of the reasons why not to do this and once you see it on a piece
of paper, you can decide.”
This was supposedly a way that Ben Franklin made decisions by writing
all the pros and cons on a piece of paper and weighing it out. If you have
done a good sales presentation you should have several reasons why to move
ahead and very few to not move ahead.
Sharp angle close—“I hear you, John: you don’t have the money. The
reason why you don’t have the money today is because you didn’t do some-
thing like this five years ago. How long are you going to put this off ? Let
make this happen for you.”
Paradoxically, the reason not to buy is also the reason to buy.

“I don’t have any time” becomes

“You would have more time if you took the program.”

“I don’t have any money” becomes

“You would have more money if you took the program.”

“I can’t do it because I have kids” becomes “I must do it because I have kids.”

 III 97

Walk away, take away, today only close—“Well, John, I’m sorry; it
sounds like this offer just isn’t for you . . . It’s okay; it’s not for everyone”
(slowly start to pack your bags and do a slow walk to the door and the car.
“Unfortunately, this offer is only available today on the first-call special is
company policy, and if you want it, I can get you started right now, and if
not, the offer expires . . .” (Slowly walk away)
This is a hard closing technique that should only be used sparingly because
it can make egos flare and damage your relationship with the other side.
Invitational close—(Preceded by a trial close) “Do you like the idea so
far?” or “Does what I have shown you make sense to you?” (Followed by a
“yes” from the customer.) You then say, “If you like what I have shown you,
why don’t you give it a try?”
This is a softer more classy close than others.
Directive close (the next step is)—“Well, John, it sounds like you like
the value and like the idea, so the next step would be to get started with the
paperwork, and I should be able to have the service delivered by Monday
as we discussed.”
This is a very popular close in a wide variety of industries.
Preferential close (A or B)—“Fantastic, John. I’m glad you like the value and
like the idea, would you like to get started with a Visa or a MasterCard today?”
This is a very common binary close and takes the buyer away from the yes
or no binary of “Should I buy this or not?”
Incremental close (wood crate vs. cardboard)—“Mr. Prospect, I know
you haven’t decided to make an order yet, but if you were to order, would
you prefer your product delivered in a wood crate or a cardboard crate?”
Another variation is, “Fantastic, what is the best zip/postal code to ship
the product to?”
These are small closes to use incrementally to gain commitment before
going for the big close.
98 The Close—7 Level Selling

Authorization close—“Do you have any further questions or concerns,

Mr. Prospect?” The prospect does not, so you grab the contract, check off
the boxes, and push it towards him with a pen ready to sign and say, “Well
then, if you will just authorize this, we will get started right away.”
This is used in very large multimillion dollar deals.
Ultimatum close—You and the prospect have been going back and forth
for some time now with multiple meetings, and the sale is starting to waste
your time and his.
You say, “Mr. Prospect, I know how busy you are; we’ve been talking
about this product for some time now, and either this is a good idea for you,
or it isn’t. If it’s a good idea, we should make the decision right now and get
on with it. If not, your time is too valuable to continue talking about it. If
you will authorize this, we’ll get started right away.”
Reserve the Ultimatum for the last resort when it comes to closing, and typ-
ically you can avoid this by setting a meeting limit up front with your prospect:
“Mr. Prospect, I understand you want to have a second meeting and that is no
problem, but usually most people are able to make a decision in two meetings,
so if you can, please have everything you need ready to make a firm decision.”
When setting the third meeting: “Okay, Mr. Prospect, I’ll set a third
meeting with you so you can sort out XYZ details, but I want to let you
know that I never book a fourth meeting. Either this is for you on the third
meeting, or it’s not. I don’t want to waste your time.”
Order sheet close—At the end of your presentation take out your order
sheet and begin to fill it out, look down at the paperwork with your pen and
say, “What’s the correct spelling of your first and last name, Mr. Prospect?”
It can be aggressive to pull out the order form earlier, and start filling out
the terms and delivery date during the presentation as well. You will have
to go with your gut as to whether you can pull this off one on one. In real
estate sales I have found it to be very effective.
 III 99

Some sales organizations instruct their sales people to fill out the
paperwork in the car in advance to psych themselves up and visualize the
prospect’s order coming through. This can be a very powerful technique.
“I want to think it over” close—The prospect responds “I have to think
about it . . .”
You respond, smiling. “Mr. Prospect, that’s a good idea. This is an import-
ant decision, and I don’t want you to rush into anything.”
The client will relax because he thinks the sale is over
Then you ask in a curious tone “Mr. Prospect, obviously you have good
reason for wanting to think it over, so may I ask what it is? Is it the money?”

Hard Closing vs. Soft Closing

When you are closing you are asking for the business and as a professional
salesperson you need to become a master of both Hard Closing and Soft
Closing. There are times where you can elegantly soft close the client into
the product or service and there is a low percentage chance that he is a lay-
down and easy business.
Soft closes are soft, easy, pillowy, light ways of asking for the business.
Unskilled salespeople usually only practice a few soft easy closes and then
walk away with discomfort. On the other end of the spectrum is the master
closer who is so elegant in his delivery that he is able to drill down on the
key issues in a soft way—like a ninja master—and keep the rapport intact
the whole time. An example would be using the 7 Level Lockdown System
where the entire process is scripted, manicured, and polished into the clean-
est script possible. The 7 level closing script only handles three real objections
but subtly handles much more in a subtle, elegant, methodical way.
However, there are times when a hard close is necessary. A hard close
is where “things get hard” and the rapport gets strained or can even
break. A hard closer can sit through six, seven, or eight objections and is
100 The Close—7 Level Selling

committed to sitting until the deal is done. You’ve got to prepare your-
self mentally for this the way an Olympic athlete would prepare himself
physically.
In many ways, a hard close is much more of a negotiation than a sale,
and that is why I believe all salespeople should become astute students of
negotiation as well as sales. Sales allows you to present and sell well, build
value, and be elegant, whereas negotiation is down-and-dirty slugging in
the trenches. If sales were a Formula 1 Race car flying down a straight path
on pure octane and fuel—an efficient machine, negotiation would be a
rusty old monster truck, chugging diesel and slogging it out in the mud.
Personally I come from a background of buying distressed real estate
on the street and coaching people to break down their belief systems and
change their lives, often taking on more financial risk than they ever have
before. Both of those can require hard closing skills, so I am okay with
sitting through a seven objection hard close as long or as hard as it takes
because I know my product or service is true and right for the customer.
There may be tears, there may be crying, there may be moments of severe
despair, I even had a client sign up for my program, his wife threatened to
divorce him, he called in for a refund, and I said, “Does she support you in
your endeavors?” He said “no,” and I said, “She’s not your wife.” They got
divorced; my client changed his life and became successful afterwards, but
the remedy for the darkness of hard closing is having a high belief in service
and to deeply care about the customer.
If you are doing what is right, you can put up with an unbearable amount
of pain.
In sales, you can only close as hard as you care. As Zig Ziglar said, “They
don’t care about how much you know until they know how much you care.”
Having strong ethics, a strong, almost religious faith, or zealous like
belief in your mission and serving the greater good can make you able
 III 101

to deal with the most difficult closes of all and sit through life-changing
moments.
Some salespeople are against the hard close. I think it’s something you
need to develop a thick skin to and keep it in your repertoire because the
biggest and hardest deals sometimes cannot be closed with elegance and
must be closed in a hard way.

The Power of Silence

The roar of silence is one of the most powerful closing tools around. We
have two ears and one mouth to use in the exact proportion 2:1, so listen
twice as much as you talk. Silence is very powerful when closing because it
allows you to “shut up and listen” to what the prospect is saying, and you
become highly perceptive to his breathing, body language, and other subtle
cues.
It’s a common myth that extroverts make better salespeople than intro-
verts, but in truth, a trained introvert has a massive advantage over his
bumbling extroverted counterpart. Extroverts will talk, and talk, and talk,
and talk themselves out of a sale, whereas an introvert will sit there and
listen until the prospect is finished.
Remember the conscious mind operates at 500 words per minute while
you can only speak at 100–200 words per minute, so every time you plunge
into silence, their mind begins to race, and as an untrained salesperson, so
will yours.
I was recently training a group of young salespeople in a role play and
performed my close and then waited in silence. Hardly ten seconds passed
before the young salespeople started to giggle and snicker; they looked at
each other and turned red in embarrassment. People are not used to pure
silence, and when you can unleash that upon them, it can be a very power-
ful tool for applying pressure.
102 The Close—7 Level Selling

They say that the music isn’t in the notes; it’s the spaces in between the
notes that make the music, which is also known as the silence.
Learn to calm your mind down and be able to sit perfectly still waiting in
silence for your prospect to react, and typically the person who breaks the
silence first loses.
Punctuate your speech with silence, use silence after asking for the busi-
ness, and use it for dramatic effect in your presentations. You will be amazed
at the power of silence.

Key issues—1 major, 3 minor issues

As with negotiation, in sales, there is usually one major issue for a buyer to
object and three minor issues. One is a need and three are wants. You need
to be able to establish the differences between what the buyer wants and
what the buyer needs.
In the wise words of Henry Ford, “If I asked my customers what they
wanted, they would have told me a faster horse.”
Sometimes the customer doesn’t really know what he wants, so you must
give him what he needs.
As a salesperson you must drill down on the key issues in the questioning
phase, and potentially the closing phase to determine what the key issue is
so that you can solve it.

Buying Questions
Years ago in my very early twenties I saw an ad online that read “get gov-
ernment money for your business.” I was twenty-one, young and naïve, and
clicked the ad requesting some information. The next morning a phone
salesman called me while I was in bed, barely awake. In fact, the phone
woke me up. I answered the phone and on the other end was a salesman
 III 103

with a French accent from Montreal. Although he had a French accent, he

sounded like a pro on the phone.
The reason for the call was that I requested some information and
he was there to give it to me; he pitched me on his company, which
compiled all of the grant information in the country and provided it
to your door so that you could apply for as many grants as you wanted:
you could get funding for your business, your family, your house, a
new car, an entire myriad of government money—millions of dollars
was waiting for me, if only I purchased his binder of compiled grant
information.
“How much is it?” I asked
The salesman said “What’s your postal code sir?”
I gave him my postal code and he closed me on a $300 binder of grant
information that came promptly in the mail.
At the time I was amazed that this guy knew that I wanted to buy and was
so slick and smooth about closing me.
Later had a job at a phone sales company and told my trainer about
the French grant salesman who sold me as soon as I asked how much
his program was and closed me by getting my postal code, increasing the
commitment.
She said, “Of course, it’s because you asked a buying question! It’s a signal
you were ready to buy.”
She was right, and then I learned the power of buying questions.

Types of Buying Indicators

a. Price and terms—“How much?” , “Are payment plans available?”
b. More details—“I’d like to know more about the guarantee.”
c. Delivery—“When can you deliver the product by?”
104 The Close—7 Level Selling

d. Body language (chin touching or tea kettle)—Touching the chin

usually signifies deep thought.
e. Calculating numbers—When the buyer starts breaking down the
numbers, “So you are telling my for X dollars I get Y result? That
works out to Z per transaction . . .”
f. Sudden friendliness—A change in positive demeanor towards you.
“Hey, that looks great! Mike—can I call you Mike?”

Common Types of Objections

General sales resistance—A general aversion to salespeople and the sales
process. They hate being sold but must buy at some point. All real custom-
ers with real money to spend have real general sales resistance, and they
will put up at least one objection to avoid feeling like a “lay down.’ This is
good, because people who are quick to buy are usually unqualified and have
no money, so they have nothing to lose and will jump right in until you
find out they have no money. As a salesperson you should welcome gen-
eral buyer’s resistance because it usually means the buyer is for real and has
something to lose. If they act like they have no money, they actually could
have quite a bit. People don’t get rich by giving it away.
Requests for information—“I need more information” is is something
you should welcome as a salesperson. Requests for information are good
because they usually indicate interest, and if you can educate the buyer
enough, they will buy.
Objective objections—“What proof do you have?” These are good objec-
tions as well; all you have to do is be able to back up your claims. Remember,
they say it—it’s real. When you say it, it’s hearsay to be untrusted. Be pre-
pared to back up your claims with case studies, testimonials, sources, and
anything else to justify your proof of claims.
 III 105

Subjective objections—Any type of objection about you, these seem

to come from salespeople talking about themselves and their companies
too much and can create a “I just don’t like him” feeling. If you sense this
happening, switch the focus onto the customer, which it should be on
anyways.
Excuses—“I’m not in the market right now” or some shallow put-off to
get rid of the salesperson. “I’m too busy for that right now” or “I don’t like
the color.” Know that these are not real objections to a lack of interest; they
are simply there to save the buyer time and energy.
Show-off objections—“I have a lot of experience in your industry” is the
buyer puffing his chest for recognition, to be right and to be liked. Play
into his need and make him feel superior: “Of course someone with your
experience can see that X . . .”
Malicious objections—You may come across someone who is overly
defensive and negative who says, “Salespeople are just out for a quick
buck!” or “I’ve tried a service like yours before and I got ripped off !”
or other negativity like that. These people have been burned in the past
by a salesperson, and all you need to do is sympathize: “I understand
exactly how you feel. If I were in your position I would feel the same
way.”
Unspoken objections—These objections are landmines because you will
get your presentation 95 percent of the way to the close and the unspo-
ken objection is stopping you. There is some uncertainty left in the buyer’s
mind about you, your offer or your company holding them back. Get them
to 10 on the three 10s.
Time—Every buyer, whether it’s a person or company, has a time con-
straint that they are dealing with. We all have twenty-four hours in a day, so
this is mostly an excuse.
106 The Close—7 Level Selling

Money—If the buyer has some money and financing ability also known
as the ability to get loans, money is never an issue. The only time money
is an issue is if the buyer has literally no job, zero cash, bad credit and is
pretty much a deadbeat. Even then, you can get a friend or family member
to sponsor him into your offer. Money is never a real objection. The real
objection is they feel uncertain about the three 10s.
Fear (uncertainty is a better word)—Replace the word “fear” in your
vocabulary for “uncertainty” and you will look at fear in a whole new light.
When you are fearful, it’s an emotion, and you can’t quite pinpoint what
the fear is. Uncertainty is a feeling, where you ask yourself, “Uncertain
about what?” Ultimately all objections are simply a lack of certainty and
if you can increase the certainty in you, your offer, and your company, the
buyer will buy.
Pride—“I don’t think I need it. I’m better than that product” may be true
or may not be. Usually this is pride talking, and all you have to ask is, “Why
are you here then? Why haven’t you got the result you really desire yet?” or
“Why hasn’t this happened for you yet?” To stop pride, you need a big dose
of reality to balance the ego out.

All Objections Are the Same—Uncertainty

The remedy for all objections is certainty. The buyer must reach a state
of certainty where he knows your product is a 10—the best thing since
sliced bread—you are a 10 and the only choice of a person to be deliv-
ering it to him and servicing him, and your company is a 10—a great
company to be proud of. In the end, all objections are the same, a form
of uncertainty. When you begin to look at all objections being the same,
you can begin to handle them in more methodical ways and really drill
down on your mechanics of closing the deal instead of worrying about
 III 107

memorizing 100 different objections as so many salespeople attempt

to do.

The Buying Combination

10

0
Certainty Certainty Certainty of Action Pain
of Offer of You Company Threshold

Asking for Referrals

As a business owner I know firsthand that marketing is a major expense for
every business, and leads cost money, and so does general customer acquisi-
tion. Acquiring a new customer takes seven times the effort to acquire over
reselling an old customer or asking for a referral, and in the old days they
used to say that it takes seven exposures of advertising to win a customer.
Tony Robbins once delivered a business seminar and revealed a new
number for 2017 and that was that it is now fourteen times exposure to
get a new customer. Many companies spend anywhere from 14 percent to
33 percent of their top line revenue on customer acquisition alone! That
money goes into marketing, advertising, travel, trade shows, and some-
times sales commissions, but usually just the costs to get the customer to
say “Hello.”
108 The Close—7 Level Selling

In my early twenties I worked in an inbound sales call center, and on the

wall was a sign that said “it costs $18 to get the phone to ring”!
That business owner had to pay $18 just to get the phone to ring for an
opportunity for one of his salespeople to do a presentation and make a
commission!
With this being said, a salesperson who can get referrals from his existing
client base is worth his weight in gold to the business owner. Referrals cost
nothing—you just have to ask.

The Best Time to Ask

The best time to get a referral is right after the sale is made and the paper-
work is drying on the table and you ask, “Before I go John, one quick
question for you.”
“Sure what is it?”
“About the product we got you started with today: what’s the thing you
loved most about it?”
“Oh, I love that it’s going to get me the result in eight weeks,
guaranteed!”
“Fantastic, who do you know that would also love getting the same result
in eight weeks, guaranteed?”
This is a powerful way to ask for a testimonial because 1) he is in—he
purchased and is invested, 2) we are asking for the thing loved the most and
using the emotion he felt to see who else would like to feel that same way,
and 3) the buyer is in a relative state of certainty.

Other Unorthodox Times to Ask for a Referral

On the stall or nonsale—You have presented, but the deal isn’t going to
happen. At this point you have nothing to lose by asking for a referral. “Hey
 III 109

John, I know this isn’t the right time for you right now to go ahead and
do this, but who do you know that would be interested in something like
this?”
On the rejection—When the buyer rejects you with a flat-out no, again
you have nothing to lose but to ask for a referral “John, I know this isn’t
for you, but who do you know that would be interested in something like
this?”
On the opening—Open with a referral. “Hey, John, I know this probably
isn’t for you, but who do you know that would like to make 8–12 percent
of their money secured by a first lien in real estate?” There is a saying in the
money-raising sales industry: Come in for advice, come out with money.
Come in for money, come out with advice.

8 Elements of Power and How To

Increase Your Personal Power
“No man is wise enough or good enough to be trusted with unlimited power.”
—Charles Colton
Power and the study of power has fascinated people for centuries. Power
is seen and used in politics, in business, in love, in war, and seemingly in
every human interaction there is some element of power being used. Power
is simply defined as the ability to get things done, whether it be move an
object across a room, influence an audience, or start or stop a war.
The value of power is so fundamental to human beings that it is indeed
a fundamental value and need for every person. We must have a certain
amount of power to be happy and get things done in life.
In negotiating, knowing how and when to use power is a way to create
leverage and a stronger position. The eight elements of power that are
shared in this book are for positioning purposes and can be stacked upon
110 The Close—7 Level Selling

one another. You can use one type of power to gain advantage or use multi-
ple elements of power at once for greater effect. The elements of power that
we will explore in this section are:

Power of Legitimacy

Power of Prizes

Power of Punishment

Power of Integrity

Power of Charisma

Power of Expertise

Power of Timing

Power Of Information

Some readers may feel negative towards power as if power is about

manipulating or harming people. When reading this section, understand
that power is neutral; it is neither good nor bad and can be used for either
good or evil.
Power is a tool and will be used as the wielders of power see fit. Consider
the atomic bomb that was dropped on Japan at the end of World War II.
Some would argue that the power of that bomb was horrible and killed
and maimed many people along with destroying great Japanese cities at the
time. The other side of the argument is that the power of the atomic bomb
saved lives because it stopped a war that was dragging on too long and many
more people would have died through prolonged fighting.
Regardless of your opinion on which side is right and which side is wrong,
we can surely agree that such a bomb is powerful and can be used in a neg-
ative way to kill and destroy or in a positive way to prevent further wars.
 III 111

Power of Legitimacy
The first element of power that must be learned is the power of legitimacy.
As human beings we succumb to the “aura of legitimacy” portrayed by oth-
ers in negotiations. If we see a person with the title of “vice president” we
assume that he is important. If we see an official-looking price tag at the
jewelry store, we believe that the price is real. Titles, the written word, and
other trappings like business cards, brands, logos, and imagery all make up
an “aura of legitimacy” that lend power to the person who appears to be
legitimate.
Consider a medical doctor. When your medical doctor steps into his
office and you have been waiting on the paper-covered examining table
after the nurse took your blood pressure and checked your heart rate and
weight, the legitimacy of someone who is called a doctor, wearing a white
coat and looks the part creates an “aura of legitimacy” that makes us listen
to whatever the doctor prescribes.
The doctor will write us an official prescription on an official piece of
doctor paper, and we accept any drug he prescribes for us, because he is
indeed a doctor. We do not consider the fact that the drug the doctor is
prescribing for us is from a company he owns shares in, or the fact that the
doctor may not actually know what is wrong with you. The fact is, the doc-
tor is a doctor, he has a title, and appears legitimate, so we accept his word
as true. That is the power of legitimacy.
The power of legitimacy extends to presidents or anyone else with power.
The president of the United States would be expected to ride in a limo,
not a Honda civic. He would be expected to have one of his staff carry his
luggage up the steps into the White House and not carry it himself. If the
president does not look and act like a president, he loses his power of legit-
imacy, and the people stop believing in him.
112 The Close—7 Level Selling

For you to have the power of legitimacy, you must use your title or create
one if you do not have one yet. In my real estate office the entry level job
for real estate is the “Vice President of Acquisitions.” In reality, this job is
entry level and anyone can be the “vice president,” but when people in the
industry get a call from the “vice president of acquisitions” they are more
likely to talk to the legitimate-sounding person on the phone whether he
has been in the business for five minutes or five years. Of course the vice
president must have the confidence to carry out his “aura of legitimacy” for
his power to be maintained.
Another way to create more power is to remove your first name from
your business cards and all of your communications in general. Consider
many successful authors H. G. Wells, J. K. Rowling, L. R. Hubbard, and
anyone who uses their initials as their first name is forcing the other side
to call them “Mr. Wells” or “Ms. Rowling.” To remove your first name is to
increase your power because it removes any chances of getting onto a first-
name basis.
Another way to create power of legitimacy for yourself when negotiating
is to use your office, automobile, or territory where you are surrounded by
your own trappings of power. You may have your title on your desk, your
awards you have won, your receptionist to make the other side wait in the
lobby, the nice leather chair you sit in versus the plastic folding one that
they sit in.
When you control the territory, you create legitimacy for yourself.
It is always more powerful to meet in your office surrounded by your
trappings of power then to meet at your home or kitchen table. Real estate
sales people understand the power of legitimacy and will typically lease a
luxury car like a Mercedes, BMW, Porsche, Range Rover, or Lexus to create
the aura of legitimacy when negotiating with clients. In reality, the salesper-
son may be broke and not have any money to make the payments, but it is
 III 113

always more powerful to negotiate in a beautiful, spotless, leather interior

of a brand new Mercedes than it is to negotiate in a ten-year-old Toyota
with kids’ toys in the back, spilled milk on the seat, and a melted chocolate
bar on the interior car mat.
Another way to create the power of legitimacy is to have a secretary screen
and place your calls. You may find this pretentious, but the harder you are
to access, the more perceived power you have.
In the insurance business, brand new agents who are male will get a
female to record their voicemail message. In reality, these sales agents are
dead broke and are just starting out in the industry; they cannot afford a
secretary, but the female voice on the voicemail creates the “aura of legiti-
macy” that creates power and prestige for the new agent.
Other ways that people and companies use the power of legitimacy is
through your positioning in the marketplace. You may be the:
1. Biggest
2. Smallest
3. Best
4. Worst
5. Oldest
6. Newest
7. Award winning, etc.
Being a positioned player in the marketplace adds to the legitimacy of
your power.
When you have the power of legitimacy, what you will earn is respect.
Consider the respect for the law that every day citizens have where you
may be stuck at a red light in the middle of the night and no one is around.
Rather than running the red light, most people will wait at the red light
merely out of respect for the legitimate power of the law.
114 The Close—7 Level Selling

Tradition is another form of legitimate power. The power lies in the fact that
“we have done this for a long time” and because “we have done this for a long
time,” we assume that the tradition is legitimate. We do not question old and
outdated traditions merely on the fact that they have been around so long that
they have become legitimate. With respect to legitimacy, consider the fact that
in any endeavor you begin will start out illegitimate and brand new, but if you
survive in the endeavor long enough, you eventually become legitimate.
Consider where the line of illegitimate to legitimate is? I challenge you to
find it; you may find that the fact that you have “been around for a long time”
suddenly makes you legit. You may know someone who has “been in the busi-
ness for twenty years,” who may say that to create legitimacy in their business
practices, but consider the fact that they may have done the same year twenty
times in a row and may not be any good at what they do. You may want some-
one who has been in the business for one year but with a stellar track record.
Along with tradition are established procedures or “company policies.”
Many businesses have price tags, and most consumers do not question the
price tag on any item. Most items are negotiable when it comes to price,
but the power of legitimacy and the written word make us comply with
established procedures and prices.
Standard contracts and forms are another way to create the power of
legitimacy. When a consumer makes a purchase, it always looks more legiti-
mate to print a contract on three-ply carbon paper that creates a white copy,
a yellow copy, and a pink copy with full return policies and procedures on
it than it would be to write the customer’s credit card number down on a
cocktail napkin and stuff it in your pocket.
The standard contract with three copies allows the customer to take one
home, the sales agent to keep one, and the company to process one copy.
In reality, the contract is barely better than the napkin, but the power of
legitimacy is what captures the heart and mind of the customer.
 III 115

Power of Prizes
The term “breads and circuses” originated in Rome by the poet Juvenal in
circa 100 a.d. The term identifies the problem in society where the popu-
lace only cares for the prizes of “breads” (free bread from the government
and politicians in power) and “circuses” (gladiator and chariot games that
entertain the masses). Since the average man only cares for breads and cir-
cuses, he no longer cares for his political birthright of political involvement
and who is in power. The power of prizes has taken over a once powerful
republic. Rome originated as a powerful stoic democracy where the people
were involved in voting and controlling the government.
The government feared the power, not the other way around. When the
elected politicians realized that they could buy the votes of the people with
“prizes”—typically free grain, breads, and gladiator games, the political sys-
tem became a race to the bottom to see who can give more prizes to the
people in exchange for poorer and poorer governance. Throughout history,
democracy only lasts for about 250 years until the people find out that they
can vote themselves prizes and the system collapses.
“When the people find that they can vote themselves (prizes)
money, that will herald the end of the republic.”
—Benjamin Franklin
Such is the power of the prize. When there is promise of a reward, people
will give up their power in exchange for the prize or the reward. In Rome the
people gave up their political involvement for free grain and free entertain-
ment. Today in America, the same thing is happening; the people give up
their involvement for breads and circuses, and this signals the end of the 250
year life span of democracy and the end of the republic, very much like Rome.
The ability to create a prize and reward the other side is a tremendous
source of power. In a taxi cab company, the dispatcher has more power than
116 The Close—7 Level Selling

the owner because he can reward the cab drivers with more jobs and in
effect more money. The person who can give the prizes is the person with
the power.
When you are negotiating in business, you can use the power of prizes
when you position yourself. You are the best in the business and doing busi-
ness with the best is a reward unto itself. There is always a market for the
best and always a market for the cheapest. However, there is much more
profit in being the best and positioned as the prize.
To create prize power in your business, you must put your personal rep-
utation on the line to solve the buyer’s problems. When you take on their
problems, you are rewarding them; they are not rewarding you with the
business. Most junior salespeople will feel like the customer is the prize
and that the customer is rewarding the salesperson with the business.
Professional salespeople who are the best in the business use the power of
prizes to frame the situation differently. Professionals know that they are
the prize and that they are rewarding the client with the best service in the
industry—and that is why a great salesperson is a prize to be won by the
customer.
When you utilize the power of prizes and frame yourself as the prize, you
will have the confidence to ask your customer for all of their business rather
than begging like a dog for a small share of the customer’s table scraps. You
are the prize to be won, so use prize power to your advantage.
Prize power can also be used as an intimidation factor. Whenever you
feel as though the other side can reward you or give you a prize, you feel
the power of prizes creep in. A junior salesperson may be intimidated with
the prize power of his first $1,000 sale whereas a pro salesperson won’t feel
any pressure with a $100,000 sale. In fact, the more you ignore the power
of prizes and ability that the other side has to reward you, the greater your
power will be in relation to the other side.
 III 117

Prize power can also be intimidating in the sexual arena. Consider a

young man who is going on a date with a very beautiful woman who is “out
of his league.”
He may feel as though she is the prize and lose his confidence and his
power when dealing with her. The same man can change his mind and tell
himself that he is the prize and that she is lucky to be out with him and
there will be an entire shift of power on the date.
Other prizes that may be available for intimidation purposes may be
opportunities to do business in the future, access to a ski cabin, free trips,
free food, opportunities for exposure, or any other rewards that you may
find attractive. Maintain your power and do not be tempted by the power
of prizes.
“A nation is born a stoic and dies an epicurean.”
—Will Durant

sto·ic
ˈstōik/
noun
noun: stoic; plural noun: stoics; noun: Stoic; plural noun: Stoics
1.
2. a person who can endure pain or hardship without showing their feelings
or complaining.

Ep·i·cu·re·an
ˌepikyəˈrēən,ˌepiˈkyo͝orēən/
noun
noun: Epicurean; plural noun: Epicureans
1.
2. a disciple or student of the Greek philosopher Epicurus.
a person devoted to sensual enjoyment, especially that derived from fine
food and drink.
118 The Close—7 Level Selling

Power of Punishment
The power of punishment is the opposite of the power of prizes. Where
the power of prizes alludes to the fact that the other side can reward you
with intangible pleasurable benefits like money, fame, travel, love, sex, more
business, or whatever else you desire, the power of punishment is the oppo-
site of pleasure. The power of punishment is indeed the perception that the
other side can punish or harm you rather than reward you.
Consider the intimidation factor of the power of punishment when a
police officer pulls you over on the highway and has the power to give you a
speeding ticket—or not. In that situation of intimidation, the police officer
has the power of punishment.
Parents with children will use the power of prizes along with the power
of punishment with their children. “if you finish your vegetables you will
get an extra cookie with dessert . . . If you don’t finish your vegetables, no
playtime after dinner and you go straight to bed.”

Power of Morality
The power of morality is awarded to those who have a consistent set of val-
ues and follow through on them. A person with high integrity and a set of
unchanging values will always have more power than a person who changes
his values frequently.
Consider the pope, the leader of the Catholic Church: although the
Catholic Church has been responsible throughout history in killing, plun-
der, rape, murder, and theft and was responsible for one of the most terrible
times in European history known as the Dark Ages, the pope, because of his
unwavering values is one of the most powerful people on the planet.
How powerful is your decision-making ability? Are you a person who will
stick to your decisions or go back on them? Do you take back an ex-lover
or do you go crawling back when you are in a weak moment? The person
 III 119

who sticks to his decisions and his values will have the power of morality
on his side.
The power of morality comes into play when you do what’s right for the
customer even if you send them to a competitor. Zappos, now a division of
Amazon, is a major online shoe retailer where the sales staff is trained to
find the right shoe for the customer even if they have to send the customer
to a competitor.
This power of morality creates massive trust between the customer and
Zappos. It wins loyal customers and huge sales in the long run. At Zappos
they also use the power of morality when hiring staff. At the end of the two
week paid staff training, they offer a $2,000 bonus to anyone who wants to
quit on the spot and not work for the company.
This example of the power of morality gives the bad employees a chance
to save face and leave before they cost the company money by offering bad
customer service or working for a company that their heart is not invested
in. When you bribe bad employees to leave, this builds massive trust on the
entire Zappos team and creates a very strong culture of performance.
To maintain your power of morality, avoid setting standards and then
breaking your own standards. Avoid saying that you never cut prices and
then cut prices. This confuses the people around you and destroys your
power.
The benefit of using the power of morality versus the power of prizes is
that long-lasting values have a long term effect whereas the power of prizes
and punishment have a short term effect. When you use the power of prizes
to reward a child too often, very soon the child takes the prizes for granted
and learns to expect rewards every time for the same behavior.
Building up your power of morality by having a strong set of values and
sticking to them consistently brings trust and leverage into any negotia-
tion. In fact, when negotiating against someone with strong values and
120 The Close—7 Level Selling

high integrity, especially against cutting prices, you soon learn to not even
ask for a concession. I have been an Apple Computers customer my entire
life, and I used to ask for discounts on my new computer purchase every
five years.
Apple will always respond with, “We don’t discount our products,” and
in-fact, they do not give discounts to the public ever. Apple is so strong in
the power of morality and sticking to their values that even after owning a
Mac computer for years, you can still sell it for almost full value years later
on the secondary market. The power of morality keeps Apple’s brand strong
because their products are excellent and thus a competitor’s computer will
sell for pennies on the dollar years later and the Mac computer will sell for
nearly full price after years of use. Such is the power of morality and sticking
to a consistent set of values.
Another trend where companies are using the power of morality to create
massive trust is in the marketplace. Like Tom’s Shoes or Roma Boots, who
gives away a pair of new shoes or boots to a person in need for every pair
that you buy.
These companies don’t overplay this giving back in their marketing. Their
goal isn’t to completely destroy the local shoe makers and shoe economies;
that is not part of moral power. Instead, they have a strong set of values,
and this strong set of values helps Tom’s Shoes and Roma Boots to become
a major seller of shoes and boots worldwide regardless of the positive and
negative effects of such morality.

Reverent power as an intimidation tool

As human beings we marvel at people who live by a consistent set of values.
To be human is to be flawed, and at some point everyone may violate his or
her values.
 III 121

If you find that someone is using the power of morality against you, you
may neutralize their power by 1) finding a precedent where the exception
beat the rule or 2) establishing that the policy that they are enforcing on
you may have worked in the past but is no longer relevant going forward.
Rules were meant to be broken, and in negotiation, morals and ethics are
merely weapons that one group of people will use against another group of
people.

Power of Charisma
cha·ris·ma
kəˈrizmə/
noun
noun: charisma; plural noun: charismata
1. compelling attractiveness or charm that can inspire devotion in others.
“she enchanted guests with her charisma”
synonyms: charm, presence, personality, force of personality, strength of
character; Moremagnetism, attractiveness, appeal, allure
“he lacks the charisma we look for in our salespeople”
2. a divinely conferred power or talent.

The power of charisma is hard to classify and hard to identify. Charisma

is a “gift from god” or a “special talent” such as the ability to heal or prophe-
size. In modern terms, charisma is the ability to capture the heart and mind
of another person and gain support or devotion.
Another way to look at the power of charisma would be the power of
personality, power of celebrity, or the power of being liked. We always wish
to please people that we like and the power of charisma can be completely
magical. Consider the special treatment that rock stars get when they travel
across the country. Celebrities get free cars, free travel, free food, and a mul-
titude of other benefits from their power of charisma.
122 The Close—7 Level Selling

To be likable and charismatic is to be powerful. People have a hard time

saying no to a person they like. Consider a cute little three-year-old girl
asking for a cookie. She is cute and has charisma; and you will give her the
cookie.

Charismatic power as an intimidation factor

The power of charisma can be very intimidating in that we are less inclined
to ask for concessions from people that we like. In fact, a charismatic nego-
tiator can often make deals that would be impossible for an uncharismatic
person to make. If you study top salespeople or negotiators, you will find
the power of charisma as an intangible X factor they have either developed
or were born with.

Power of Expertise
When you project more expertise on a subject than other people, you have
power over them. Your doctor, auto mechanic, plumber, and even your
maid will have expertise you don’t. A waiter at a fancy restaurant will have
the power of expertise when making recommendations to you. We all want
to be guided by experts and as human beings we are trained socially to look
to experts to learn what we should think about any particular subject.

Expertise as an Intimidation Factor

Do not be intimidated by someone who appears to be an expert. The expert
is merely someone who is at least one step ahead of the person they are
advising. Oftentimes, experts are merely people who are self-proclaimed
experts and may not even have any special knowledge or expertise at all.
Consider a realtor who claims to be the local area expert. What qualifies
him to be the expert? The fact that he lives on a street in the neighborhood?
He is merely the expert because he calls himself the expert.
 III 123

Conversely, when someone questions your expertise on a matter and you

may lack the expertise to maintain power, simply say “That is not my area
of expertise, but my team is the finest in the business, and I have someone
with that expertise on my team.”
Using different and specific language is a major ploy for using the power
of expertise to gain advantage over others. Doctors and lawyers will use
different language with you to appear more technical and more powerful,
so get them to speak in plain English to take the expertise and intimida-
tion factor away. You can strip the power of expertise completely away from
people using special language on you to get them to explain the techni-
cal jargon-using fourth-grade language or, as I like to say, explain that to a
three-year-old when the three-year-old is me!

Power of Timing
The power of timing is found when people who normally don’t have any
power suddenly have power over you. Consider the clerk at the government
office who has no power to choose how he does his job when suddenly you
show up his desk and need something from him. This government worker
with limited power typically will exercise power over you because in this
situation and this specific timing, he will have all the power and you have
none. Generally, people with very little power love to use it when they get
a chance.
You can see the power of timing with building inspectors, desk clerks,
secretaries, government workers etc. These people have very little power in
real life, but under certain timings and circumstances, their power is mag-
nified immensely.
124 The Close—7 Level Selling

Power of Information
With the proliferation of computers in the 1990s, the Industrial Age ended
when the Berlin Wall came down and we entered the Information Age. The
power of information is extremely valuable when negotiating because the
sharing of information bonds people together. When you share informa-
tion with your customers, you create value, and this shared information
bonds the customer to you. Pharmaceutical reps typically can only book
meetings with busy doctors if they have new information about a drug or
specific research. I used to work for a company in Canada that shared more
free information in the marketplace than any other competitor, and in a
few short years the startup company grew to have multimillion-dollar reve-
nue and became the fortieth fastest growing company in the country. Such
is the power of information and its ability to build trust in a negotiation.

Information Power as an Intimidation Factor

Secrets and withheld information can be used to manipulate the confidence
levels of negotiators in any negotiation. Secrets and withheld information
may increase or decrease your confidence in any situation.

Stacking Power
If you study top salespeople and top negotiators around the world, you will
notice that they will use multiple types of power at once and will “stack”
power for maximum leverage and advantage. A sales leader in most indus-
tries will use all eight types of power to his advantage, namely:
Power of Legitimacy—A sales leader will have a fancy title “regional
vice president,” he will look like a president and act like the owner of the
company.
 III 125

Power of Prizes—The sales leader will have some specific reward or prize
for taking action today, perhaps a special discount or rebate for taking
action now.
Power of Punishment—The sales leader will also have something that
will be lost for those who do not take action today.
Power of Morality—The sales leader will appeal to the power of morality
by serving a higher purpose or sticking to a strong set of values of doing
what is right for the customer. He may even donate a percentage of his prof-
its to charity to show morality.
Power of Charisma—The sales leader will be charismatic and well liked
to many types of people. He will typically be physically fit, well dressed,
well spoken, well-mannered and have a good sense of humor with a high
degree of agreeableness.
Power of Expertise—The sales leader will be framed as an expert in his
field.
Power of Timing—The sales leader will have the power of timing on his
side in that now is the perfect time to act on his offer.
Power of Information—The sales leader will use information to his
advantage and may offer you a free report, free book, or any other materials
you will need to make a decision today.

Other Forms of Power

Power of Crazy
To convince the other side that you are crazy is to have power over them.
You are unpredictable and you are powerful. The power of unpredictabil-
ity is terrifying to most intelligent, rational people. We like to be able to
predict the outcomes of dealing with another person and nothing is more
powerful than a man with nothing to lose or everything to gain.
126 The Close—7 Level Selling

Power of Risk Displacement, Risk Sharing, or Risk Reversal

One way to create power in a negotiation is to give a risk reversal guarantee
where the seller will offer a money-back guarantee if their product does not per-
form. To manipulate risk, displace it, share it, or reverse it, which is extremely
powerful at the bargaining table. Besides reversing risk, you can also share the
risk of the upside or downside of a deal. Consider a real estate syndicate where
instead of contributing $1,000,000 to a large real estate project, investors are
much more comfortable to break the $1,000,000 into one hundred $10,000
units. A smaller risk with a smaller reward can be very powerful in this situation.

Power of Confusion
As an extension of the power of information is the power of confusion.
They say in sales that a confused mind does not buy. However, creating con-
fusion by having too many moving parts or too much complexity can create
power for you as a seller or a buyer. Creating confusion can create need, and
need disempowers the other side and makes them more willing to buy your
solution. Use confusion to your advantage by offering a confusing problem
and your simple solution.

Power of Competition
The person who has more options always has more power in any negotiation.
Consider the power of competition, when there are multiple buyers—say
ten, fifteen, or twenty buyers for a single property. The property will enter
into a bidding war where the buyers will strip their offers of conditions and
escalate their buying price to irrational levels just to win. The human spirit
is very competitive and although we may not admit to loving a competi-
tion, we all love to win. Whenever you can get multiple people competing
for one job or one opportunity, you will create leverage and advantage just
by using the power of competition.
 III 127

The Stall—Multi-Call Selling, Setting

the Next Appointment
Some buyers you will be able to close on the first engagement and you
should always aim to close in the shortest path possible. However, you will
never be able to close every buyer on the first engagement. Your goal as a
salesperson, however is to get a simple “Yes or no” decision as to whether
this product is for them. Is this worth pursuing more?
At the end of the sales presentation there are five outcomes:
1. Yes
2. Yes, with condition
3. Maybe
4. No with condition
5. No
You have done your job as a salesperson when you are eliminating all
maybes from your life. It’s either a yes, yes with a condition, no, or no with
a condition.
When you begin to set a meeting, whether they are phone meeting or in
person meeting, you want to be in control as much as possible. You want to
stay in rapport which is:
1. Sharp as a tack
2. Enthusiastic as hell
3. An expert in your field.
Protecting your time and avoiding phone tag are parts of being an expert
and a professional. The more professional you act yourself, the more profes-
sional your prospects will treat you.
As a rule, I never accept “I’ll call you back” or “call me back next week,”
which will put you into an endless game of voicemails, phone tag and
128 The Close—7 Level Selling

wasted time. Instead, say “Okay, John, I understand there are some things
you have to do before we can get started. Let’s set a phone meeting, exactly
one week today, same day, same time. I’ll call you at this number. I’ve got
you in my calendar; am I in yours?”
The easiest path to a yes is one-week, same day, same time, which is likely
open in the buyer’s schedule.
If the buyer doesn’t show up to the second phone meeting leave him a
message “John, this is [[YOURNAME]] from [[XYZ COMPANY]]. We
had a meeting tonight scheduled at 7 pm, so reach me back at 555–555–
5555. I hope everything is okay.”
Also send a text and an email, then wait fifteen minutes. If the buyer
doesn’t show up to the phone meeting, this is meaningless: life gets in the
way, he had other priorities; it does not mean he does not want your offer.
Keep contacting him in a professional manner with a second voicemail,
text, and email.
After two voicemails, texts, and emails, you can do one final voicemail
that will usually make him surface: “Hey John, it’s [[FIRST NAME]] call-
ing from [[XYZ COMPANY]] and I haven’t heard back from you. Hope
everything is okay. I’m leaving you a third voicemail to let you know I will
not be chasing you, and if I do not hear from you, I’m going to assume
you are not interested in the program we spoke about earlier. If you still
are interested, you can call me back at 555–555–5555 on my direct line;
otherwise good luck to you.”
Also send that text and email. You will typically notice that he will call
you back because of the “I’m not going to call or chase you anymore” mes-
sage. If he doesn’t reply he is either:
1. Out of the country and is not accessing his messages or
2. You aren’t a priority.
 III 129

If you aren’t a priority, rotate him to a lower position in your lead stack
and re-prospect him later.
You also want to be clear when doing phone meetings or in person meet-
ings about your process and “If you like it, this is what’s going to happen.”
I typically operate on a one or two meeting sale with a limit of three. Let
the prospect know that they should be able to decide in a certain amount
of time to avoid time wasters.
On a three-meeting system, 30 percent of my business is closed on the
first meeting, 40 percent on the second and 30 percent on the third. There
is value in going to three meetings in rare circumstances with clear limits to
the prospect about how decisions are to be made. When I began my sales
career in private equity, the company I worked for never closed on the first
meeting as they believed it could not be done. Some salespeople had an
undefined number of meetings and called it “relationship selling,” which
I believed to be nonsense. I shortened the sales cycle to close on the first
meeting and it worked—people bought. Most sales were done in one or
two meetings with a rare third, which saved me huge amounts of time and
also put me into the top ranks of salespeople almost immediately.
PART FOUR
TURNING PRO—BECOMING A TOP 1
PERCENT SALESPERSON—MACRO GAME

131
IV

W hen I was seventeen, I had a burning desire to sell, it was in my

blood! Every summer in high school I “had to get a job” to get
money for the next year and later in university it was to pay next year’s
tuition. The jobs that always attracted me were the sales jobs—vacuums,
insurance, financial services, real estate, private equity, energy contracts,
and I would always get started with a company and then my family who
had a horribly negative belief about selling would resist me so much, I
would quit.
I would hear things like “they aren’t going to pay you!,” “Sales organiza-
tions are crooks!,” “You won’t find any leads!,” “Who is going to buy from
you, you’re just a kid!?,” “How are you going to win business?,” and “Where
are your customers going to come from?.” Negative nonsense poisoned my
emotional mind until I got a safe secure job painting houses in the sum-
mer and the same people said, “Good honest work.,” “Safe secure pay.,”

133
134 The Close—7 Level Selling

“Guaranteed money.,” and suggested I go work for the government (as most
of my family does).
The negativity came from the fact that my father had taken a short career
in sales and was fired right about the time my younger brother was born.
Back then, they paid large base salaries, expense accounts, car accounts all
sorts of luxurious things many salespeople don’t get from their companies
these days. I assume he survived off his base pay, and the “up and down
money” irritated my mother who was a government teacher and got paid
every two weeks.
The real problem was that my father was an amateur salesperson, which
is common in the sales industry. Sales is an industry filled with amateurs,
training amateurs, attracting amateurs, and nearly all of the bad things said
about sales and selling come from an amateur’s reputation.
I recently had my father join me at one of my negotiation classes in which
we have each student do thirty live negotiations against real opponents for
real money. The class is set up like a tournament, and the winner ends up
with the most real money, and the weaker negotiators lose money as the
weekend goes on. Out of forty-six negotiators, my father placed 44th, and
#45 and #46 left early and didn’t finish he tournament.
My father was indeed an amateur who never read a book, took a class, or
hired a coach or mentor to make him better. When I was driving him home
after the event he said, “If I knew this information twenty years ago, I’d be
a multimillionaire today! I let so many deals and opportunities slip by . . .” I
kept my hands on the wheel and said, “Yup, all it takes is a $20 book and a
few thousand dollars to go to a class.”
In sales there are three levels of professional:
1. Amateurs
2. Pros
3. Super-pros
 IV 135

Amateurs are amateurs because they take the two-week training class at
the beginning of their sales career and stop there; they don’t bother to read
books on selling, negotiation, or marketing etc. to become better. They
don’t take a class or hire a performance coach or mentor to bring them to
the next level. In the world of cause and effect: amateur input, amateur out-
put. Most amateurs in sales do not make much money at all.
In the world of real estate, most real estate salespeople live below the pov-
erty line because they are amateur salespeople who do not study or take the
profession seriously.
Pros are lifelong learners who understand that becoming a professional
salesperson is technical and takes as much study as becoming a medical
doctor, lawyer, business executive, or any other white collar professional.
If you want to make professional income that is the top 1 percent of your
industry, you must put in professional input—that means training harder
than anyone else, reading more, being in better shape, having better profes-
sional hygiene, stronger ethics, a better personal brand, a better image, and
overall better skills and professional work ethic. Sales is the highest paid
job in the world for someone who trains like a pro, plays like a pro, and gets
results like a pro.
The only thing that separates amateurs from pros is that to turn pro, a
person must decide he wants to be the top 1 percent. I believe that if you
are in selling you should aim to be no less than the top 4 percent of income
earners in your country. At the time of writing right now, that’s around
$120,000 in Canada where I live. The top 1 percent income earners earn
$250,000. You must aim to be first in the top 10 percent, then the top 5
percent, 4 percent, then 1 percent.
Super-pros are the superstars of the industry. These people are game
changers earning extraordinary incomes. They run wildly successful sell-
ing practices and often train amateurs to be pros. Super pros are the top
136 The Close—7 Level Selling

0.5 percent or 0.1 percent of their game and many are earning in excess of
$1,000,000 a year. Many super-pros build brands around themselves and
turn into business moguls.

Why You Need to Be a Pro or Super-Pro in Today’s World

In today’s world, the market is getting too competitive. Technology is gob-
bling up jobs at a faster pace than ever and there is less and less room for
the amateurs at the bottom. As they say, “It’s crowded at the bottom, but
it’s lonely at the top.” If you are making the decision to be in sales, it is your
absolute utmost ethical duty to reach your potential and at the very least
get to pro status. Personal taxes are higher than ever, expenses keep creeping
up, and inflation keeps getting higher and higher eating away at your earn-
ings. $250,000 isn’t a lot of money anymore. Where I live in Winnipeg,
Manitoba, Canada you can buy a 100 year-old-crack house for $100,000
when the median home is currently $320,000 annually!
The average household income in Winnipeg is only $70,000, which
works out to only $35,000 per working person! In a recent article when
asking the wealthy how much money they needed to be wealthy, they
replied “$100,000,000.” A millionaire is the new middle class along with
doctors, lawyers and dentists who used to be upper middle class.
The world is changing, and you must be at least a pro to make the profes-
sion of selling a worthwhile endeavor.

Power Prospecting
“The leads are weak!” says one of the salesmen in the famous movie
Glengarry Glenn Ross in which Alec Baldwin replies “You’re weak!”
So your company didn’t give you any leads? Big deal. Leads costs compa-
nies massive amounts of money, and I know because I frequently buy them
 IV 137

for my own sales team and feed them daily. Leads on a silver platter come at
premium. You might think leads handed to you are a real bonus, but in real-
ity, whenever the company hands you a lead, they need to water down your
commission somewhere in the equation to give you less money per sale.
The more you can hunt and kill your own leads, the higher your commis-
sions will be. In one of my companies, the sales team earns 25 percent if I
feed them the lead, 35 percent if they bring in the lead and close it, amaz-
ingly, in two years of operation, the salespeople have always resorted to the
path of least resistance and have focused exclusively on the 25 percent leads
that are handed to them rather than picking up the phone and bringing in
their own leads—amazing!
It is human nature to always look for ways to conserve energy, and that
means time, effort, energy, and money. Salespeople are no different; if you
give them an easier way, they will always degrade themselves to the easi-
est, lowest paid activity possible to conserve energy, it’s a fact! This is why
salespeople erroneously start changing presentations and cutting corners
to make it easier for them, but it also is the first thing that causes their sales
to slip and decline and eventually death spiral into a “dry spell” of zero
sales.

5 Proven and Profitable Sources of Leads

The Power Base—The first place you always want to look for leads is in
your power base. To create power base, simply get out a piece of paper and
write down every single person you know—you can get out your phone
address book, your email list, and your social media accounts and compile
everyone into one massive list.
No matter how unconnected you are, every person should have at least
150 people they know and can remember. Your power base is where your
best and biggest opportunities will come from because they know you, like
138 The Close—7 Level Selling

you, and trust you. Some people object to the power base, saying, “I don’t
want to sell or talk to my friends and family.” As a rebuttal, most people
who say that are broke or have a poverty mentality.
Once you have your list, you can organize it into first circle, second circle,
third circle by the following criteria:
1. First circle knows you, knows what you do, and would 80 percent buy
from you
2. Second circle kind of knows you and has a 20 percent chance to buy
from you
3. Third circle does not know you and has a less than 10 percent chance
of buying from you
Your job is to work your power base and bring as many people into your
first circle as possible. You can start off with the first circle, call them, catch
up on your relationship, explain to them what you are doing and if they
know of anyone who would be interested in that kind of thing. This is
where a ton of business lies because these people have an 80 percent chance
of buying from you when the time is right. The first circle can also be a great
source of referrals.
Once first circle calls are done, then you call your second circle, which
you know less well than you first circle, have a similar conversation and
invite them to have lunch with you. Once you have broken bread with these
people, they are now in your first circle.
The third circle you do not know that well, so you will send them a post-
card that reads, “Hey, we haven’t spoken in a while, was thinking of you,
let’s do lunch!” and let them call you to bring them into the second and
finally the first circle.
As a professional salesperson you should never eat lunch alone; instead,
eat lunch with someone who can buy from you—a potential customer or a
 IV 139

potential referral source—because your network is your net worth. Always

work your powerbase and go back to it for the best source of leads. Too
many salespeople give up on their powerbases or forget about them, it’s
your main source of power. Do anything you can: join country clubs, tennis
clubs, golf clubs, or the best gym or spa in town to increase the quality and
quantity of your powerbase.
Existing Customers—The second best source of leads for you as a
salesperson is your company’s existing lead database or book of business.
These customers have already walked over the line of money and made
a purchase. They already like the company enough to buy, they like the
product and the brand enough to buy and repeat customers are seven
times easier to sell than cold traffic. In fact, there is virtually no company
on the face of the earth that can transmute cold traffic into gold in a
reliable way.
Cold traffic is where most marketers, salespeople, branding people, and
everyone turn to for new revenue, but it’s also the animal that can never be
tamed! Cold traffic it is always changing, and whatever works today in mar-
keting likely won’t work tomorrow. Cracking cold traffic is the holy grail
that every company wants but almost none can do efficiently. Therefore,
focusing on those who have already bought will result in the quickest path
to money for you. When I took over the Winnipeg office for a private
equity company I was working for, not a single salesperson was calling the
existing database.
There were tens of thousands of leads who had attended seminars, seen
the product, liked it enough and no one ever followed up. Instead, what
the salespeople in eleven offices across the country would do is wait for the
touring seminar to come through town, get a huge pile of hot juicy fresh
leads, call them, work them, then do nothing. They called it “relationship
selling.” What a pile of nonsense. I sat down in the Winnipeg office, opened
140 The Close—7 Level Selling

up the database and began calling the people who had been left behind. My
script was simple:

“Hey [[THEIR NAME]], is this [[THEIR NAME]]?

Hey [[THEIR NAME]], it’s [[YOUR NAME]], [[YOUR POSITION]],
calling from [[YOUR COMPANY]] on behalf of the founder
[[FOUNDER NAME]]. I’ve just taken over the Winnipeg office, and I
noticed that you attended one of our events in the past and no one has
called you in a while; got a minute?
“The reason for the call is just a quick customer service call to see how
things were going with your real estate investments and to reopen the lines
of communication . . .”
Most customers love to hear a quick customer service call from a com-
pany they bought from, know, like, and trust. It’s your chance to give them
information on the new developments, new deals, new products, and new
offers and check in on how their account is doing etc. and also a fantastic
source of business and referrals for you. Customers who feel valued will
share your name with others!
Paying for marketing for new customers—This is the favorite for
salespeople and the least favorite for the company. Lazy, loser, amateur
salespeople will sit around and wait for the next advertising barrage to hit
and take the walk-in traffic, the inbound calls, and the easy low hanging
fruit because it expends the least energy, but you have two major problems
with new customers:
1. They cost a fortune to acquire through the marketing department.
Depending on where you are in the marketing campaign’s lifecycle,
the leads may be at the cheapest they can be bought or the end of the
cycle where the costs go up geometrically per customer. You can’t rely
on the company’s big pockets to reach in and feed you every time you
 IV 141

are hungry. These leads are a bonus, a gift from God, the holy grail for
salespeople. If you are given leads by your company that are hot and
fresh and new—hallelujah! You found a great place to work. However,
you don’t know how reliably these people are going to come into your
funnel and how often because marketing always presents its own chal-
lenges, and you could wake up one day to find that the campaign is
burned out and there are no more leads until the marketing depart-
ment “figures it out” again. Do not rely on these leads for your success.
2. They don’t know you, may not like you, and certainly don’t trust
you—These people are cold; they are the general public; they don’t
trust anyone because they have been screwed and burned so many
times by unscrupulous amateur salespeople. As Zig Ziglar says, “If a
cat jumps up on a hot stove and burns his paw, he won’t stay away from
stoves, he’ll stay out of the kitchen!” Buyers today have many reasons
to distrust anything marketing or a salesperson tells them because there
has been copious amounts of unethical advertising over the years and
ultimately lying, cheating, and stealing to make a few dollars by too
many players. Cold traffic is terrified of you because you might sell
them something, they might do something stupid, they might lose
money on your offer, and there is a myriad of trust building exercises
that must be done to build trust with these leads before they can turn
into customers.
Smart Outbound cold calling: There is value in outbound cold calling,
in real estate acquisitions, I have my salespeople call fifty realtors a day, cold.
Why? Because relationships are built through communication, and these
people have the potential to enter the powerbase overtime as a source of
leads. You might pick up the newspaper (yes, they still exist) and call compa-
nies with ads advertised if you are selling ads, or contractor advertisements
142 The Close—7 Level Selling

if you sell things to contractors, but this is highly niche and applies to each
sales profession and industry separately.
Bill Bartmann, the billionaire, used to say, “If you want to catch a fish,
most people would go to the ocean, a river, a lake, or a stream, I say go to a
fish farm.
Sure, you pay a fee to get in, but when you walk by the tank, the fish hear
your boots and know it’s feeding time, so they come to the top, ready for
food and you scoop up as many as you want. “If you are going to look for
a fish, find the “fish farm” for your niche, and pay something to get inside,
because it’s usually worth it.
Blind Outbound Cold Calling/knocking doors: If you have a good
enough script for this or if your product or service permits, knocking doors
and blind cold calling can work. I still prefer all methods above to this brute
force, inefficient grind-until-you-die method, but some people make entire
careers out of it and it still works.
I have never sold cars, but I heard of a famous car salesman who would
call people out of the phone book and say “Hey, is this John? Hey John, it’s
Mike Jones calling from Main Street Cadillac. We have a brand-new car
being delivered to your house this afternoon and I wanted to confirm the
address was 123 Fakestreet.
The buyer on the other end would go, “What?! I didn’t order a brand
new Cadillac?!,” the salesman would have their address and name from the
phone book and then would enter a conversation with them explaining
that some wires must have been crossed, but while they were on the phone,
were they in the market for a new car?
This particular gentlemen made a career off of this. If you have the script
and it’s efficient for you, do it until it doesn’t work anymore! Personally, I
prefer the power base, existing customers and marketing customers to this,
 IV 143

which should be more than enough to fill up your sales day productively
every day.

Time Management—The Ideal Sales Day

They say that the real rock stars are either waking up at 5:00 am or going
to bed at 5:00 am—either way, 5:00 am is part of the equation. Typically,
salespeople have to operate during the day so I will make a schedule around
starting at 5:00 am rather than going to bed at 5:00 am. If you are an artist,
creative, visionary, writer, or a night salesperson, you might go to bed at
5:00 am, but that is taxing on the body overtime as the cortisol and hor-
mones don’t balance right. Your body was meant to get up with the sun; its
rhythms work with the circadian cycle of sunlight and darkness.
The modern world with artificial light has really changed people’s sched-
ules to very odd hours, and people are doing things that were never possible
in history before, like eating a large pizza at 1:00 am on the couch in front
of the TV. One hundred years ago, or further back in history, that was
impossible; there was no delivery of pizza at 1:00 am, there was no blue
light shining in your eyes, or TVs to be watched. One hundred years ago,
when it got dark, you went to bed; candles and electric light weren’t very
good.

The Ideal Sales Day

5:00 am: Wake up, start heading to the gym, stick an audiobook in your
ears, start mind feeding. The more you feed your mind, the better you will
be. If you fail to plant flowers in your mind, weeds will grow. The absence
of positive messages always defaults to negative messages, so stick some-
thing positive in your ears the second you wake up; it will motivate you
to keep going and get out of bed. If you listen to an audiobook first thing
144 The Close—7 Level Selling

in the morning throughout your entire morning routine, in the car and in
between meetings, you can consume a book a week, making fifty-two books
a year. The average CEO reads sixty books a year. If you read fifty books a
year for four years you are likely as smart as someone with a graduate degree
in university. Do it for ten years and that’s 500 books—you will be an inter-
national scholar.
First thing out of bed and last thing at night is also your most creative
time. Often you can solve problems you can’t solve in the middle of the day
at 5:00 am when everything is quiet. Why? No distractions. Some people
like to write out their goals first thing in the morning; as long as you do it
sometime before you get to work and review your vision plan for your life,
you will be on track.
6:00–7:00 am Get up. Go the gym walk, jog or run at least two miles
a day as recommended by sales trainer Brian Tracy. Do your workout with
your audiobook in your ears still, then have a steam or sauna, shower, and
shave.
7:00–8:00 am Get dressed/Breakfast/get to work with the audiobook
is still playing in your ears. You now have three hours of reading done
while also preparing for the day. An ideal diet is low in fat, low in carbs,
and no artificial sugar. Most very high performing people do not eat meat
or drink alcohol.
8:00–9:00 am Strategic planning—This is your hour to really review
your strategic plan for the day: how are you going to get the most out your
day today? Review your vision plan, your journal, or whatever resources
you use to plan your life.
I personally keep a one-year vision plan with every detail written out
in advance about my life, both personal and business. I offer this plan to
others as a program called “Your Best Self,” which you can purchase from
my company online.
 IV 145

I also keep two journals: one is my high-performance journal with my

ninety-day goals broken down into step by step actions, and the other is
the black book which is a book I use to track my sales meetings and negoti-
ations daily. Both the high-performance journal and the black book can be
purchased online from my company.
9:00–10:00 am Set up your people for the day—current business—If
you have an executive assistant or a team, set them up for the day and give
them goals to hit; otherwise, focus on the current business you have in the
pipeline.
10:00–11:00 am emails and callbacks—current business—Only do
emails once and at a maximum twice per day. Generally business does not
happen over email; it mostly happens over the phone or in person, so I
typically avoid email at all costs as it’s usually people looking to take your
time. Limit this use. Check your voicemails, make your callbacks from the
day before, and focus on current business in the pipeline.
11:00 am-12:00 noon—Current business—Focus on current business
in the pipeline.
12:00 noon-1:00 pm Lunch—If you are going to eat lunch, go out with
a customer; otherwise pack an extremely light lunch and eat it while work-
ing. Don’t go out for lunch with your sales buddies and waste time together.
Only eat lunch with people who have the potential of being a customer or
bringing you customers, or keep working and eat light.
15-minute nap. This is key to eighteen hours of being awake each day.
A fifteen-minute powernap, one where you slip out of consciousness for a
few moments and then reenter will refresh your mind and bring creative
solutions to the top of your mind. Why? Because when you are entering or
exiting consciousness is when the creative mind is coming to the surface.
I like to break my day up with two fifteen-minute naps if possible so I am
never going for more than six hours without breaking consciousness. Some
146 The Close—7 Level Selling

people like Ray Dalio (successful hedge fund manager with a net worth of
$17 billion) practice mediations; a fifteen-minute nap is a primitive form
of meditation.
1:15–6:00 pm New business and potential sales meetings—This is your
zone to earn and win new business. If you make sales through sales meet-
ings, only schedule them in the afternoon if you can; it will keep you more
organized.
6:30 pm Debrief for day, fifteen-minute nap—Reconcile what you did
for the day and write down what needs to be done for tomorrow in your
journals to avoid loose ends.
7:00–9:00 pm If you have a family you may want to spend time with
them. Your kids only need to see you one or two hours a day if you are a
father and if you are a mother, they need to see you more. But it’s a myth
that you need to be around all the time for your kids; your kids have their
own lives and don’t want to see you as much as you think. If you don’t have
a family, you will likely be doing meetings in this time or prospecting more
if your industry allows it.
9:00–10:00 pm The key to going to bed on time is to actually get in
the bed. Get in bed, mind feed with a real paperback book, and review
your goals before going to sleep. If you review your goals before going to
sleep, your mind will have a chance to work on them while sleeping and you
will wake up with new solutions that have “magically” appeared. The only
magic is the power of the subconscious mind and what Napoleon Hill calls
infinite intelligence in Think and Grow Rich.
11:00 pm-5:00 am Sleep. You only need six hours of sleep to sustain-
ably maintain your life. In my experience four hours eventually breaks you
down, and eight is too much, but six can sustainably be done over time.
As Arnold Schwarzenegger says, “Everyone has twenty-four hours in a day.
 IV 147

You have to sleep six, so that leaves you with eighteen hours to yourself ”
How you manage those hours is up to you and directly affects your income.
But what if my sales day looks different?
Some people might like at this schedule and say, “That’s too long of a
day,” “That’s too much planning,” “That’s not going to work for me in my
industry,” or “I’m different, my industry is different.” I would beg to differ.
When people say, “I’m different,” or “My industry is different,” it usually is
an excuse to let them off the hook from doing all the things they think they
should have been doing all along. People are fundamentally the same, and
industries are fundamentally the same.
If your hours are different, so be it. This schedule was learned from a
$100,000,000 man and helped me make over $1,000,000 a year and reach
the top fraction of 1 percent in my industry, so if you are okay with staying
where you are in life, stick to your schedule, but if you want to level up,
adopt the 5:00 am schedule.

Keys to Ongoing Success (Metrics)

“Actions equal dollars, dollars don’t equal actions.”
—Gerry Mason, Sales Trainer
Sales is a contact sport, which means you must make contacts to win.
Whenever a salesperson is underperforming, it usually equates to not
enough sales activity being generated, also known as calls being made or
secondly, it’s the execution of a well-thought-out scripted presentation and
close.
Years ago, while working in the private equity industry, I was trained by
a gentlemen who had been selling vacuums and other direct products his
whole life but was trained in school as an engineer. He had the mind of
process, a mathematical way to achieve a desired result. I liked the idea of
148 The Close—7 Level Selling

mathematically being able to determine my earnings based on my actions

because most of the negative things I heard my family say about selling was
“Selling is luck,” “Sometimes there’s money, sometimes there isn’t,” or “It’s
up and down.” If your business or sales career is “up and down” be assured,
you are operating as an amateur. A professional knows with a degree of cer-
tainty that the law of certainty works.
The law of certainty: certain things performed in a
certain way will yield certain results, certainly!
Professional salespeople have a system to keep their pipeline full and
money coming in every day. I will repeat that. As a business, you the sales-
person need to be bringing in money every day. If you are a business you
must sell every day, and as a salesperson you need to sell every day. When
selling private equity, I would not go home until I made enough sales to
cover my daily expenses because I knew that actions equal dollars.
The question you might want to ask yourself is, what does it cost you
to go to work every day? Most people have $30,000 of expenses starting
out in life which is $2,500 a month, which is $125 dollars a day for twenty
working days of the month. That’s what most people need to break even
and live an extremely modest life. If you are a salesperson with $30,000 of
expenses and you only manage to make $125 a day in commissions at the
end of the year, you made $30,000 in earnings minus $30,000 commission
so you made $0 for the year! It’s not worth it.
You need to know your numbers going in so that you can multiply your
expenses by ten with earnings and stay ahead of the curve. As a salesperson,
as a business of one, you need to be profitable. If you don’t want to be prof-
itable, you can always work at McDonalds or for the government. I heard
they are both hiring.
 IV 149

Personal Business Plan—The Fishbowl

Calls lead to conversations. Those conversations lead to meetings. Booked
leads in meetings can lead to closes and lead to dollars collected for your
personal business.
I don’t know what industry you are in, but I’ll use a fifty-call day as an
example and a benchmark to illustrate the path to money.

Definitions
Calls = # of times the phone was dialed
Conversations = # of times you spoke to the decision maker
Meetings = Meetings with the intent of purchasing the product or service
Close = What it’s worth for you to close a deal and earn in commissions

Daily
50 Calls a day
10 Conversations
2 Meetings booked

Weekly
250 calls a week
50 Conversations
10 meetings booked

Meetings
10 Meetings booked
3 Close
Each close is worth $1,800
3 x $1,800 = $5,400 for the week
150 The Close—7 Level Selling

Monthly
1,000 calls a month
200 conversations
40 meetings conducted
12 meetings closed
12 closes at $1,800 a close = $21,600 for the month

Annually
50-week year assuming 2 weeks off
250 calls x 50 weeks = 12,500 calls
2,500 conversations at a 20 percent pick up the phone rate
500 meetings at a 20 percent book meetings
150 closes at a 30 percent close rate
150 closes at $1,800 a close = $270,000 annual earnings
In this scenario you made $21.60 every time you dialed the
phone whether the customer picked up the phone or not!
What we have illustrated here is a very simple business plan for a single
salesperson and how he is going to run his year. It all starts with a certain
number of calls per day because without the top line, there can be no bot-
tom line. As Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple used to say, “Take care of the
top line and everything else will sort itself out.”
You want to be motivated by dollars per dial because you don’t control
anything else. The only number you control on the entire plan is your
dials, and everything else requires someone else to respond. That is why
you must measure yourself in dollars per dial so that you know your opti-
mum amount of activity. In private equity, I knew that roughly $8 a call was
where I needed to be. If I was making $1,000 a call, I wasn’t making enough
calls and if I was making $1 a call, my script or process was broken.
Track your numbers in a personal spreadsheet grid called “the fishbowl.”
 IV 151

I don’t know what industry you are in, but I’ll use a fifty-call day as an
example and a benchmark to illustrate the path to money:

To download your own fishbowl file go to 7LevelSelling.com/fishbowl

How to Fix the Machine if It’s Broken

The small business plan you have made is a machine. If you put the top
number into the machine, the bottom number will spit out money. The
problem is, sometimes the machine breaks down. You must track your
personal numbers every day so that you know what your dollar per call is
and can stay at optimum levels of performance. Use the “Fishbowl” to keep
track of your activity. Your sales manager should also have a team fishbowl
to figure out where the team sales are at and who needs additional training.
Some problems to fix:
Calls but no pickups = Wrong time of day to be calling, or dead leads,
or the area code on your phone doesn’t match theirs and they don’t want to
pick up. Fix by: Trying another time of day to call; when doing calls, doc-
ument the last time you called in your CRM software or whatever you use
to track your notes. Try a morning, an afternoon, and a night time because
you don’t know when your prospect is around.
152 The Close—7 Level Selling

Conversations but no meetings booked—This is either a script issue or

execution of the script. The script might need to be modified, or the person
performing the script might need more training.

Meetings are happening but no closes—The presentation is off, the clos-

ing process is off, the offer may be wrong, the salesperson may be offering
the wrong thing to the wrong person, or the closer might not be following
or using a script.

Call number goes down—Salespeople are slacking off, not managing time,
wasting time, hiding, soothing emotional pain; they need to be amped up
by a great meeting, coaching, or outside motivation.

Conversation number goes down—How old are the leads? Is it a holi-

day? Is it the wrong season or time of year? Are there people on vacation?
Did lead quality go down? Is the marketing campaign either fished out or
burned out?

Close numbers go down—Closer is off process and is improvising, needs

retraining, coaching, and put back on the script.

Money collected goes down—Closers are accepting too many terms

deals, not big enough deposits; need negotiation training to collect in full.
Closers may be off script or off policy. Need an audit of closing.

You need to know your conversion percentages over time and your fish-
bowl will help you track that:
• percent of people who pick up the phone on call
• percent of people who convert into meetings
• percent of people who you close on meetings
 IV 153

These closing percentages are directly related to your skills and strategic
ability to do your calls at the right time with the right script and execute the
script in a professional way.
They key to success in running a professional sales practice is knowing
your dollars per call and maintaining a strong “fishbowl” and sticking to
your plan. If you can do those things, sales will become one of the most
successful endeavors you have ever undertaken because you will see that the
inputs certainly yield worthwhile outputs.

Top Performers Peak 3 Times a

Year and the Pit Of Despair

The Pit of Despair and

The Path to the Good Life

Same Thing Addiction Curve The Pursuit of Anything Good

“The Flatline” “The Drop” “The Dip, the Pit of Despair”

In life there are three choices to constantly make: what is easy vs. doing
nothing vs. what is hard but good. As you make daily choices, there are
three patterns that form:
1. The Flatline—every day is the same; no better, no worse. This is what
happens when we get stuck in routine and things stay the same. This is
where change needs to happen.
2. The Drop—The addiction curve. This is where things get better every
day, little by little, until suddenly the floor falls out from under you.
154 The Close—7 Level Selling

Think about the smoking habit. Every day smoking gets better and
better until one day you have lung cancer. Or eating a donut a day is
a great idea until you have a heart attack. Things that feel good right
away sometimes do not have great results over time.
3. The Dip and the Pit of Despair–Anything good in life goes through
the dip. At the beginning, we feel a small hit of success, followed by
a long, dangerous, and difficult trench called the dip. In the dip, the
pit of despair is where most people quit. However, if you survive the
pit, you will receive the rewards that are reserved for you on the other
side of the dip. Typically, the better the reward, the longer and more
dangerous the trench. Starting a business, having a family, or becoming
a professional athlete or musician, all have long and dangerous dips.
Typically, anything good in life follows the “dip” pattern.
In sales, usually the first two years of a career have a serious and major dip,
but if you can survive five years, you will become affluent, and in ten years
you can become rich.
Peak performers in any industry, whether it’s athletics, acting, or sales,
peak three times a year and have valleys three times a year. You would be
wise to track your numbers throughout the year and identify the slow times
for you where you personally “crash” and choose to take time off then.
When the machine is off, it’s totally off; when the machine is on, it’s totally
on. Embrace the peak times and harvest as much as you can, work ungodly
hours to get a full yield, but then when the season changes and you have
mapped out the times that are not as good, use those to recharge, retrain,
reboot, and get ready for the next wave of greatness. When I wrote this
book for you, I was in Costa Rica in one of the valley times in my business
so that when I turn the machine back on, I come back recharged with new
weapons to bring to the battlefield. Know when to use your uptime to the
fullest and know when to rest to the fullest.
 IV 155

Brand/Marketing/Sales/Product Pyramid
As a salesperson it’s important to know where you fit into the food chain of
a company and how different departments affect the relative ease of a sale
or difficulty of a sale. In general, the more difficult the product is to sell, like
investments, financial advice, or raising capital, the higher skilled you must
be and the commissions are higher. Especially if you have to constantly find
your own leads. The company has taken the marketing money and given it
to the salesperson in the form of commissions to bring business in the door
instead of paying for marketing and this is a good thing for a skilled sales-
person. On the flip side, if you work for a company where leads are handed
to you every day, the commissions are lower, and the skill required is lower.
The only upside is that your risk is less.
Typically, the harder it is to make the sale, the more you will get paid.

How to Make the Sale as Easy as Possible—

Pyramid of Making a Successful Sale

Branding
Department
Trust Based -
"What others
say about you"
Marketing Department -
"What you say about you"
Sales Department - Active Human
Effort "What you say about you"
Product "Does this thing actually work?"

Clean Ethics "Do What's right For the Customer"

156 The Close—7 Level Selling

Salespeople are arguably the most important people in every company: they
are usually the highest paid, and when they are doing well, they are adored
by executives no matter how unruly. But salespeople fit into the middle of
the food chain of making a successful sale. Let’s examine the Pyramid of
Making a Successful Sale.
The pyramid is the strongest structure known to man and if you can get
your ethics, product, sales department, marketing department, and brand-
ing to department to work together in a choreographed fashion, this is
truly an unstoppable force of money. Let’s examine the pyramid.

The Soil Beneath the Pyramid—Clean Ethics

“Do What’s Right for the Customer”
Usually people who remind you of how great their ethics are not as ethical
as they say. To be truly powerful, you should not have to remind people,
same with ethical people. When it comes to ethics, it’s better to show it
then to tell it. If you are a company who focuses on “Doing what’s right for
the customer no matter what,” you will be golden in the ethics department.
Take care of the customer and they will take care of you. You might make
less money, you might make money slowly, but over time you are building
trust with the customer and the marketplace. That will reap exponential
dividends in the future and blossom into a great brand that can be trusted.
Zappos, the legendary online shoe retailer who was bought out by Amazon
was famous for having great ethics. If the salesperson didn’t have the right
shoes for the customer, the salesperson would research where the customer
could get such shoes and send the customer straight to a competitor! You
might be thinking, that’s insane! But what happened in return was the cus-
tomer was very likely to return and become a repeat customer after such a
huge trust-building gesture.
 IV 157

Conversely, one of the greatest salespeople I have ever met in person is

Jordan Belfort—the real Wolf of Wall Street, who stole hundreds of mil-
lions of dollars from investors due to his bad ethics. He and his company
were purposely pushing junk investments into the hands of ultra-wealthy
investors and taking obscene commissions knowing that the investments
would never work out. This kind of “pump and dump” strategy will ruin
your company, ruin your brand forever, and potentially put you in jail—
like it did to Jordan, who lost everything. If he was a clean player, he would
have made money slower, and over time could be a billionaire today, but
instead he threw his ethics to the wind.
Even today, Jordan preaches on ethics, although it’s hard to believe him—
do people really change? That black mark will be on his brand forever, no
matter how cool the movie the Wolf of Wall Street is. Jordan Belfort is
anathema to some people simply because he failed to do what was right
when he was young.

The foundation of the pyramid—A great

product—“Does this thing actually work?”
Laid upon the soil of clean ethics is the strong foundation of the pyramid—
the product. Your product only needs one thing. “Does this thing actually
work?” Fortunately, the vast majority of products do work. They do what
they claim to, and most companies live up to the claim they are selling. I have
a small burger joint a few blocks from my office called “Cindy’s Burgers.”
The brand is nothing, the marketing is nothing, the salespeople sometimes
are unfriendly as per Trip Advisor Reviews online, but the food is amazing!
The product is homemade Greek burgers and Greek food for a great price.
Cindy doesn’t need a salesperson because she has a great product; it does
what it promises for a fair price, and that is where the development of that
business stops: with the product.
158 The Close—7 Level Selling

The old adage is true: the product does sell itself, in some cases, like ice
cream on a hot day or popcorn at a movie. But most companies do not have
the luxury of selling ice cream on a hot day (especially in the wintertime),
and that is why we need salespeople.

The base of the pyramid—The sales

department—“What you say about you”
Built on the foundation of the pyramid is the sales department. Many com-
panies actively “walk their customers over the finish line.” That is why a great
number of them employ salespeople. Salespeople and the sales presenta-
tion must coordinate with the ethics of the company, product department,
marketing department and branding department to coordinate the most
effective sales presentation. In today’s world, it takes a coordinated effort
and sales choreography to make complex and high-trust sales in a low-trust
world.
What remains true is the power of scripting and sales choreography to
create compelling sales situations where customers want to buy. Sales cho-
reography is a multimedia sequence and mix of online and offline activity
that creates optimum buying situations for customers so that it is “easy” for
them to buy and they feel safe and secure doing so.
The goal of sales choreography is to ensure that very few leads, prospects,
or customers end up in the endless “trash bin” of leads that are underworked
or forgotten. Every company has a large “trash bin” of leads and previous
customers that is under worked and underserved. The company has spent
great resources acquiring through marketing efforts. Sales choreography is
to extract the most value out of the leads as possible and build trust with the
clients throughout the process.
The trouble with salespeople is that for generations, salespeople have
been known by the public to “rip people off ” and “be crooks” Building
 IV 159

trust through salespeople alone can be a challenge because no matter what

a salesperson says, the customer will always be distrusting in the beginning.
We live in a world today where showing the customer the facts and the
results is, and always will be, more powerful than anything a salesperson can
ever say. Prospects will always be checking what salespeople say with a fine-
tooth comb to make sure that no red flags are tripped or that the bullshit
meter doesn’t start to tip off the scale. It’s harder to be a salesperson today
more than ever because you are under more scrutiny more than ever.
The world is no longer buyer beware; it’s now seller beware! The sales
process must be systematized and scripted with a microscope to make sure
it is done in the exact right way.
No matter what a salesperson says, it will always be challenged by the
customer, either overtly or covertly in their mind, and that is where the
marketing and branding departments come in.

The middle of the pyramid—The marketing

department—“What you say about you”
There is an old saying: “If you have to sell, it’s because your marketing
sucks,” and this statement is somewhat true. Companies with great market-
ing don’t have to sell nearly as hard as companies with horrible marketing.
Think of a store like Best Buy that sends out full-color flyers in neighbor-
hoods filled with great marketing and great offers, and their store is full
of people gobbling up electronics in their big box store, even in the age of
e-commerce. Best Buy was so strong on their marketing that they in fact
wiped out all other electronics retailers in Canada and are the last standing
giant.
The marketing department is your chance to get your value and your
promise out to the marketplace, but it is still mistrusted because again
it’s “what you say about you.” There is no question that marketing is
160 The Close—7 Level Selling

ultra-important for generating qualified leads for salespeople, and picking

the right messages and media to attract those people, but at the end of the
day, it will always fall short of making a sale on its own. Don’t ignore the
consumer-driven marketing that will spread like wildfire. The consumer
drives the market.

The top of the pyramid—The branding

department—“What others say about you”
“If you have to put out marketing, your brand sucks.”
The top of the pyramid is the company’s brand. The brand is the reputa-
tion, the relationship with the customers, the trust that has been formed
over the years, and most importantly, “What others say about you.”
What others say about you makes up your brand, and thus you never
really own your brand; the public does. Apple computers has developed
such a legendary brand that customers still line up outside the doors of
the Apple store to get the hottest new gadget; who knows how long that
will continue for? Apple was just in a class action lawsuit against them for
purposely slowing down their products, so they could sell more under the
leadership of Tim Cook. Would Steve Jobs the founder and CEO have
done that? That destroys the ethics of the company and the integrity of
the products—it will hurt the brand! “It takes a lifetime to build a great
brand and five minutes to destroy it,” to paraphrase the words of billionaire
Warren Buffet, who invests in great brands and holds them for life.
If you have a great brand, you don’t need to be a strong marketer, and you
don’t have to be a strong salesperson, because people simply buy. A great
brand only happens when the ethics, the product, the salespeople, and the
marketing align into the intangible value that comprise a great brand.
Donald Trump when running for president claimed he was worth $10
billion while Forbes and other sources showed his net worth between $2–4
 IV 161

billion, and my guess was that in Trump’s mind, his brand will be worth $7
billion more after he’s finished being president, as all presidents become
much richer after finishing their term, but it’s hard to place an exact value
on a brand. Other sources have estimated that Trumps brand went down by
$1 billion from all the lost business deals from the “things he said” but who
knows? Brands are intangible assets that can be monetized into real assets.
Kylie Jenner, the youngest Kardashian, is set to become a billionaire in
record time because of her fame and Instagram account, and she has sold
hundreds of millions of dollars of her makeup line on brand alone. This is a
perfect example of sales and marketing fame.
All of the departments of a company, the ethics, the product, the sales
team, the marketing team, and the branding team should be working hard
every day to build trust and brand equity in the marketplace to make it eas-
ier and easier to sell in the marketplace every day as market trust gets built.

The Right Marketing and the Right Leads

One of the keys to successful selling is to get in front of the right people. It’s
important to work closely with the marketing department to constantly be
checking if “the leads are qualified.”
You could be a stellar salesperson and sell nothing because the audience
was wrong. I’ve learned this the hard way several times speaking and doing
sales presentations to wrong audiences. Usually I can convert 15–30 per-
cent of a room into sales and when I have tried some rooms, the sales are
almost 0 percent. Same presentation, zero sales. If you do this too many
times, you will lose your sales self-esteem.
Upon further investigation, the people in those rooms were made up of
nonbuyers of my product or they did not fit my niche at all. It was a market-
ing error on my part to put myself in front of such audiences, and I should
stick to the profile of my proven buyers.
162 The Close—7 Level Selling

The only side caveat to this is to have your product marked as the same
product “but for seniors,” “for real estate investors,” “for speakers,” “for
financial planners,” or whatever other niche you would wish to retarget.
Everybody thinks they are different, and while this is a fallacy, still it’s a true
fallacy in every customers mind: my situation is different, my company is
different, my industry is different, and my product is different. It is only
in very rare cases that it is actually different. You must cater the message
towards the niche and not assume your niche will cross over into theirs
with proper “customer tailoring” to the audience.
No matter how good of salesperson you are, no matter how good the
presentation, it will never work on the wrong audience. Work closely with
your marketing team to ensure you are targeting the right leads.

Dress for Success—Three Seconds

Buys You Thirty Seconds
They say that three seconds buys you thirty seconds, thirty seconds buys
you two minutes, two minutes buys you half an hour, half an hour buys you
two hours, and two hours will buy you a day. People don’t buy you. They
buy your image and your appearance and what it means to them.
Generally, the most effective salespeople want to appear to be the trusted
advisor. “The doctor,” in that niche, is there to diagnose and make an edu-
cated recommendation to their client. You must look the part, act the part,
and dress the part. After all, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and
walks like a duck, it must be a duck.
A good rule of thumb to follow is to be dressed one notch above your
client. It communicates you are on the same level, but a little bit more pro-
fessional, which they like to see. People get into rapport with professionals
 IV 163

who are sharp as a tack, enthusiastic as hell, and an expert in their field. You
must look it.

All of Life Is a Stage

Whatever role you are playing in the theatre of the prospect’s mind, you
must dress the way he would expect. The IBM executive look—dark navy
suit, solid color tie, white shirt, black oxford shoes, black dress socks, no
jewelry except maybe a wedding band, no facial hair, clean cut tightly
cropped hair—is classic and is “ketchup” in that it goes with everything.
This look works for positions of trust like real estate, financial, insur-
ance, securities, banking, and funerals, and the more conservative the
look, the better. You are not dressing for yourself; you are dressing to
respect your customer and show them what they want to see. It doesn’t
matter if you’re overdressed or dressed better than everyone else. Think
about it. Why would you dress to “fit in” to a low expectation culture?
Why not dress better than everyone else? Dressing for success means
dressing a level up.
Conversely if you are a plumber, you need to look like a plumber. The
word is congruence—“How does the look of this person align with the
messages they are sending to me?” If the message and the look are incon-
gruent, that sets off a red flag in the customer’s mind.
Dressing for success is more about creating absolutely zero reasons why
someone would not want to do business with you. When people meet you,
they judge you as hard as they can. In kindergarten we are told not to judge
other people, but we mercilessly judge them and place them into neat tidy
boxes in our minds. If there is the slightest reason in appearance to not do
business with you, you will already be at a disadvantage.
164 The Close—7 Level Selling

The Guide to Commanding Power with Your Appearance

The sculpture carved out of stone is not finished until there is nothing left
to take away. The same goes for your appearance.
Generally offensive trust-killing decisions that can give you a negative
appearance to the general population
WARNING: This list is NOT politically correct, but it will make you
more money to eliminate the following items. if you are easily offended,
move on to the next section.
Facial Hair—Generally any facial hair is perceived by others subcon-
sciously to be psychological signal that you are hiding something. It is rare
for first world leaders to have facial hair. Third world dictators have an
assortment of moustaches and beards, and facial hair is associated with
outlaws, pirates, etc. The only exception to this rule would be a neatly
cropped moustache, which is actually proven to increase a man’s earnings.
Police, fire, military, and executives wear moustaches to appear more mas-
culine. But if given a choice between no hair and hair, I say no hair every
time.
Man rings—Anything more than a wedding ring is generally too much.
A pinkie ring is scientifically proven to be trust killing in all cases unless
you are a casino manager or a professional hustler. Rings are associated with
gangs, bikers, pirates, criminals, etc.
The two-hand handshake—When you shake someone’s hand, it is never
in your interest to put your other hand on top of theirs; this is offensive
across the board and will weaken your position.
Bad teeth or breath—Poor dental hygiene or breath can easily turn
someone off. Smell goes straight to the emotional brain and the thinking
brain doesn’t even get a chance to think about it before the emotions
say “no.” If you have a bad breath, do a cleanse, go on a fast, or clean out
 IV 165

your digestion because breath comes from the colon. Bad teeth make
you appear lower class; the old adage holds true: “Dress British, think
Yiddish, talk American.” It’s better to have gentlemanly teeth than a
pirate’s smile.
Poor grooming—Poor grooming is proven in all pack animals, chickens,
dogs, cats, pigs, and even humans to be animals lower on the pecking order.
The pecking order comes from chickens in which the alpha chickens will
peck on the weaker chickens all the way down to the omega chicken that
gets pecked the most.
It’s proven that in the poorest ghettos and the poorest parts of sub-Saha-
ran Africa that women will spend money on lipstick before they will spend
money to feed their children. This places them higher on the pecking order
and gives them a higher chance of attracting a mate. The same is true with
men and women in the ghetto who spend all their money on sporty clothes
and the newest Nike shoes. Being well groomed and well-dressed will place
you as the alpha animal in the pack; the omega is always disheveled. No one
wants to buy from the omega.
Dirty or wrinkled—If you are dirty or have wrinkled clothing, especially
suits, it immediately places you in a negative light. Have enough suits so
you can rotate them in and out of the dry cleaners and keep them look-
ing fresh. All of this sends a nonverbal signal that you mind the details. Be
intentional.
The smell of smoke—The smell of smoke is now taboo in the mod-
ern world, and some people gag when they smell it. If you are a smoker,
quit.
It is a horrible habit anyways, there is no benefit, and it is just a sign of
perpetual weakness.
Out of shape—Being out of shape shows you can’t take care of yourself
or you are working too hard, neither of which is attractive to your customer.
166 The Close—7 Level Selling

Many top performers do at least the bare minimum to stay in shape. Several
very rich billionaires I have met hate exercise, but they still do the mini-
mum because there is no way around it.
Sick looking—If you look sick, it places you as a weaker animal in the
pack. No one wants to buy from a sick person. Mind your complexion and
the health of your organs, because organ health will show up on a person’s
skin.
Ethnic distinctions outside of your ethnic niche—Anything you wear
that is of a religious or ethnic preference—for example a turban—is per-
ceived negative outside of its own ethnic community. In ethnic marketing,
these ethnic distinctions work, but if you want to be outside the niche,
eliminate it.
Your name—If you have a name that no one can say or spell, change it,
especially if it’s a very ethnic name. If you want to have the broadest appeal,
you will need to pick a name with the broadest appeal. Many very famous
and successful people have changed their names. My name Stefan Aarnio
is a horrible name because no one can say it or spell it, but it is Western
enough that people think it’s Italian, and it’s unique on Google. I own
everything “Stefan Aarnio,” so I use it as an asset online.
Accents—Accents are negative across the board. Take a class to eliminate
your accent. I understand that you can never fully eliminate it, but several
successful people have eliminated their accents like Gene Simmons of Kiss
who speaks five languages. His first language is not English, and he grew
up in New York, but chose to sound the “way they sound on the news” so
he does not have a Yiddish accent and does not have a New York accent;
instead, he chose the most marketable one.
Tattoos—You may love your tattoos, you may hate them, but cover them
or have them removed. If you are selling Harley Davidson motorcycles
maybe it’s okay to have tattoos or if you are a rock star in a mega band like
 IV 167

Guns and Roses, sure, but tattoos show a sign of weakness. Companies like
Disney have a “no tattoo” policy, and they are right. The general public does
not want to see tattoos. In Japan you can’t enter a public pool or show a tat-
too in public because it is a sign of gangs and the Yakuza. If you are thinking
of getting a tattoo, please don’t.
Anything on a female salesperson that sexualizes her—Females in sell-
ing and business will probably always have an uphill battle selling to male
clients. The reason for this is, many men view women as wives, mothers, sis-
ters, girlfriends, and mistresses. If there is anything on a female’s appearance
like “too much leg,” cleavage, or anything that makes her sexy, she will be
taken less seriously. Even female shoes are sexualized and Chinese culture
uses sexual foot bindings. Wear conservative everything and if in doubt, go
more conservative.
Too much female jewelry—Too much jewelry sexualizes and cheapens
a woman in business. Unless you are a gypsy belly dancer, wear the bare
minimum and keep it conservative to get respect.
Unpolished shoes—If you have shoes that should be polished, get them
polished and keep them polished. Polish your shoes before you leave the
house; it’s a sign of social status and gentlemanliness. Have a large enough
rotation of shoes so that you if you are short on time you can take pre-pol-
ished shoes.
Posture—Good athletic posture, straight back, shoulders back, full of
health and vigor is what a buyer wants to see. Bad posture is a sign of disre-
spect and is negative.
Speech impediments—If you have a speech impediment, work with a
professional to get rid of it; it won’t help you sell.
The deal-signing pen—The last line of resistance on the deal is the pen
you pull out to ink the contract. Have a nice, beautiful pen that communi-
cates trust and that this is the “right choice.” A good rule of thumb is go to
168 The Close—7 Level Selling

a pen dealer and get a starter luxury pen from Mont Blanc, Cross, Visconti,
or some other brand. It helps seal the deal and tells a good story in the
buyer’s mind.
Your notebook—Have a presentable looking notebook with you that
communicates class. I use The Black Book Journal and The High Performance
Journal. You can order them online if you wish to have a nice notebook for
meetings and personal organization.
Your bag or briefcase—Have something of class that makes sense
for your position. When it comes to bags, a good leather bag will last
years and send a positive professional message. A doctor carries a black
leather bag to house calls; you should have the equivalent of that. The
first nice black leather briefcase I had was made by Coach, was beautiful,
and served me for years. I now use a roller luggage briefcase as I am trav-
eling and presenting almost every week. Have a bag that communicates
professionalism.

DISC—Four Types of Salespeople: Your

Personality and Balancing Yourself Out
There are four types of people: those who want to be liked, those who want
to be comfortable, those who want to be right, and those who want to win.
There have always been four archetypes of human personalities dating back
to the Greeks when they would describe people as earth, fire, wind, water.
DISC is an industrial psychological test that classifies people into four cat-
egories: Dominance—those who want to win, Influence—those who want
to be liked, Compliance—those who want to be right, and Submission—
those who want to be comfortable. There are several names that have been
used for the same four personalities, but they usually start with the letters
D, I, S, and C.
 IV 169

As far as business partners and love partners you are always attracted
to the diagonal position on the chart. Dominance goes with Submission
and Influence goes with Compliance. There is another section in this book
about how this four-personality system applies to customers and how to
handle them, but this section is for the purposes of understanding yourself
and your own communication style.
As a rule, we usually have a primary profile. For myself I am a D first, I
second. As far as developing my own personality, I need to learn my oppo-
sites to become a well-rounded salesperson.
Dominance without any Submission becomes
punishing to for the customer to deal with.
Submission without any Dominance becomes too soft and can’t close.
Influence without Compliance becomes shallow, flashy,
with no substance or product knowledge.
Compliance without Influence becomes lost in the details and
specs of the product and loses the customer altogether.
They say that when a man marries a woman he marries his complement,
and he is supposed to assimilate some of her traits and she assimilates some
of his. This is old ancient wisdom and usually men become better and more
productive after getting married and having kids. Perhaps it’s the time spent
adopting the opposite traits that round them out? Or perhaps it’s because
he has an accountability partner every night checking on him also known
as his wife? Or perhaps it’s because he has a strong “Why” to succeed, usu-
ally his children and their wellbeing?
Working on your opposite traits is major to your growth as a salesperson
and ability to be hard enough, soft enough, have enough information, and
enough sizzle to sell to all types.
170 The Close—7 Level Selling

Framing, Frames, and Counters

In Oren Klaff’s book, Pitch Anything, the author outlines the use of “frames.”
Frames are simply the version of reality that you generate for yourself. Each
person creates a frame with their own version of reality, and when two
frames collide, one frame will overtake the other.
For example, two alpha males will collide with a power frame, and both
will seek dominance. In the end, one will take the alpha position and one
the beta position. They might defy one another to attempt for domi-
nance, but eventually one will become the alpha and the other will be the
beta. This analogy is important when understanding the psychology of
the sale.
Types of frames you can use to control the reality around the sale:
Power Framing—To create a power frame is to take dominance and con-
trol over the situation. Powerful people will create power for themselves by
having a receptionist and waiting room. They will place a tiny little chair
for the customer across from a large mahogany desk and a powerful chair
for themselves.
This creates power for them and establishes them as the alpha while you
are stuck in the beta trap. The counter to a power frame is to defy the
trappings of power. When they offer you a patronizing glass of water in the
waiting room, refuse. When the boss makes you sit in the little chair, prefer
to stand. These small acts of defiance can help you take power and control
in the situation. On the flip side, there are times when it makes sense to fit
into the narrative of power and never forget the first law of power in Robert
Greene’s forty-eight laws of power: “Don’t outshine the master.”
Time Framing—Time framing is to take control of the time in a sales
situation. When the client says he only has thirty minutes, tell him you will
 IV 171

be done in fifteen. Control the time, set the times, and keep them short to
remain powerful in the transaction.
Setting a timer at the beginning of your pitch is a very powerful way to
show integrity and that you respect the other side’s time. Amateurs ramble
on and on. Pros are succinct. Control the time of the sale; it adds to your
power. The counter to time frame is to cut the time of the other side shorter:
if he wants fifteen minutes, give him five; this will put you in control of the
time.
Prize Framing—You are the prize, or your offer is the prize. The customer
may think that their money is the prize, and it’s your job as a salesperson
to flip around the value for money equation. Making your offer exclusive,
making you exclusive, making what you offer scarce or one of a kind flips
the money for value equation on its head. Their money is no longer the
prize; your offer is the prize. If you fail to prize frame you and your product,
the customer will always think that their money is the prize to be won and
you are of lower value.
Analyst Framing—Sometimes your customers, when barraged with data
will slip into an analyst frame. An analyst frame is where thinking and num-
bers take over and the prospect has to “think about it,” “run the numbers,”
or “do some due diligence.”
The analyst frame is death to all decision making as the neocortex, the
thinking brain, is unable to make decisions. Decisions are made with emo-
tions and more so the reptile brain, which operates on fear and greed. To
get your prospect out of an analyst frame, get them into a story that will
bring them into the emotional brain and shut off the “thinking brain” that
is killing their decision-making power.
172 The Close—7 Level Selling

Decision Making—How Buyers Make

Decisions—Three Parts to the Human Brain

The human brain is not one entity, but rather three entities stacked upon
one another. The brain is divided into three somewhat independent smaller
brains and to understand how people make real buying decisions, you must
understand all three brains.
The Neocortex—The last part of the human brain to evolve was the neo-
cortex. This part of the brain is the “thinking” brain that can imagine the
future, see into the past, sing songs, write poetry, paint beautiful pictures,
write books, and lie, cheat, and steal. This part of the brain is the “let me
think about it brain.” The neocortex can think forever, but it can never
make a decision. Decisions are made in the emotional brain and action is
taken in the reptile brain. The neocortex is a trap for you as a salesperson
because the last thing you want is your prospects thinking and unable to
make a decision. You must tailor your presentations so that they run on
 IV 173

emotions, fear, and greed to avoid getting stuck in the disabled “thinking
brain.” A confused mind never buys, and neither does a thinking mind. The
neocortex cannot ever make a decision.
The Mammalian Brain—The mammalian brain is that part of the brain
that fights, flees, flocks, or freezes. It controls the emotions and is a main
influencer on buying decisions. People do not buy on logic, ever. They
always buy on emotions and justify with logic after the fact. The main emo-
tion you want your prospects to feel throughout your presentation is the
“yes” feeling that keeps you in rapport.
The main emotion you want them to avoid is the “no” feeling, which
may be linked to disgust or other offensive emotions and will break rapport
instantly. Tailor your presentation to eliminate anything that will give your
prospects the “no” feeling so that the presentation is a series of “yesses” fol-
lowed by a trial close and a close.
Some studies have shown that the emotional brain carries on through the
digestive tract right into the stomach and the colon. Some people theorize
that prolonged states of fear and anxiety are what create stomach ulcers and
gastrointestinal ulcers as the emotional brain carries on down through the
gut and intestines. This is why people say, “go with your gut” as your gut
contains very old decision-making equipment that must have been useful
in earlier times. No matter how advanced people and technology become,
we will always make decisions with our “gut” and this is why salespeople are
so valuable. People want someone they trust to walk them over the finish
line and people will pay a premium through a sales commission to feel good
throughout the process.
The Reptile Brain—The reptilian brain controls the limbic system and
is the oldest part of the brain. This brain operates on fear and greed only.
This brain has the strongest decision-making power and holds nearly all of
the action taking power over the body. Your prospect must feel significant
174 The Close—7 Level Selling

“greedy” gain over your offer, but “fear of loss” can also be a huge moti-
vator for the reptile brain to take action. It may sadden you to know that
humans make decisions based on fear and greed, but do not be saddened by
this information. Instead, embrace the mechanics of the mind and use this
information to communicate your offer in such a way that will appeal to the
reptilian brain that controls all action over the body.

The Power of Scripting and Sales Choreography

“A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one
worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.”
—Henry Ford
Stop selling and start serving: A service-focused sales choreography is the
difference between having your customers happy to hear from you and
loving the buying process versus an adversarial, distrustful, negotiation
process with haggling over price and terms. Focus on the customer, devote
yourself to service, and do not worry about the profits: service first, profits
second.
The sales process is easier now for some industries and harder for others.
Technology has shortened the sales process for many in the modern world
with social media, the internet and technology yet to come—which will
likely include artificial intelligence and virtual reality!
All of this is making the sales process in many ways longer and more com-
plicated in some industries and shorter and easier in others.
What remains true is the power of scripting and sales choreography to
create compelling sales situations where customers want to buy. Sales cho-
reography is a multimedia sequence and mix of online and offline activity
that creates optimum buying situations for customers so that it is “easy” for
them to buy and they feel safe and secure doing so.
 IV 175

Some of the elements you may use in sales choreography are:

Online ads to lead capture offers—Many sales processes and funnels
today start with an online ad and online lead capture offer, also known
as bait: something offered for free in exchange for the customer’s contact
information. This exchange of information for value is of great value to a
sales team as it generates fresh qualified leads for offline follow up and can
be done relatively cheaply on a consistent basis.
Online application forms—You may offer an opportunity for clients to
apply for your product online if it’s a more complex product to sell and
clients need to be qualified.
Free reports, e-books, real books as loss leaders—Offering free infor-
mation by way of free reports, e-books, or real books in the mail as loss
leaders positions your sales team as a knowledgeable choice in your indus-
try. A published 50,000-word book is one of the most powerful sales tools
ever and will prove your knowledge over your competition who do not
have the resources to publish such an advanced tool.
White papers (printed)—Case studies of successful customers who have
been served and are happy with your offer. These are the second most influ-
ential pieces of sales literature that customers are seeking after published
books. White papers are expensive and take time to generate, so again, sev-
eral of your competitors will not have such a document. A simple title like
“The types of people we serve:” followed by a laundry list of demographics
that “think they are different” will dispel the “I’m different objection” that
every buyer falsely has placed in his mind.
Webinars—Either a live or recorded informational session followed by a
sale is a great way to 1) educate buyers but also ask for business and 2) make
sales. Webinars save travel time and costs and therefore are very convenient
ways to reach several customers. The downside is they are not as powerful
as real live seminars, but the savings on cost make them a popular choice for
176 The Close—7 Level Selling

several sales and marketing teams. It is a great way to continue to provide

content, and they can also be prerecorded to be consumed at any time of
day by any customer.
Online Videos—Video is becoming more and more competitive for
buyers in the modern world. Good production quality and sound quality is
expected nowadays to create trust. Video is getting more competitive every
day and it is also becoming one of the favorite ways for people to buy things
as sites like YouTube become more and more competitive.
Live Stream—Several social media services are offering live streaming ser-
vices direct to the customer’s eyeballs. This is an increasingly powerful tool
for making online sales or educating and interacting with live customers.
Infomercials—Infomercials are still powerful sale tools even though TV
viewership is precipitously trending down. Infomercials are moving online
and still sell products where prospects need to be educated to buy.
Live Seminars—A live seminar where the customer is receiving educa-
tion on complex or high trust products like education are always a favorite
way for customers to “try before they buy.” Live seminars build major trust
and although they are fraught with horrendous expenses, people are will-
ing to spend tens of thousands of dollars at live seminars because they can
feel the trust and bond between the speaker, the message and themselves.
Churches around the world hold live seminars and collect billions of dol-
lars to save souls. Take a hint from the church; they know how to sell and
collect money.
Glossy Brochures—Although glossy brochures often are not enough
for a customer to buy, they still like to hold the information in their hands.
Having a glossy looking brochure is a great reference tool in a sales presenta-
tion and a great way to show value in a tangible way. You cannot escape the
glossy brochure in the modern world, and buyers still want and expect them.
 IV 177

Workbooks—A workbook that the customer can work through to

become educated over a two- or three-day seminar can be unbelievable
powerful to create trust and make the customer feel like he is learning.
Workbooks create an educational environment and show that your team
cares and is organized and committed to helping your customer make the
right decisions.
Sample Materials/Sample Products—Everyone loves free samples and
free products. When you can offer samples, customers can “feel” the prod-
uct for themselves and make a decision based on their feelings.
Free Demos—Test drives are still popular at car dealerships because people
want a live demonstration of how the product works. Free demos dispel the
objection “does this thing really work”? which creates power for your team.
Emails—Emails are a weak form of communication, but people still
expect them and still read them. Your sales choreography will likely use
email in some form to confirm orders and appointments.
Text Messages—A more powerful way of reaching a customer are text
messages because they are rarely ignored, vibrate, and go straight into a buy-
er’s pocket via a cell phone. These are great for sending reminders into your
sales meetings.
Free Gifts—A gift of chocolate, brownies, or cookies that are unrelated
to the sale you are making can really boost trust. Free lunches or cookies can
also make people feel comfortable.
Live Promo Events—Live promotional events on site can be very power-
ful ways to sell things that have to be “seen to be believed.” They also create
a party atmosphere and “fun” around your company to make people want
to buy.
Newsletters (printed)—Newsletters are a great way to infiltrate your
customer’s inbox every month with useful information. They also are seen
to be higher value than email or electronic communication.
178 The Close—7 Level Selling

Blogs—Blogs are still fantastic for gaining SEO rankings and making
yourself an expert online. Customers still like to read blogs to make them
feel comfortable about working with you, and they are a great way to create
return traffic to your website.
Video Series—An educational video series online can be a great way to
nurture a relationship where clients have to “build trust over time.” In some
industries people will not want to buy until they have seen hours and hours
of your educational content. Video series can deliver value over time to
marinate customers into trust and buying positions.
CDs or DVDs in the Mail—Believe it or not, people still like receiving
old media like CDs and DVDs in the mail because it feels like a present and
the physicality of the information makes it seem more important than an
online video.
Postcards—Glossy post cards with reminders and notes, especially if
hand written can be great ways to invite customers to take action on the
next step of your offer.
Handwritten Notes—These are very powerful to send in the mail as they
show you care and took the time for the personal touch.
Snail Mail Letters—A letter from the founder, or a letter from the sales
agent, hand signed can be very powerful ways to send sincere messages and
sincere offers.
Multi Salesperson Meetings—Some sales processes will involve several
salespeople and a series of meetings. Salespeople can be rotated until the
right personality match is found or it could be a “setter/closer” type of sales
relationship, but several sales nowadays require a rotation of salespeople to
close, especially if it’s a high trust sale.
Free Coaching Session/Consult/Strategy Session—A free one-on-one
educational session followed by an offer from the person giving the lesson
can be a great way to sell training, education, or other high trust offers.
 IV 179

Next Visit Offer—An offer for the next visit to the store or e-store is a
very popular hook in e-commerce to reengage the prospect into a second
or third sale.
Podcasts—These are a great ways to educate and create celebrity on your
salesforce. Podcasts can add tremendous value for those who love to listen
to them.

Building Your Sales Funnel and Sales Choreography

The sales and marketing teams must choose and choreograph the ele-
ments above to create the most optimum sales and buying situations
possible. Each and every method above has a cost of time, effort, energy,
and money, and you will need to figure out which pieces are most valuable
to your customers and your process.
The sales process can be more convoluted today than ever before because
customers can go online to your competitor in a fraction of a second and in
fact, your company and several others are likely directly targeting the same
people online. Having a stronger and better sales choreography, a better
“show” to entertain and educate your buyers will always give you an edge in
creating optimum buying situations for your buyers.

The Law of Averages: A Segmented Look At Types of Buyers

Not everyone is sellable. In fact, there is a small fraction of the population—5
percent of prospects—that are apathetic buyers. When you encounter these
people, identify them as quickly as possible and do not waste your time
trying to save someone who is hopelessly negative, apathetic, or simply unin-
terested. These people will destroy your self-esteem and tire you out. When
you find an unsellable apathetic buyer, thank them for coming in and let
them reach back out to you. Do not waste time on them, move on.
180 The Close—7 Level Selling

The self-actualizing buyer—5 percent of the population is the self-actu-

alizing buyer; these people know what they need and what they want. They
walk into the appropriate store and buy it. They are the dream customer
and easy to work with. When you meet one of these people, make it easy
for them to buy: make the sale and move on. Realize that they bought not
because of your sales skills, but because they were self-actualized and knew
what they wanted.
The 90 percent bulk of sellable buyers—90 percent of your prospects
are sellable with some skill; some are ready to buy now, and some are ready
to buy later and need to be followed up with. Overall, most people are
sellable; the question becomes which ones can be sold today or closest to
today, and which ones need to be nurtured into future sales.
Inside of this subsection of buyers are:
Buyers in heat—10–20 percent of your prospects are buyers in heat who
are ready to buy right now. They have a need, a pain, and need to solve it
now. Your job is to locate these people and write the order as quickly as
possible. They will either buy from you or a competitor, but they are ready
to buy!
Buyers in power—30–40 percent of your prospects are buyers in power.
They want to buy, but maybe not today; they are not in pain and are instead
in power, and your job is to present your offer in its best light, make a pro-
posal, and find out when they will be making a decision and when the best
time to revisit them is. They may be window shopping today, but they are
serious and will make a purchase in the future. Never look at a sale as merely
transactional. I’ve had people come back to me years after I first sold them,
or talked to them, to purchase something.
Lookie Loos—30–40 percent These people are not serious and just
curious; locate them as quickly as you can and eliminate them from your
schedule. These people are professional time wasters who may appear to be
 IV 181

buyers in power. You need to have a system to weed out the lookie loos and
cut them off from wasting all of your precious time.
Four signs you are talking to a lookie loo:
1. They ask questions they seem to already know the answer to
2. They kick tires to the point of overkicking them
3. They appear to be over interested with too many oo’s and aah’s and
yup’s
4. When it comes to money and finances, they become vague or
overconfident
The mistakes—These people were dragged into your funnel by someone
else, maybe a spouse or a business partner and have no interest in ever buy-
ing. Locate them and eliminate them from your funnel so you do not waste
time on them.

Hierarchy of Sales Skills Retail—Biz Sales

Not all salespeople are created equally. There is a hierarchy of salespeople
and sales skills, and showing off the categories of different salespeople can
give you an idea of the skills and experience that each level of selling has. Of
course, anyone can train to make sales at a higher level, but when building
a sales team with people from all different backgrounds, you can use this
section to determine the skill level of other people’s sales experience.

Low Skill Sales

Retail is where many salespeople can start their careers, and for many it
can be a good place to start. Retail sales is typically low skill because the
company you work for supplies leads through a store or a sales floor. The
customer walks in ready to buy, and prospecting is minimal. The retail sales
floor is usually set up to create an optimal selling environment, and there
182 The Close—7 Level Selling

are usually heavy marketing expenditures to fill up the sales environment

with customers.
All of these factors make retail sales a low-skill game relative to the other
forms of selling, and thus retail sales are usually one of lowest paid, lowest
skill positions available in sales. Commissions are usually around 1–2 per-
cent and minimum wage. If you want more money, you will need to get
into a more difficult environment where the company does not hand you
leads every day. Salespeople always get paid less when the company is pay-
ing for the leads. Bring your own leads or your own book of business in one
of the higher skill games to get paid the big dollars.

Low Medium Skills

Door-to-Door Sales—These are another place where salespeople start
their careers. Door-to-door companies do not supply leads to their sales-
people and thus, door to door is higher skill and higher paid than retail
sales. Door-to-door sales usually have short pitches and simple offers that
people can understand in a matter of minutes. This is the first opportunity
to really make a career out of selling is once you take control of your own
lead flow.

Medium Skill Sales

Corporate Sales and B2B Sales—Medium skills give you medium pay in
corporate sales and B2B. B2B and corporate is somewhat easier than the
super high skill sales because you work for a large company with a good
training program, and typically the large companies have established offer-
ings and good brand recognition.
In addition, several companies you are selling to have set budgets for your
products and services and are “buying anyways.” You may be convincing
your customers to switch service providers, but the money is being spent
 IV 183

anyways. That means there is more skill required in longer sales cycles and
more gate keepers and committees to go through to get to the top, all of
this extra work is compensated usually with generous corporate compensa-
tion packages plus commissions and benefits.

High Skill Sales

Business Sales, Biz Op Sales, Entrepreneurial Sales, Raising Capital—
The highest skill game of sales is selling things that don’t really exist. Selling
businesses from one owner to another is an extremely challenging sale.
Selling business opportunities like franchises is another high skill sale.
Entrepreneurial sales for new companies and ideas and raising capital also
fit into this model, and these are the highest paid and highest skill sales
opportunities around. People who can master the high skill sale are the
highest earners in the world and also the most skilled salespeople around.
Aspire to be in the high skill category one day and watch your income grow
exponentially.

The Purpose of a Salesperson

Your #1 job as a salesperson is to get a decision out of the prospect. There
are five outcomes of any sales presentation and they are:
1. Yes
2. Yes, with a condition
3. Maybe
4. No, with a condition
5. No
You need to make it clear to your prospects that you are looking for a
clear yes or no answer and that maybe is unacceptable because it means you
didn’t do your job very well. Contrary to popular belief, the #1 function
184 The Close—7 Level Selling

of a salesperson is not to sell, but rather, show the value, determine if your
value is a fit with the customer, and get a firm yes or no decision. A no deci-
sion is completely fine, and you need to embrace “the no” especially if it’s
not a fit. You are not looking for any customer for your product or service;
rather, you are looking for the right customer to ethically sell to the right
way.
Never sell your customer something he doesn’t need, cannot use; qualify
well, and disqualify as well. Your career will be long lived and very profit-
able if you allow “no” to be one of the outcomes. Welcome it and embrace
it, especially on the wrong customers. Nothing strengthens your power
position like “forcing a no” on a customer that you know is wrong for the
product.
If it’s not a fit, tell the customer up front and you will automatically go to
#1 in trust in the customer’s eyes because of your honesty and commitment
to excellence in ethics. That is a client for life.

Top Three Traits of a Top Salesperson

There is a myth in the world of sales that there is such thing as a “natural”
salesperson and you are either a “natural” or you are not. I believe this is a
myth, but that surely there are people who may naturally be suited to sales.
What are your core personality traits?
We’ve all seen people who seem natural at sales. They thrive in the sales
environment.
Their personality is perceived to be more extroverted, or maybe they
enjoy being with people, or maybe they enjoy presenting, but all of those
traits to do not make a natural salesperson and can in fact turn into weak-
nesses down the road. Natural extroverts talk too much and can kill the
sale. People who enjoy socializing can be inefficient and shallow and get
 IV 185

nothing done while socializing too much. People who enjoy presenting
may be horrible closers. Introverts make great listeners and possess many
traits that are perceived to be “less desirable” as salespeople. However those
traits can be developed into strengths.
What remains true is that all top performing salespeople have three traits
in common: ego, empathy, and passion. Everything else—the technique,
the mechanics, the delivery—can be learned through training.

e·go
ˈēɡō/
noun
1. a person’s sense of self-esteem or self-importance.
“a boost to my ego”
synonyms: self-esteem, self-importance, self-worth, self-respect, self-
image, self-confidence
“the defeat was a bruise to his ego”

Top Sales Trait #1: Ego—Ego is what you think of yourself. It’s the
force that says “I am,” and ego is important as a salesperson because you
are required to go into the world, be unreasonable, make progress, and
ultimately “push” on the world. When you push on the world, the world
pushes back. Your ego is what will allow you to know your value, face rejec-
tion, and keep going despite the emotional pain that salespeople experience
every day. After all, it’s not water that sinks ships, but only when the water
gets inside the hull of the boat does the boat start to sink. The same is true
for the ego: if you allow negativity to penetrate your ego, you will sink.
Your ego will allow you to “float” much like a boat in the face of adversity.
A caution on the ego, however, is to not have too much. Too much ego
is a turnoff and will make you blind in decision making. You must have
enough ego to do your job but not so much that it ruins your relationships
around you.
186 The Close—7 Level Selling

em·pa·thy
ˈempəTHē/
noun
noun: empathy
the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

Top Sales Trait #2: Empathy—Zig Ziglar famously used to say, “They
don’t care about how much you know until they know how much you
care.” Understanding the feelings of your prospect is probably one of the
most desired traits for buyers when meeting salespeople. People want to
buy from people who “understand them” and understand their feelings,
fears, and weaknesses. People buy out of need or want, and because both
are positions of weakness, people fear being taken advantage of in almost
every business situation.
Human nature is dark, and humans have been preying on weaker
humans since the dawn of time. Empathy is a way to show your customers
that you care about them and their wellbeing and want them to be treated
fairly when dealing with you. Top salespeople can almost “feel” the emo-
tions of their prospects intuitively and act like a mind reader because they
are so in tune with feeling the emotions and psychic energy of their cus-
tomer. This power comes from taking a genuine interest in people and
focusing deeply on them and not yourself. The trait of empathy is hard to
learn and harder to master, but if you can master empathy and combine
it with healthy dose of assertiveness, you will be a top salesperson almost
immediately.
 IV 187

pas·sion
ˈpaSHən/
noun
1. strong and barely controllable emotion.
“a man of impetuous passion”

Top Sales Trait #3: Passion—A deep religious-like passion about your
company and product is infectious and exciting to you and the people
around you. When you use your product, love your product, love the com-
pany you are working for, and show intense love and passion for what you
are selling. It’s almost unstoppable in the face of a prospect because it is real.
Sales is simply the transfer of emotion, after all, and the deeper your love
for your product and passion for your product, the more unstoppable you
become in the face of objections. To become ultra-passionate about your
product—buy it! Own it! Use it! Use it every day!
If you are a user yourself, you can sell your product with the undying
belief that it works. Every prospect has the fear in their mind, “Does this
thing actually work?” When you are living proof that the product is every
word as good as you say it is, it’s hard to deny the truth, especially a passion-
ate deliverer of truth. You must own what you sell, if you sell cars you can’t
ride the bus to work. If you sell real estate, you can’t be a renter.
If you sell insurance, you must own the maximum amount. Nothing will
make you sell more or sell harder than you are becoming a passionate owner
of your own product. If you fall out of love with your product one day, you
must revisit your product from a place of gratitude and make a list of the
twenty things that you “love” about your product. You must fall in love
again and practicing gratitude is the way back into positivity and into love.
Look yourself in the mirror and read the twenty things that you love while
staring yourself in the face, making intense eye contact. You will fall in love
188 The Close—7 Level Selling

again; sometimes you just need to be reminded of the greatness that you
once saw inside of your product and reignite the passion.

What holds you back from your sales potential?

Fears/weaknesses/knowledge
Advice from a $100,000,000 man
Years ago, I met a man and he mentioned that five years from now we would
all be in the same spot we are today and no closer to our potential unless
we focused on three things. He proceeded to draw a diagram of a triangle
as an iceberg floating in water. With his marker he divided the tip of the
iceberg as 2 percent of what holds us back from our potential and under
the waterline on the iceberg he divided the remainder of the iceberg into
49 percent and 49 percent. “You see?” he said, “what holds us back in life is
only 2 percent knowledge, what you learn, what you know, your education,
which, in the end isn’t a huge factor. But what becomes huge in holding you
back from your potential are your fears and your weaknesses.”

2%
Knowledge

Death Pride
Poverty Lust
Criticism Gluttony
Ill Health
49% 49% Greed
Fears Weaknesses
Loss of Love Sloth
Old Age Wrath
Envy

Knowledge - Fears - Weakness

Maximizes Knowledge, Minimizes Fears and Weaknesses
 IV 189

He went on to list the six ghosts of fear from Napoleon Hill’s Think and
Grow Rich and the seven deadly sins as per most religions of the world and
explained how it was not our knowledge, but rather human fears and weak-
nesses that held us back from reaching our full potential as business people.
FEARs are nothing but False Evidence Appearing Real, and all fear exists
in the mind. To transform the mind from fear into faith, I would say replace
the word “fear” with the word “uncertainty.” Everyone has natural uncer-
tainties. Rather than feeling fear, explore what you are uncertain about. The
mind cannot solve fear, but it can solve uncertainty and a lack of knowledge
in any specific area. The six major human fears are illustrated below in the
Six Ghosts of Fear by Napoleon Hill:

Six Ghosts of Fear

1. Fear of death—The mother of all fears and the ultimate unknown in
life.
2. Fear of failure—Will keep a salesperson from taking new risks.
3. Fear of Poverty—The fear of losing money or being left in a worse
financial position after taking a career in sales, a career with the risk of
making no money through a commission structure. Many novice sales-
people fear the idea of commission because of the potential downside
of “making no money.” This fear must be tamed as quickly as possible
by breaking a sales day down into predicable actions with predictable
results that generate predictable amounts of money over time.
4. Feat of ill health—This fear runs in parallel with fear of poverty, which
leads to ill health. To be afraid of being sick will lower the power of
your immune system and make you sick in turn. To be a top salesperson
you need to display a degree of vitality and good health to be effective.
5. Fear of loss of love—Fear of losing your mate due to bad decisions.
190 The Close—7 Level Selling

6. Fear of criticism—Fear of being criticized for asserting your position

in life.
None of these fears are real and all are perceived. Often the emotion of
fear is more debilitating and damaging to the human body than the thing
you fear happening. The opposite of fear is faith, the faith that “this will all
work out.” Many superstar salespeople practice a religion to practice the
emotion of faith, giving them the spiritual power to overcome their fears
and face the adversity within. I always recommend someone in the pursuit
of money, success, fame, or fortune to take on a religion for study of the
power of faith and to increase their spiritual power. Making money, after
all, is a spiritual endeavor, and money is a spiritual energy unto itself. It
comes from an idea backed by confidence, and faith is a wellspring from
which confidence can be drawn. Without faith, one’s mind will turn to fear,
and if you are in fear long enough, fear will consume even the best of minds.
Weaknesses—Our weaknesses rob us of our energy and focus to be suc-
cessful in any pursuit including a successful career in sales. Although this is
not a book on religion, all religions of the world agree that sin is a waste of
energy. All human weaknesses can be categorized by the seven deadly sins:

Seven Deadly Sins

1. Pride—The mother of all sins and the thinking that you are better or
that your situation is different. You are no better or worse than anyone
else, and your situation is never really different. This is pride talking,
and pride is the most damaging of all human sins because it opens the
door to the other six wastes of energy on the list.
2. Greed—The human emotion of wanting “more.” Every human being
has a magic number when it comes to money and material wealth, and
that number is always “more.” The most important question you have
 IV 191

in a sales career is when is “enough, enough?” Many professional sales-

people do not sell for the money, but rather to serve in a big way. If you
are driven by pure greed all the time, you will simply stop selling when
you have a little bit of money. If you are driven by service and deliver-
ing maximum service to the world, you will become rich beyond your
wildest dreams because there is no limit to the amount of service one
can give, and in fact, limitless service means limitless money.
3. Lust—The undisciplined emotion of sex in a negotiation is a pit-
fall that can ruin many otherwise competent salespeople. Very often
young single men and women can waste decades chasing members of
the opposite (or same) sex around every night and every weekend and
expend inordinate amounts of energy and throwing all the precious,
valuable, actionable energy straight down the drain. A focus on sex can
take an otherwise competent salesperson and take his eyes off the ball.
Many young people end up taming their sexual urges by either being
married or by being single and celibate. Napoleon Hill talks about sex
transmutation in his book Think and Grow Rich that is transmuting
sexual desire into creativity and ultimately great riches. You can choose
to harness this energy to serve you, or it can become a destructive force
in your life; it’s up to you.
4. Envy—The desire to count the money of someone else will always
destroy you. Don’t focus on what other people have; focus on yourself
and what you have. There is nothing more evil than desiring something
that you have not earned. You will only ever really keep things in your
life that you earn because anything given to you in life will be merci-
lessly taken back by life if you do not earn the right to have it. This goes
for having a beautiful body, a beautiful mind, money in the bank, lov-
ing relationships, and anything else in life that is of true value. Only by
earning real value do we appreciate value, and can we hold onto value.
192 The Close—7 Level Selling

Desiring things we do not earn through the function of envy is pure

evil and a waste of energy.
5. Wrath—When emotions go up, intelligence goes down. Sometimes
salespeople can get heated or frustrated, and they can let anger take
over. When anger takes over, your chances of winning in a career in sales
will drop to nearly 0 percent. Anger and wrath are generally a waste of
energy, and you are best to “feel the emotion,” understand why you feel
it, acknowledge the emotion, and let it go. Forgiveness is a powerful
emotion to release you of what you feel; you may think forgiveness is
something you do for someone else, but rather it is something you do
for yourself for emotional release.
6. Sloth—The art of selling takes a lot of work, time, effort, energy, and
sometimes money to carry out. Many humans avoid selling purely
because it takes energy—don’t be lazy! Everything good in life will
take an inordinate expenditure of energy, including getting in shape,
earning money, having a loving relationship, and growing as a person.
It all takes energy, and the time and energy are getting used up every
day. Use your energy on something worthwhile. Dedicate your life to
a worthwhile cause because you will die one day anyways, out of time
and out of energy. You might as well choose something worthwhile to
spend it all on.
7. Gluttony—The human emotion of anything done to the extreme.
Gluttony is usually extreme overeating, extreme overdrinking, and tak-
ing anything to an extreme. Eating and drinking are necessary for life,
but anything that is good will, in extreme excess, turn destructive and
into a waste of energy. Sometimes salespeople can feel like the hare in
the ancient fable “the tortoise and the hare” but you are always better
off to be slow and steady and win over time. Very seldom can you be
successful in life by being extreme all the time.
 IV 193

The common law of business balance:

Close as the lowest risk bidder, never lowest cost.
“Common Law of Business Balance—There is hardly anything in the
world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper,
and the people who consider price alone are that person’s lawful prey. It’s
unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little. When you pay too
much, you lose a little money—that is all. When you pay too little, you
sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of
doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance
prohibits paying a little and getting a lot—it can’t be done. If you deal
with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run,
and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”
—John Ruskin
“Price!” complain salespeople all over the country, “We are losing on price.”
Price should never be an issue if the value is there. In any market, there
is a high-end provider, a middle provider, and a low-end provider. All the
money is at the top or the bottom of the market. The top wins on margin
and excellent fulfillment, the bottom wins on volume, and fulfillment can
be in question. Whenever price is brought up as an objection, you need to
examine not the dollars vs. dollars nature of the transaction. If their prod-
uct is $800 and yours is $1,000, the difference is only $200. The law of
business balance above is a great sales tool to use in your presentations, in
your sales office, and in your sales literature because it is an eternal truth
that can never be escaped.
You are never selling $1,000 vs. $800 dollars; what you are selling is the
value and the difference of the $200. What does the buyer get for his extra
$200? Insurance that the deliver, fulfillment, service, support, and every
other component of the transaction works! Whenever prices are slashed,
194 The Close—7 Level Selling

so is service. Walmart has low prices and absolutely zero service. Costco
has low prices and absolutely zero service. Going into a grocery store like
Whole Foods gives you premium prices and premium service. For the small
premium what do you get? Organic well sourced food, staff that works in
the store and knows about the products, and several specialty items pro-
vided and serviced in a great buying environment.
When your customer pays less, you need to remind him that he’s giving
something up for that small savings—the insurance that the product works,
the service you bring, the guarantee you bring, and bringing them over the
finish line so they are happy and you can have an ongoing lifetime relation-
ship. The $800 item might be garbage and not work, might break, or there
is no service. In today’s economy of e-commerce, service and relationships
are worth more than ever.
I have several vendors I purchase from who give me fair prices and
excellent service. There is no need to grind them down because they
deliver every time, and I am happy every time: if there is a problem, they
fix it and the insurance that “this really works” is why your prices are a
little higher.
When you can communicate the idea of “insurance” at a small premium
to your buyer, they will see the value, and if they are smart, they will not run
the risk of losing all their money in an inferior offering.

Dealing with Prospects More Powerful Than You

One challenge I have observed in my sales career is salespeople having dif-
ficulty selling and negotiating against prospects who are more powerful
than they are. It’s been proven in negotiation studies that the better of a
negotiator you are, the more you will yield to someone who is proven to be
more powerful than you. In other words, smart people psych themselves
out against opponents who are more powerful than they are.
 IV 195

Here are some principles for dealing with people more powerful than
you:
You cannot manipulate them—People who are more powerful than you
have seen it all; in fact many of them wrote the book on manipulation to
get into high places of power. If you try to do a “today only offer” or a gim-
mick, they will throw you out like a clown. You need to position yourself
for power but also use zero tricks or manipulation and be very clear in all
communications.
Shows like Dragon’s Den and Shark Tank on mainstream television by
Mark Burnett really showcase weaker players negotiating against exponen-
tially stronger players. Typically you get to see these weaker players being
destroyed like a gorilla would a rag doll. However, there are a few general
rules to follow when selling or negotiating against more powerful players.
Use clear time frames upfront—Telling your more powerful player the
exact time frames of how long the pitch is going to take and sticking to it is a
sign of power; knowing all other time frames and revealing them in advance
is impressive. Their time is at a mega premium; they want a two-minute
pitch, five-minute pitch, or fifteen-minute pitch, no longer; they don’t need
more. When people are asking for my time, I say tell me in two sentences
what you want. If they can’t fit into my box, I throw them out.
Have all data printed and organized in written format with you for
reference, but don’t use it.—Nothing is more powerful than the written
word. Showing up with the full plan written out in advance with statistics
for reference is powerful, and while you keep it visible, do not hand it to
them to peruse. Pitch them, and use the binder only if absolute necessary to
prove something in due diligence. You can have your due diligence materi-
als pre-prepared for their review. It’s a nice gesture, but they have their own
lawyers and accountants to check you out anyways. Some power players
will do deeper checks into you than that.
196 The Close—7 Level Selling

Let them know how the process typically goes—Letting them know
that they have seventy-two hours to decide on this offer upfront is what
they want to know or that you stick to a maximum of three meetings is
refreshing. Let them know how the sales process usually goes, and they will
probably ask for some customization because they always get their way.
Even if they like it, they will have a token objection—No matter how
much they like your offer, they are never going to say “yes” right away. They
will always have a token objection to not make themselves feel too easy.
This is good because it’s real buyer’s resistance; these people have something
to lose by doing business with you.
Let them know you are not wasting their time—Let them know you are
not going to waste their time upfront and explain how many minutes you
need, whether it is sixty seconds, two minutes, or even five minutes, which
is often adequate. If they want to know more they will ask you for more
time.
Use the Ziff principle—done for you technique—Have everything
prepared in advance so that all they need to do is sign. This is very
powerful, and I secured my last book foreword by mailing a printed pro-
totype of the book, along with a picture of me and the person at an event
where we met, a letter with my request, and a pre-written forward of
what he could say in a voice that sounded like him. He made some very
minor revisions, signed the foreword, and called me to congratulate me.
Because the process was easy for him and he could see the product, he
said yes.
Use real scarcity, have a backup, never fake scarcity—Scarcity is huge
for creating impulse to buy; however, powerful people do not respond to
gimmicks, so if you have a scarce offer, you better have a backup or several
real backups. When you can take an offer away from a powerful person, it
makes them want it more and shows your power in return.
 IV 197

Be able to walk—want, don’t need.—Never need the business; want the

business. When I got into real estate investing, I invited two multimillion-
aires, a dentist, and an accountant to one of my flips. I was looking for a
money relationship with all of them to fund my deals. One of them asked
me in front of the other, “Why do you need us?” I replied, “I don’t need
you; I want your business.” All four of them gasped because they weren’t
expecting this young kid to say he didn’t need their money. I explained I
wanted to expand and that I could continue the way I was, but I had larger
ambitions. Over time all four of them became my sources of funding. Need
and power are inverse and “needy” is a stinky cologne, never be needy.
Have a very short pitch—A sixty-second pitch is all you need, and if they
like the sixty seconds, they will ask you for more time or to set a meeting.
Often, they want the pitch in “I’m looking for X dollars to do Y with Z”—
extremely simple—and if the idea makes sense, you can continue.
Be flexible with terms—Powerful people are used to having everything
custom, and they are also used to exercising power. Either out of real needs
or just sadism and wanting to exercise power, they will want some special
terms that you normally don’t do.
Never insult them—This is common sense, which is uncommon. To
powerful people, wasting time is worse than wasting money. Keep your
interaction to pure business and always agree with whatever they say;
insults will kill your deal in a microsecond. Even if they say “You’re ugly!”
you can say, “Thank you, I haven’t heard that one yet.” You can have a laugh
and then get on with the pitch.
They must win every time—Powerful people never lose at anything.
They must always win, and if they ever feel like they are losing or getting
the short end of the stick, they will get mad like a little boy and “take his ball
home” and there will be no more ball playing because your powerful player
“took the ball home” and away from you. You need to counterbalance this
198 The Close—7 Level Selling

by putting up resistance to not let them steamroll you. They will test you
with questions to see if you are honest or stupid. In business there are usu-
ally crooks and clowns—crooks are dishonest and steal, and clowns are just
incompetent, and they don’t like either.
Answer directly and be able to tell them what the downside is—They
will ask you what’s bad about your product or offer, so tell them straight up;
don’t sugarcoat it, and be prepared to show your weaknesses because that is
a sign of strength. If they are interested, they will genuinely try to help you
with mitigating your weaknesses with referrals to competent people.
Know your numbers inside and out memorized—Have every import-
ant number memorized. If you don’t know your key numbers, you will be
labelled as a clown and thrown out in a second. Looking into it and getting
back to them may be acceptable, but you need to be sharper than that.
Be exactly on time—Not late, not early. Come at the exact minute. You
can wait outside in the car early and show up right on time prepared. Early
is rude; late is rude.
Have a token or gift—Have a leave behind, a book, a gift—the more per-
sonal and researched to their hot buttons and preferences the better. Give
them something awesome; it goes a long way. Don’t just give them some
crap brochures that everyone receives; make it special.
Research them beforehand—Do your homework on them before you
meet them, and at the very least Google them so you know the basics. The
bigger the deal, the more research you need. Especially when it comes to
investors or raising capital, you need to match your industry with the cap-
ital that is looking to invest in that industry. Typically, everyone loves real
estate, but real estate guys don’t love scrap metal because there is no secu-
rity. Restaurant guys like restaurant deals and car guys like car deals, so get
in the niche. It doesn’t matter how great the opportunity is—if they’re not
predisposed towards it. If a restaurant guy doesn’t understand a different
 IV 199

industry he won’t be interested in that other industry. Stay in the niche and
sell to what you know.
Remember they are human beings and so are you—At the end of the
day, they are human beings just like you. They bleed when wounded and
sweat when tired, they sleep, they poop—they do everything the same as
you. Warren Buffet, the world’s richest investor, drinks Cherry Coke, eats
a quarter pounder with cheese from McDonalds for lunch, and has Dairy
Queen ice cream because he also owns shares in those companies. Buffet has
been paraphrased as saying, “Being rich, my life is no different than yours, I
drink the same coke, I eat the same cheeseburger; the only difference is long
distance travel I do in a nicer way (private jet vs. economy class commercial)”
Set clear boundaries to show your power—Let them know that they
should be able to make a decision in two meetings in advance (or whatever
your process is). They appreciate this; otherwise you could get into a long
tire-kicking session or a “not a priority” session. Be prepared to take the
deal away and move on.

The Shortest Path Through the Sales Cycle

(Without Cutting Corners) and Still Building Trust
When it comes to sales cycles, the shorter the better. If you can sell cus-
tomers quicker it means more velocity of money for your business, more
growth, and more market share. If you can eliminate any extra delays in the
sales cycle, then do so. People are making faster and faster decisions to buy
or not buy these days, especially with the advent of google and ecommerce.
If you are selling insurance and you let them “go home and think about it,”
which means Googling your offer online and finding a cheaper broker.
Be prepared to close in one meeting instead of two. Cut three down to two
and do as much cutting as you can without cutting the trust-building process.
200 The Close—7 Level Selling

The counter argument. In trust based industries, clients might need to

“marinate” and become familiar with you and your brand. If you cut the
sales process too quickly without any margination period, it can appear that
you are too eager for the sale and only want their money. This is tough bal-
ance to strike between efficiency and trust.
A friend of mine used to work in jewelry sales in a jewelry store, and he would
approach prospects as they walked in and would say, “Sir, can I help you?”
Inevitably, this is the kiss of death in retail sales. The answer was always “no”
Instead, my friend added a “marination” period: he would see the pros-
pect, look at them over his shoulder, and politely say “Sir, I will be right
with you.” He would then disappear and go into the back for five minutes
to let the customer peruse. He would then approach the customer and make
a sale. The scarcity of the jewelry salesman created value. If you are selling a
high trust item that the buyer must be “educated” on to buy, which is sev-
eral high-ticket items these days, including finance, real estate, insurance,
medical or any other high trust purchase, sending an information package
or having an informational educational period before asking for the sale
will create the trust necessary to close. Research how long this must be sci-
entifically and cut it to where it has no more and no less than you need.
Now get out there and apply what you’ve learned!
 IV 201

To order a copy of Self-Made visit SelfMadeConfessions.com or

StefanAarnio.com and visit the store for other books and products.

Dear Reader,
Thank you for taking the time to invest in yourself and read my
work on professional selling: The Close: 7 Level Selling. Today is the
first day on a journey towards a new level of success in your career!
The difference between the rich and the poor is how we use our
time, and I hope you feel that studying this book has been a posi-
tive use of your time. Writing books is hard work, and books can
be life-changing tools where, for a very small amount of money,
you can make a big impact on your life. After all, your life in five
years will be exactly the same as today, except for the books you
read and the people you meet.
Reading books is good, but taking action in the real world is
great! Get out there, and sell! Don’t forget there are four simple
steps to getting rich: 1) Get a job; any job will do 2) Master the
art and science of straight commission sales 3) Start your own
business 4) Sell your business or invest the cash flow and become
a professional investor. The four steps are important, but you can’t
grow your money into lasting meaningful wealth without first
learning to sell!
So get out there and sell! Sell something every day! A business
isn’t a business unless it sells something every day!
Success is your duty; you owe it to yourself and your family to
reach your potential and becoming self-made in a way that only
you can be proud of !
202 The Close—7 Level Selling

You have just read my book on sales, and as you know, after the
presentation you must “close” and ask for the business! I will take
my own advice and ask for your continued business if you enjoyed
reading this book!
Here are some ways we can work together if you liked the value
and ideas inside of this book:
The next steps for our relationship should you wish to continue
working with me:
1. My company offers advanced classes for both individuals and
companies on selling and closing and the methods outlined
in this book. For more information you may call my office at
204–285–9882 or by email [email protected]
2. My company also offers one-on-one high performance
coaching as well as accountability coaching for salespeople,
sales teams, other companies, real estate investors, and other
business people. If you are serious about reaching the next level
of results in your life and business you may call my office at
204–285–9882 or email [email protected]
3. You may find value in the other books and products found on
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lowed by the various social media websites of the current day.
 IV 203

My accounts are typically @stefanaarnio, and I dominate all of

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5. If you are serious about succeeding in sales, business and life,
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results you have always desired out of your career or team!
Eighty percent of books that are bought never get read! I com-
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Readers are leaders and readers are earners! Let’s connect and
work together in the pursuit of your highest and greatest self ! I
believe in you.​

Respect The Grind,

Stefan Aarnio

P.S. Visit StefanAarnio.com for more ways that we can work

together. We can do big things together!
 MORE BOOKS BY
THE AUTHOR

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Hard times create strong men,
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The Blackbook is the perfect complement to the High

The Blackbook is the perfect complement to the High Performance Journal.
Performance Journal.
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 For a full list of products, please visit
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To book speaking engagements with Stefan

please email [email protected]
or call 204-285-9882
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