Control the conditions, keep every step congruent and clear

1. What selling is for

A story to start. A story answers the old saying about leading a horse to water. Its point is that the surroundings are not beside the point: change them, one after another, and each change makes it likelier the horse drinks. Nobody talks the horse into it. The situation has made drinking the most likely thing for it to do.

Why it matters. A lot of the time, people credit their own power to persuade, whether over other people, over situations or whatever else. One illustration holds that you could get a whole roomful of people to undress, if you could control all the conditions: lock each person in a room and set the heat at 200 degrees, and a few hours later every one of them would have taken their clothes off. Nobody would have argued themselves into it, and nobody would have been persuaded. The conditions would have been set.

What follows for a sale. When you want a particular behavior or outcome from a prospect, control as many of the conditions as possible. To be clear, you cannot control them all; the aim is to control as many as you can of the ones that raise the chance of a sale. One view, maybe a romantic one: selling is a wild kind of expertise in trying to bring chaos under control. The variables acting on a person are unlimited, and nobody can promise that every prospect buys, because each person brings their own history of reinforcement into the conversation. You could promise a sale only if you had controlled that person's life from birth until they reached your sales table, and you cannot. So the work is to try to take charge of as many of the variables as lie within your reach.

The goal, in one line. Make it as likely as it can be that qualified leads buy, and so become customers. That is the whole of the outcome.

One condition you set: phone or video. By and large, the preference here is to sell by phone rather than on a video call. The reasons given: nobody has technical trouble; a full day of selling on the phone takes far less energy from the team than a day on video; and the view here is that a proper script leaves the work to the buyer's own imagination, which no seller can better. Something very visual might be worth video. It also depends on the price: managing someone's wealth, for one, probably would be too. High-ticket deals were done by phone for a very long time before video calls existed, so there is no reason the phone should fail. Your video before the call is the same whatever the medium: SOP 247, section 2.

2. Sales gains add up

Sales is additive rather than a jump from nothing to everything. You take control of one variable and it adds 5 percent: among 20 people who would not otherwise have bought, one now does, thanks to that single change. You add another variable, it brings in another one out of 20, and that is another 5 percent. Think about selling this way, as controlling many variables, and not as a hunt for one silver bullet.

Outside selling there can be silver bullets. Sometimes a great hook can be one. Sometimes a great message, or something like a brand, is one. Call these big silver bullets: once you have established them, they can change a business enormously, seemingly overnight. Selling does not work like that, at least in experience here. It is far more additive: there are many small things, and put together they create the result.

3. Keep every step congruent

For many of you, this matters, and especially if what you sell is more premium.

Where it comes from. A book interviewed the manager of a business that did very well charging far higher prices than its competitors. This is no moral comment on that trade. The view here is that you can learn from anyone, without passing moral judgment. What stood out from the interview was one idea: everything has to be congruent.

What congruence means. From the moment a prospect first sees your ad to the moment they hand over money, you are almost painting a picture for them. You set a frame: here is what the prospect is signing up for, and here is what the business stands for. If, at any point along the way, something is off, a red flag goes up and the prospect thinks that this does not fit what came before. At that point you lose them.

Above all else, in the view here, make sure the whole funnel stays congruent from end to end.

One job for each stage. One practice here gives each stage of the funnel a job of its own, on the view that whatever is promised early on turns into a conversation later: if the ad promises more leads, the call has to make sense of that promise. Saying the same message at every stage, on this view, rarely works. The jobs, stage by stage:

Stage	Its main job
The ad	Recognition: people come to know you, your service and your brand
The landing page	Belief: that this is the answer, and worth their time
The application	Self-selection: friction, such as a quiz or more steps, raises quality; made too easy, it probably draws idle sign-ups (SOP 208, section 6)
The follow-up	Relevance: most of the time people forget what they clicked; tie it to their situation. A lead written off as unqualified may have been qualified and met with a conversation that did not fit
The call	The decision
The records system	Feeding results back to the ad platform
Finance	The economic value: whether it paid

4. Action item one: walk your own process as a buyer would

This is the first action item. If you want something that will make you feel terrible, this is it.

• Go through your entire sales process, the way a prospect would.
• Use a changed name, a changed email address, a changed phone number, or whatever else it takes, and walk through it together with your team.
• If you work alone with no team, go through at least the click flow the way a consumer might.

What you might find. What you might find, to your surprise and dismay, is that a lot of pieces feel clunky, feel rough, or make no sense. One part says it will do one thing, and then the prospect is taken somewhere else. The reason is that you have changed the process a couple of times over the years and never smoothed out the edges.

Why it comes first. Before anything else here, and almost guaranteed to pay: check that the promise you make at the outset matches what the prospect actually receives in the sales conversation, on a call, on Zoom or wherever it is you sell. The lift is significantly higher as long as the process is congruent from start to finish. When you know it is, look at what else can be made to fit, and begin lifting the standard. If everything is disjointed, what you close will fall well short, nowhere near as many.

5. Motivation runs high, and briefly

Buyers feel a very strong drive to buy, for very short spells. That drive tracks how deprived they feel of the solution, which is to say the pain they feel right now. Pain like that typically passes very quickly. A bad mood lasts far less time than you would expect, even when you are deeply sad; you get on with your life, something reminds you, you are sad again for a little while, and then normal life resumes.

Those moments are when motivation peaks, and you need to be on hand with an offer right then. That is why speed carries so much weight here. Many of you, it is claimed, could triple your businesses just by speaking with your leads inside a minute, and many of you would see your business double or triple if your calls to leads went out faster. That is all it takes: buying has become easier and quicker for them.

How fast to make first contact, and the daily test for it, are on SOP 90 — Reach a new lead fast. Timing an offer for the point of greatest want, rather than just after the want has been met, is section 5 of SOP 57 — Compute the payback period and shorten it.

6. Say it so simply that nobody has to think

Clarity first. The view here is that clarity is the dividing line between exceptional copy and mediocre copy. Experience here: the more selling, marketing and persuading done, the less faith kept in NLP, language patterns and the rest. Most people are confused and distracted, and cannot tell what you are on about. So talk to them in third-grade language. The reason is not that they are dumb; it is that they do not care. Make your message so easy to take in that it costs them no mental effort at all. Then the message does the work, and their mind never stops to process it and pass judgment.

The test to apply. Whenever you are unsure about your messaging, anywhere in the sales process or in the script, ask whether it can be simplified to a third-grade reading level, with not one word in it that anyone has to stop and think about before they decide.

A routine. One practice here, used more often than can be counted: to improve a campaign, run every piece of copy in the funnel, from first to last, plus the script, through a reading calculator and bring it under a fifth-grade score. A third-grade score is amazing, and fifth grade is usually closer to normal. Still, you want it as low as it will go. If you do only that, results reportedly improve by 10, 20, 30 or 50 percent overnight. What you say stays the same; only the way you say it changes, because it has become easy to take in.

Flag: the grade to aim for. SOP 31, section 1, sets the bar for the same kind of pass below a third-grade level, not a fifth. What each costs: the fifth-grade routine here sends out copy that SOP 31 would rewrite; its third-grade bar asks for more rewriting before anything goes out. This page does not settle which reading is right.

The full pass. SOP 31 — Write at the right reading level carries the pass itself, and the effects it reports for outbound email and for advertising are in its section 3.

7. Selling can be trained, and culture keeps it up

Not born, trained. Many of you will have sales teams or salespeople, whether they sell in person or online. There is a popular belief that people are born salespeople; the view here disagrees with it hard. In this view, some people, over the years before they sit down to interview with you, will have picked up skills others have not. If they have some skills already, and those line up with many of the general ones selling calls for, less training has to happen. But at bottom, if you can learn it, it can be trained, full stop. Whether it deserves the training is its own question.

Whose job it is. If you take the position, as the view here does, that everything can be trained, it follows that building the best possible sales team is always your responsibility, and within your power.

Culture. Once your people have the skill they need to produce sales consistently, what sustains that behavior, and keeps it high, is culture. Many of you have some of the right pieces and still complain that your salespeople are lazy: they do not want to give up weekends, they are in no rush to contact leads, they only want hot leads handed to them. Whose fault is that? Yours, in the view here, because you set that culture. You told them how things are done here, and they took from it that idleness was allowed, and that they would still earn money and be rewarded for it. Not rewarded in public, but out of every reinforcer in the system, they are reinforced more for not working than for working. That is on you.

What to screen for, and when to stop trying to teach a trait someone does not have, is section 5 of SOP 43 — Document, demonstrate, duplicate. Deciding whether to train someone into a skill or hire someone who has it is SOP 44 — Buy or build talent. Drilling a team, one obstacle at a time, is SOP 108 — Drill a team on closing.

8. What this page does not decide for you

• Which conditions to control first. The advice is to control as many as you can; the order to take them in: Not established on this page.
• What a single change adds in your business. The 5 percent and the one out of 20 are an illustration of how gains add up. This page gives no figure for what any one change will add for you.
• How to judge whether a skill is worth training. It is called a separate question and left there: Not established on this page.

9. The checklist

Step	What to do
1	Treat a sale as the result of its conditions, and control as many as you can of those that raise the chance a qualified lead buys
2	The preference here: by and large, sell by phone; video might suit a very visual product and, depending on the price, a service such as managing wealth
3	Look for many small gains that add up, not one silver bullet
4	Walk your whole sales process as a prospect, under a changed name, email and number, with your team; alone, at least the click flow
5	Smooth out every piece that feels clunky or does not fit what came before
6	Check that what you promise at the start matches what the prospect gets in the sales conversation
7	One practice: give each stage its own job: recognition, belief, self-selection, relevance, the decision, feedback, value
8	Once it is congruent, look at what else can be made to fit and start lifting things
9	Be there to make an offer while motivation is high: reach leads fast (SOP 90)
10	Put every piece of funnel copy, plus the script, through a reading calculator and bring it as low as it will go (SOP 31)
11	Treat selling as trainable, and building the team as your job
12	Ask whether your culture reinforces people more for not working than for working

10. What this page does not cover

How much a buyer needs to know before they buy, and giving them a longer run-up before the sale, are on SOP 244 — Sell to what the buyer knows and lengthen the runway. Checking whether selling is really what holds you back, and how your close rate compares, is SOP 245 — Check sales is the constraint and fix the worst part first.

Finding salespeople is SOP 252, and interviewing them in groups is SOP 253. Onboarding a new rep is SOP 255, and training a team already on live calls is SOP 256. Building a sales culture is SOP 257 — Name the rules your sales culture reinforces and tolerates.