Fishing is very popular in the Florida Keys, and one of the favorite catches for anglers and tourists alike is bonefish. Most people fish for sport rather than food, and catching one is an art. If someone from New England came down to the Florida Keys to bonefish, that person would probably do what I was tempted to do at first: bait the hook with shrimp, cast it, and wait for a bite on the line. As soon as that morsel arrives, we New Englanders start fishing, just like we do cod and haddock in our cold waters. However, more often than not, the hook will return to us empty and our frustration will only increase as we continue to try the same ineffective way to fish for bonefish.

If you were to call your local fishing guide and ask them to show you how it’s done, this is what you’d see. She would bait the hook with shrimp, cast it, and wait for a bite on the line. But once he felt that bite, he wouldn’t try to catch the fish right away. Instead, the experienced guide would begin to strip the line of the real. After a minute or two, the guide might turn to you and say, “Okay now. Are you ready for that?” So you would roll it up. So why would the guide throw the fish instead of trying to reel it in from the start?

It turns out that the bonefish feeds on shrimp found in shallow water. As soon as they get one, they dash off into deeper water to avoid those large pink birds known as flamingos. Flamingos are predators, and will swoop in and try to eat the bonefish for lunch while searching for shrimp in the shallows. To avoid becoming a flamingo fillet, bonefish seek safety in deeper water. Once he’s safe and alone, he finally swallows the shrimp and hook. With the hook inside the fish, you can now set the hook to reel it in. If you are impatient and try to reel in the fish too fast, it is almost impossible to catch a bonefish. Their strategy to avoid becoming eaten is to keep the shrimp in their mouths as they run to safety. The bonefish does not swallow the crustacean, or the hook, until it finds refuge in deeper water. If you try to reel them in the right way, the hook will come loose and you will come up empty handed.

STRIP LINING EFFECTIVELY UNCOVER BREAD

The fishing technique I just shared with you is known as strip-lining, but I’m not just sharing fishing stories. This concept is a powerful metaphor to illustrate what happens when you integrate it into your sales techniques to uncover a prospect’s pain. Strip-lining becomes even more effective when combined with a little lesson from the great physicist Sir Isaac Newton, who said that objects at rest tend to stay at rest and objects in motion tend to stay in motion. When you think about it, Newton’s theory even applies to selling.

Prospects can be neutral. A neutral perspective would be a pendulum that does not move. They can be positive, like the pendulum swinging to the right, toward the positive, toward the possibility of buying and doing business with you. The third position would be negative. The pendulum swings to the left, in the direction of not doing business with you or buying from you, ending up with no deal or negative results.

All salespeople have been faced with positive, negative, and neutral prospects. Most sellers feel that positive prospects are the easiest to sell. It’s true, they are. when based solely on traditional sales approaches. once you learn Negative Reverse Sell®in particular strip-lining, both positive and negative prospects are much easier to sell.

Negative Reverse Sell it means acting in a way exactly opposite to the way the prospect expects you to act. An example would be salespeople sounding like they are trying to discourage prospects from buying their product or service. Yes, it sounds counter-intuitive at first, and maybe even silly, but believe it or not, this can work when done correctly. Strip-lining is a specific technique under the Negative Reverse Sell umbrella. Let’s take a closer look at these sales as well, and discuss the prospect that is perhaps the hardest sell.

SELL TO NEUTRAL PROSPECT

More often than not, you’ll find that the hardest prospects to sell are the neutrals whose pain you haven’t discovered yet. Because? Because they are stuck, not moving, not going anywhere. The neutral prospect is not emotionally invested and has no strong feelings, either positive or negative. At least when the outlook is positive or negative, they feel something. So what do you do with a neutral prospect? You have to make it swing one way or the other on the emotional pendulum.

Ask yourself this: Would it be easier to get a neutral prospect to move towards the negative or towards the positive? In other words, would it be easier to discourage that neutral prospect from doing business with you or to convince him or her to do business with you? Hands down, the easiest thing to do with a neutral prospect is to steer them into the negative, essentially discourage them from doing business with you. Because they expect you to try to convince them to work with you, they will move in the negative direction much more easily. To suggest the opposite of what the prospect expects is disarming. If you can get neutral prospects to move on to negative prospects, they’ll suddenly become a lot easier to sell. Because? Because you have set them in motion. The prospect becomes involved and emotionally involved. I realize it goes against everything you may have learned when it comes to selling, but stick with me here and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Stay tuned for our next blog, where we’ll discuss various takedown techniques that effectively take your neutral lead as a negative and end up with positive results.