Industry Magazine Get JACK'D Magazine Winter 2019 | Page 12

SPEAK YOUR INTELLIGENCE
GATHERING
TRUTH
THE
POWER
OF GATHERING INTELLIGENCE
BY: JORDAN BELFORT
THE PROBLEM with a lot of salespeople is they talk a lot more
than they listen. Asking the right questions and then listening to
the answers is crucial to understanding your prospects’ needs. This
asking the right questions is what I call gathering intelligence. You
probably call it qualifying. Same thing.
The reason you gather intelligence is, so you can build both an
airtight logical and an airtight emotional case for why someone
should buy now. Without these two things you have no sale.
The man you’re about to meet believed the sole purpose of
advertising is to sell stuff. I teach goal-oriented selling. What this
means is that from the second you begin a conversation with your
prospect you have one goal in mind and that is to close the sale.
Every word is deliberate, every tonality is deliberate, every gesture
is deliberate so that every step you take brings you a little closer to
the close.
An intelligence gathering story
Okay, so let me tell you a story and this is a classic of Madison
Avenue advertising. Anyone in the business worth his salt knows
this one well. There’s this ad man working in Racine, Wisconsin, for a
company called the J. L. Stack Advertising Agency. His name is Claude
Hopkins and he’s just picked up a new account in Milwaukee called the
Schlitz Brewing Company.
At the time there were some large breweries in the United States
and in their advertising they all pretty much made the same claim—
that their beer was “pure.” Some took their advertising to extremes
buying two-page spreads in local newspapers, so they could make
their PURE extra-large.
Hopkins began gathering his intelligence by going to brewing school
where he could learn the science of brewing, but he says it didn’t
help at all. So, then he went to the Schlitz brewery. There he saw
plateglass rooms where beer was dripping over pipes. So, Hopkins
asked, “Why?” He was told the rooms are filled with filtered air, so the
beer could be cooled in purity. He also saw beer being filtered through
white wood pulp. To avoid contamination every pump and pipe was
thoroughly cleaned twice a day. Every bottle was cleaned too—four
times before beer was ever put into it. To get the purest water Schlitz
had an artesian well that went down 4,000 feet. The water of Lake
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