The pitch was designed to elicit a 'Yes' response at every turn (the idea being that the prospective client would be conditioned to saying 'Yes' over and over a

The pitch was designed to elicit a 'Yes' response at every turn (the idea being that the prospective client would be conditioned to saying 'Yes' over and over and be more amenable to the final hammer swing of 'send me x dollars for y shares'). Most pitches were directed at the kind of business owners and execs who end up on lead services like Dun & Bradstreet, but sometimes also targeted individuals at their homes; in either case, the prospect is either running a business or just arrived home from work and is tending to kids/dinner/chores/etc. Ask someone in either scenario if they're busy and the default answer is yes; they're always busy. But ask them if they have a second, and they're more likely to say yes. Everyone has a second, even if they're busy, and the very wording of the question implies this will be a brief and laconic interaction that won't interrupt their day. Busy is a negative primer, have a second is a positive one. The article contains a few rebuttal snippets, but the full "straight line" pitch had rebuttals for every step of the interaction and every possible response from a prospect. They called it the "straight line" because the idea was that at all moments of the conversation, you are constantly guiding the prospect along a straight line to the desired conclusion (a sale), and any diversion from this straight line in the form of customer protest/question/disinterest needs to be quickly and somewhat aggressively countered with a rebuttal and then followed with a slick line that elicits a return to the previous direction. Since I'm already rambling, I'll add another detail that isn't in the article; Belfort didn't come up with this pitch himself, it was developed originally at Lehman Brothers (one of the leading firms) and was used in some form at all of the big wirehouse brokerages (eg, the original Merrill Lynch "thundering herd" or LF Rothschild, where Belfort learned it). Belfort's "innovation" was not the script, it was taking the script out of the hands of elite white-shoe brokers (who sold legitimate stocks to clients) and teaching it to unscrupulous boiler room scammers (who made their money by tricking prospects into buying penny stocks that Stratton Oakmont then dumped).