If you have not seen the movie Glengarry Glen Ross, it is well worth watching.
It’s a look into the cold-hearted world of high-pressure sales. Could well be based on the IAS or any of the numerous other “regging” activities in the world of scientology.
That there is even a “workshop” in a “church” that teaches “effective closing” is a pretty sad indictment of just how far afield this “church” has strayed. That they promote it to the general public and offer a free meal in order to entice people to attend is even sadder.
Alec Baldwin for the win.
I can picturing him towering over Miscavige ranting…
“Fuck you! That’s my name…”
“The real secret to sales is finding out what is needed and wanted and fitting the best product you have to those needs and wants. ”
Exactly, Mark. I always liked HCOPL 9 Sept 1981 entitled How To “Sell” Scientology To Your Friends. (The satirical quotation marks are Ron’s) In it there is a step by step process to find out what is needed and wanted by a person (using the pre-session processes), and only once that is discovered is any recommendation made regarding a service. When I first read this policy on Staff Status II I called the course supervisor over and said, “This is amazing…..has ANY reg ever read this??”.
As for Les Dane, I have heard “rumors” that Hubbard once said something complimentary about his book, but I have never seen that in writing anywhere. It might be true, but he didn’t have anything to do with Scientology and to my knowledge was not a Scientologist.
In any event he was a salesman whose purpose was to SELL without regard for the nature of the product or the needs and wants of the customer.
His book was all about how to enforce realities rather than discovering new realities and enhancing understanding.
His book described a way to sell Cadillacs in the ghetto on credit to people who are struggling to make ends meet.
The world needs products like this like it needs disease and famine.
Gavin Potter, still hard after it. He looks eerily more and more like Miscavige every year.
The money for nothing inflow lines must be slowing down. I’m sure the donos for services slowed awhile back but now, the ias and building monies just aren’t flowing the way they used to. Methinks the large quantity of overt products are catching up to the the rcs. Now they are unabashedly promoting hard, cold, singular “closing”. It’s obvious that money is the only product. Their lower conditions are showing.
Intriguing.
Though I always thought Howsen was a bit odd. I can’t explain why, exactly; I just do.
But anyway, all this crap about selling selling selling. There was a time at CC where the only reg was the one who signed you up for your next course. That was it. You could actually hang out there with friends without being bothered. It became kind of a social center for Scientologists… sort of like, well, a church might. Groups would often meet up there before going out somewhere. It was such a nice place that people actually went on course, too. Astounding!
Now, you can’t sit still for a moment in any org without getting hounded by that angry-looking woman in the satin “IAS World Tour” jacket, or the Ideal Org or Super Power or books in libraries or what-the-fuck-ever reg. And even if you pay one to go away, well that’s worse because now you’ve chummed the water – all of them will line up to take their turn on you once they smell even a little bit of cash.
All that money spent buying and fixing up buildings… all to house an utterly toxic environment inside. I’m soooo glad I’m outta there.
It’s a laugh a minute here – really enjoying it tonight, the previous post was “Les Dane is 1.1” and now with Gus’s phrase “chummed the water”. LOL! Very good Gus! One can just imagine when one or more Regges hears that another Reg has just “made his mark” – and the bee lines being drawn to the mark and the mark fleeing from the Org before the others can take a bite out of him.
Yes I remember those times before all this as well Gus, without a reg popping up from behind every pillar. The tone level within Orgs now is probably what? 1.1? At highest 2.0. Or what is “Fear” – 1.0 as I recall. And that’s just social tone! The “public” are there to be milked and slaughtered for their cash, they are almost regarded as “enemies” – the idea of a religious co-operative (that still needed funding of course) has long since gone. But they would have made far more money if they had not changed their attitudes. Imagine those 50-100,000 disaffected and trained people still being on lines and all the courses and intensives they would have bought? I always remember hearing the story of Harvey Jacques regarding students on courses as “marks” rather than auditors in training.
Your post was excellent Gus. Nice summary of the current state of affairs.
And of course those 50-100,000 would have led to several hundred thousand more appearing on lines over the last decades by obtaining good results and a nice friendly environment and thus good PR – forgot all those aspects! Someone has been busy driving them all away. I wonder who?
Its funny but my Ex FSM David Howsen used to tell me that he thought that Les Dane was 1.1. The book he wrote sells for $600 plus on Amazon now. Anyone want my copy 🙂
“Les Dane was 1.1” – made me laugh. Still laughing! Just about sums it all up really – “the technique we are using to strip you of your assets was invented by a 1.1”. I remember perusing the book and thinking some of the ideas were pretty good. I don’t think there would have been anything fundamentally wrong with (helping to) close people for fairly priced intensives and courses when they were ready for it and the product was good. Or helping them to decide whether they should buy a big screen TV or 12.5 hours. But scamming them for the other stuff like IAS and Idle Orgs and maxing out credit cards and selling/re-mortgaging their houses when obviously deep down they know they are being bilked and robbed is where the line must be drawn.
To see the difference between scientology and actual religions, just google “(name of religion) trademarks”. Businesses have trademarks, not religions.
Of course! “Who should attend” spells out who they want to attend and who they are enticing with a no admission fee and a free meal – all the different types of cult regges, the whole puking crowd.
Yes they are probably the sickest bunch of those remaining in the bubble – the 10% commission gang – IAS and Idle Org, books and other stuff. But this “hard sell” and rewards for such has been going on the since the 1980s – it is just that they are now brazenly open about it whereas years ago the Regges and book sellers didn’t let the other staff know that they were were making a living wage whilst the other staff were struggling on a few dollars a week. I have the feeling that this is how COB drummed up support within the Orgs – he built a cadre of Regges and Book Sellers and Execs around him that were all making a very nice living from the 10% commissions and they have probably remained “with Command Intention” ever since – “why not?” they think – they are driving nice cars and eating well whilst still being with “Command Intention” and occasionally getting an FPRD or SRD free of charge and not having to work in the wog world.
I also noticed that Potter photographs and looks like a doppelganger for COB. I would think many in the Church are now moving into his valence.
Interesting, Foolproof. Yes, its all about the money.
This is anecdotal but I know one ex-SO who was fitness-boarded for health reasons, who apparently was “ordered” to become a “Recovery Specialist” or whatever the term for this hat is now. As an OTC member, it was not what this terminal wanted to do but you know, Command Intention and all…the deal was recover Div 2 people via ethics cycles and then reg them for a service, their next service, whatever, and get that commission. Which means if you’re being recovered your ethics officer is double-hatted as your registrar.
Now, can you imagine feeling relaxed and able to communicate your problems to an EO who has a vested financial interest in getting you back, who, as soon as your ethics cycles are handled, becomes your registrar? Gosh, I would just feel so safe with this person, wouldn’t you?
Its so squirrel, so wrong, so not workable, so not LRH, and I’m so glad I’m no longer there, and that I know what I know, thanks to Mike, Marty, Tony and all the other truth-tellers. I’m very lucky.
Miscavige Maxims:
“Everyone regges.”
“No food or sleep until you close someone.”
“Scientology will expand to the degree you sell it.”
“If you wanna get out of lowers, make a Patron!”
“The Golden Age of Tech will succeed only if you bring in the gold.”
Probably all the major FSMers and other professional bloodsuckers will be in attendance.
Not a good strategic move. Your first intro to Scientology will be us telling you how we will be regging you for increasingly absurd amounts of money and getting you to sign a Sea Org contract. I guess it doesn’t matter. Scientologists all know about the processes they use to handle each other. Yet all these processes still seem to work.
Dear Gavin I think will pass and wait for the whale flensing status-improving workshop where I can figure out how to get a 10% cut of a 1000x deal. Maybe I’ll skip the rendered blubber and rice free meal though at that session.
Gavin Potter is a SMUCK from the other side of the tracks of SMUCK TOWN.
I attended the Les Dane seminar at Flag and the very first thing Les had you do was
X out several pages of the book he wrote on Big League sales because the formula he wrote to spend on anything did not work!!!!! That’s what he said and we all crossed out these pages !! I still have the book signed by Les Dane himself.
OMG Jose.. That is absolutely classic story.. I almost choked on my pork chop while I read..hahahhaa
Absolute truth 100 percent.
The guy sitting next to me commented that None
of the regges at his could make it work either and shrugged.
It guaranteed the Public would over spend to Purchase Bridge Services ALWAYS.
Of course nobody goes bankrupt in Scientology, wink,wink, cough,wink,wink.
Gavin’s 5X ain’t nothing. I’ve heard tell of this other ass-hat, Grant Cardone, who’s got a 10X thing going. 10X is twice as better as 5X.
I found that bullet point hilarious. So Cardone is 2x better then Gavin Potter?
Gavin’s a real stand up guy. He suggested I abandon my 4-5 year old daughter to my ex-husband so I could go back into the SO.
Also, it was a running joke in the early 90’s that he would recruit just pretty girls. I worked with some of them and they all had a crush on him. This was what he built his successful recruiting career on.
Yes that and dangling other cute boys in front if the cute girls to them to join. Teens we’re joining left and right with Gavin at Bridge in hopes of hooking up with their crush of the day. Gavin just dangled the carrot.
He’s not the only SO recruiter to dangle the 2D carrot. The Austrian named Gerald Pissel did it too. And he was a looker.
“First place? A new Cadallac. Second place? A set of steak knives. Third Place? You’re Fired!” One of Alec Baldwin’s best scenes ever.
The real secret to sales is finding out what is needed and wanted and fitting the best product you have to those needs and wants.
For the Church of Scientology – in other words, sell training and processing – not donations.
Yes. Selling is NOT “closing.” Closing is just closing. Co$ is not teaching sales. That’s why it’s so obnoxious. The people who are buying are no longer in the equation. It’s: just get them to buy what they don’t want or need. Close ’em before they catch on.
And I don’t recall any LRH techniques for “Closing”, dissemination yes but “closing”? Can’t recall it. The advert implies this (and thus lends credence to an unsavoury action) but I have never heard or seen LRH closing technology.
Well, there is quite a bit, including his recommendation of Les Dane. But the policy on “never offering the public a choice” and “cash or check” could be classified as “dissemination” but are really about SALES and CLOSING.
if he actually closes 90% of the time and earns 10% of donations would he not be a multi-millionaire? And a top closer of LRH sales, huh, it’s a real world insanity in a mini fake world. What is he closing? No really, really guys, Xenu really did send out fake tax notices to millions of thetans from a far, far away galaxy, totally tricked them to coming in to his fake office, drugged em up like nobody’s business, loaded these bad boys on some really cool airplanes, DC-8’s I’m pretty sure, flew to planet earth as we now know it, without refueling mind you, made buds with the “Guardians of the Galaxy” along the way, who helped acclimate them to the earth’s atmosphere, and then, and then, get this, sent these little boogers to a local cineplex to watch mind numbing movies in 3-D, and hold on, hold on don’t go anywhere. He first threw their meat bodies in a real live volcano, I think somewhere in Slobovia or maybe Tibet, yeah that’s it, Tibet. Anyway have not you seen the volcano commercial young man? I produced that bad boy! no really, really, don’t get up, where you going, don’t leave…………90% of the time closing, when monkeys fly out my ass!
Gavin needs to add this to his arsenal:
http://www.sharefaith.com/guide/church-fundraising-events/bingo-fundraiser.html
His resemblance to Miscavige is startling, at least in this photo. Could be his younger brother.
I noticed this too. Thought at first “What? DM is giving a seminar”??????????????????????
Probably just a valence shift to stay in good graces.
Greta
I hope they are all successful. Closing the cherch is what we all want. Sell the furniture, turn off the lights and shut the door. The people already left.
Yes. Preferably without any further bloodshed.
Imagine going into the real world and touting your featured guest as a “Hatting speaker and lecturer.” Ass-hatting is more like it.
Anyway, I’m glad that he’s both a speaker and a lecturer. Though have been perfect if he were an orator as well. Orators are my favorite.
I was thinking bloviator might be appropriate…
He’s a Mad Hatter.
Alec Baldwin’s character is who grant cardone dreams of being.
🙂
ha ha ha. Great one, White Star
Yep.
Grant Cardone would sell his mother.
No no, you’ve got him all wrong. Grant doesn’t care about money anymore. He said so in his Super Power success story. He has visited the SOURCE of GOD and operates now at an entirely new level. I am looking forward to hearing him discuss the importance of compassion, kindness and unconditional love. I’m sure a video will be uploaded to YouTube soon. Shouldn’t be long now…
And Howard (the coward ) Becker would sell ……………..
So you mean the criteria for choosing a mate is no longer the size of his/her bank account?
Will the wins never end!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I agree science doc, and is that Neville and Leslie potters kid?
No, he’s not.
Great movie. Great analogy. I don’t recall ever being in an org and NOT trying to be closed for something. A briefing, event, workshop, services, dono for this or that “campaign”, books, CDs, staff, OT committee …… I’m getting flashbacks here.
What a bare-faced admission: you learn how to ruthlessly close sales in order to “progress up the Bridge”…????…
All that CoS has been reduced to now is a hard sales training camp…one’s personal salvation and progress up the Bridge is tied to how well you can sell-sell-sell….
Hey IRS: care to re-evaluate CoS’s tax free status now?
I wish the IRS would re-evaluate Cof$ tax free status now. My kids are on staff at a class 5 org and they came home one day (back when they still talked to me) all excited because the entire staff was going to be trained on how to sell. I said, but your post has nothing to do with selling so why do you have to go to it? The reply was that everyone in the org was being taught to sell because it was everyone’s hat to sell books and lectures. So there you have it. Too bad it wasn’t a seminar on “how to audit” and they made everyone go to learn how to audit. Times have changed.
Which (off post activity) violates about every policy in OEC VOl 1 on holding the form of the Org and posts and hats. Amazing how all these policies are just swept off the desk when it comes to people at the “top” wanting their 10% commissions and which is also the bribe to staff at the bottom of the ladder to ignore the policies as the wages are so bad because – people went off policy and off-hat – you couldn’t make it up!
And the times they are a changin.’ You got that right, Cindy.
That’s so gross Cindy. You’re going to have to be a kind terminal for them when they realize what’s really going on. Too bad youth is wasted on the young.
A pyramid scheme with no new people. DM is going to be forced to take his stash and bail, or run from the courts.
+1 That is all that is left at this point.
Glengarry Glen Ross was written by David Mamet as a play and it won a Pulitzer Prize. The most memorable scene in the movie, Alec Baldwin’s role and the whole coffee is for closers speech, was not in the play. When the screenplay for the movie was being written, Alec asked Mamet to create a character for him, hence Always Be Closing. It’s a great movie and superbly cast. The analogy to scientology is spot on.
Mike, I didn’t know the church paid Les Daine to come out of retirement to do a sales training for their registrars. Folks, this is what your donations buy: paying big bucks to a guru to teach the staff to sell YOU on buildings and renos, on IAS donations that go straight to DM that go straight to paying lawyers to defend him in court. What kind of church pays someone to teach their priests how to sell???
Answer: the kind of church which purports to help and does nothing of the kind, the kind of church with a pious, ecclisiastical facade cloaking a ruthless, money-grubbing cult.
Ahhhh… there you see, this is a BUSINESS, not a church. Hmmmm…. You don’t send priests to “closing” school. Right on. This is a corporation that sells shit. This is not a spiritual organization that helps people.
Yeah, Les Dane sales 1960’s style! Men rule the house and the world and women are weak idiots. Big League Sales, such sexist crap being the bible of the CoS regges makes perfect sense.
” What kind of church pays someone to teach their priests how to sell?”
A FAKE ONE OF COURSE!
Another answer: The kind of (cough, cough,..Cult) church that uses and abuses it’s staff and then discards them. The kind of church who’s sole deity is money. The kind of church that has a psychotic, sociopath who beats his staff. The kind of church you only see in your darkest nightmares. The kind of church that does NOTHING for mankind or this planet. The kind of church that uses brainwashing like other churches use prayer. The kind of church that’s anti-American (our biggest domestic spying scandal was perpetrated by these fucks). The kind of church that prizes destruction over compassion. The kind of church where more members & staff are out than in. WAY MORE! The kind of church where violence is not only tolerated, but, encouraged. I.E., the absolute worst institution you can imagine.
I’m done…
What kind of church…?
The scam cult kind of church that like every other scam cult church preys on the insecurities of its followers and brainwashes them into believing they’ve being allowed to join a group of “SUPER” people. No scam cult can survive without selling tons of BS. Credit to Elron for recognizing early on he’d need well trained scam artists to peddle his brand of manure
They use the same tech to close people into becoming slaves for the cult. It is called regging for the SO.
You got that right, Coop! And they’ll be using their new closing powers to sell (read recruit) KIDS on joining the Nightmare, umm, ahhhhhh, errr, I mean the Sea Org.
‘Trained by Les Dane’.
BS LIE!!!
What a lie. Gavin was NOT trained by Les Daine. I took the last seminar he ever gave and that was in the 80’s. I doubt Gavin was even born at that time. Maybe the PR lie is that Gavin read Les Daine’s book and calls that “trained by Les Daine.” Les stopped doing seminars and training in the 80’s.
The church arranged for him to come out of retirement to train a bunch of regges.
Works 90% of the time….every time.
Paul, that literally makes no sense. I love lamp