Guide To Closing The Sale

Excerpts from Closing the Sale

 

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Tip From Your Executive Sales Coach

Instead of making the selling process about you and how much you might be able to gain from the sale (money, recognition, and so on), make it about the prospect, how much value you can deliver and what's in it for them. Shift the focus away from you and onto them.

Consumers today are savvier than ever and are aware of certain sales tactics
that would have them running in the other direction and towards your
competitors. The Internet dispatches immediate information at the click of a
button; enabling consumers to gather the information and data they need to
make an educated purchasing decision.

As such, the salesperson's role has evolved. Instead of taking the time to
educate the prospect about their products and services, salespeople are
finding that their prospects are already aware of the options available to
them. In response to this, the top salespeople are using their time with
prospects to first uncover what the prospect already knows about their
products. Then, the salesperson can help sift through the mounds of data the
prospect already collected about their industry, their company and their
products to make the best decision.

Consequently, the salesperson's role has evolved as they become more of a
consultant, guiding and assisting the prospect throughout their decision
making process, rather than limiting their role to an information provider
who simply brings them up to speed on the options they have available.

This subtle shift in the role and expectations of a sales professional is
changing the way salespeople are being trained, coached and developed. To
stand apart from their competition, salespeople are moving away from the old
model of becoming a strong closer and instead, are evolving into more of a
trusted advisor role and an expert in their field.


Closing the Sale or Closing a Person

Salespeople have tendency to look at their prospects and customers through
the wrong set of lenses. Look at the traditional definition of "closing."
Closing is an action. It's the final step in your selling process where you
ask for the prospects business and if necessary, convince a prospect to
purchase from you. In essence, to be persistent enough to turn their 'No'
into a 'Yes.'

Lets look at this from a different set of lenses. Closing is not an event.
Closing is not an action you take or a step in your process that happens in
some type of sequential order. Most important, closing is not something you
do to someone.

Do you notice something here? Salespeople are taking their eye off the goal
and objective of what professional selling truly is. What happened to
providing beneficial solutions or solving the challenges and problems
through the service or product you sell? When did it become more about
closing the customer and walking away with another order rather than
delivering measurable, rewarding results? In this model, the salesperson is
making the sales process more about them and what they can get (another
sale) rather than the value they can give. They have distilled the sales
process down to a numbers game, making the prospect more of a statistic,
rather than a person.

Now that we've torn apart the old definition and mindset of closing, lets
now build a new, improved one that inspires you to want to go out and sell.

Turning the Model Upside Down

If closing is not an action nor a step, nor a fancy canned pitch that we
memorize or a thunderous event of unprecedented proportion, then what is it?
Here's a new, healthier definition of closing that will upgrade how you
think about it and subsequently redefine the approach to use when converting
a prospect into a client.

Closing is the natural evolution of your selling process when your prospect
becomes your customer. Closing is the art of creating new possibilities and
solutions that may not have been presented before.

That's it. Short and very sweet. Notice I didn't say the natural conclusion
of your selling process. The reason why closing is more of a natural
evolution rather than a conclusion is this. While you may have converted a
prospect into a client, the sale is still far from over. We will discuss the
post-sale process in Chapter 13.

Evolution is by definition, natural and ongoing where the word "conclusion:"
implies "termination, finish, end" and of course, "close."

Closing is not about trying to control the sales process nor forcing a
prospect into saying "Yes" (which you can't effectively do, in case you
didn't realize that. More on this later.). Closing is more about recognizing
the right opportunity and waiting for the right time when the prospect is
ready to become a client.

Closing is an organic process rather than a planned one. Since the close can
happen at any point during a conversation with a prospect, it needs to be a
fluid and natural component that evolves from a well designed and executed
sales process.

Closing is less about "ending, shutting or terminating" and more about
"creating, collaborating, inquiring and coaching." It took me a while to
realize this. While I was always a successful salesperson, I was never a
great closer. Instead, what I was great at doing was opening up and creating
new selling opportunities that may never have existed before. The bottom
line was, I was a great opener not a closer. Chapter 9 breaks down, step by
step this new model of closing, I mean, opening for you so that you will
never have to close a sale in the traditional sense again. Instead, it will
happen naturally.

Finally, the sale or the close can be initiated by either the salesperson or
the prospect!

The greatest salespeople realize that in order to achieve incredible success
at selling, you need to become a strong opener rather than a strong closer.

Why You Don't Have To Close

If you eat healthy and took care of yourself, then you would never have the
need to go on a diet. A sound and practical philosophy, regardless of how
challenging it may be at times to consistently do so.

This same philosophy holds true when it comes to selling. If you honor a
well balanced sales process, which includes everything from first contact,
how you qualify a prospect as well as how effectively you deliver your
presentation, then you will not have to close.

Look what was being taught in the old school of selling. The old school
taught salespeople to close, close, close. Salespeople were told to spend
most of their time closing the deal. Trainers taught salespeople fancy
closes to handle and overcome objections. Over the years, a new school of
thought has evolved. The school of possibility. Imagine what would be
possible if all the objections you would typically hear at the "closing
table" are prevented and defused throughout the course of your presentation.


There exists a choice a salesperson has to make. The first choice is
spending minimal time on your presentation and spending the rest of your
time attempting to close the prospect. The second choice is investing most
of your time up front on a masterful presentation infused with well crafted
questions that defuse the most common objections you hear. This results in
the prospect essentially closing himself, with minimal effort. Which school
do you choose to be a student of?

Do you run into the same objection over and over again? If you see a
pattern, wouldn't it make sense to plan for or master a way to defuse these
objections by preventing them from surfacing before they actually arise?
Wouldn't it make your job easier to put these objections or concerns to rest
throughout your presentation? The end of your presentation should simply be
the natural evolution of the selling process; earning the business of a new
prospect.

If you can overcome an objection during the course of your presentation when
it is still in its fetal stage, as opposed to waiting until the end of your
presentation when it becomes a full grown obstacle, you will find yourself
spending less time on closing and more time posting new sales. Consider
this, if you were building a brick wall, what would be easier? Removing a
broken brick that has just been laid or waiting until the wall is fully
constructed? If you wait until the end, you would have to tear down the
entire wall just to get to the broken brick and then spend the rest of your
time reconstructing it. The same holds true with your selling process.
Remove the defective bricks or objections first in order to avoid having to
do so later on, when it just may be too late to do anything about it.


The Least You Need To Know

Closing is not something you do to a person, it is something that happens
naturally with them.
The greatest salespeople are not great closers. Rather, they are skilled
openers of new selling opportunities.
Become more of a consultant and advisor to your clients rather than simply
being a salesperson.
Deliver value to your prospects rather than delivering a presentation.
The more time you invest asking well crafted questions, the less time you
will spend overcoming objections.
While a well organized templated response can come in handy, learn to speak
your language of selling rather than someone else's.
The more you align your selling approach with your values and style of
communicating, the more authentic you will come across.