Don’t Do This When Selling

I recently got into a heated online debate with a well-known sales trainer who teaches his minions to

“Focus all of your attention on the close. That’s where all of your effort will be spent in most sales situations. And close hard, baby!”

I’m thinking “Oh, boy. Here comes fodder for a blog, a free three-part video series and maybe even an entire sales training course.”

More details on that in a minute. First…

I wish I could say this is rare, unique, uncommon, out of the ordinary, but alas, I would be fibbing.

If you ever answer your phone, go car shopping, or pass a Girl Scout schlepping her wares outside the grocery store, you know this HARD CLOSE happens all the time. But we can’t solve the world’s problems, and besides, before we remove the splinter from our brother’s eye, we need to remove the big 2×4 in our own, right?

Admit it, you’ve put the screws to a prospect before. I know you have. I have, too. We all have. At least we were doing what we thought salespeople were supposed to do, right? (If you have more than one sales person at your office, you know many of them stopped selling the moment they got hired. “Hey, Boss, I’ve been studying LinkedIn all month. If you let me buy the Premium account and let me mail brochures to everyone in 18 states, I think I can maybe set an appointment with one of their assistants in the next 3-6 months. Whew. That was exhausting work. I think I’ll take my comp time now and go home for the rest of the week.”)

Ahhhhh!

What’s wrong with closing hard and closing all the time?

A few things:

First, closing hard tells me you are over-charging for what you are offering or you have not clearly presented the value of doing business with you.

Second, closing hard means you opened poorly. (You don’t have to close a heart attack victim on the benefits of having surgery and following a healthier diet when he returns home.)

Third, it creates doubt and buyer’s remorse in many of those that do buy via the hard close. We’ve all been on the giving and receiving end of a hard close. When we got home after buying the item we either rationalized the purchase––“Yeah. I know I shouldn’t have done it but that salesperson was so persistent. And besides. He did throw in free Air Supply tickets with my purchase.”––or we were ashamed that we caved and we put the item––still shrink-wrapped––in the back of the closet, never to be mentioned or discussed again.

And those are the GOOD options if we’re the hard closer. Many of those clients will turn around and ask for a refund hours or days later. (Ever had a “clawback” on a commission check you already cashed? Not fun. Not fun at all.)

Yes, we want our prospects to buy. Yes, sometimes they need a little nudge. Yes, some of our prospects like the song and dance and courtship of the sales process and want you to ask for the order.

But there is a right way and a wrong way—an old-school, used-car salesman, go-home-and-both-shower-the-sale-off way and a modern, professional way––to leverage both the science and the art of the close.

Salespeople must prospect, but the goal of prospecting is to DISQUALIFY the people you encounter. To sort and sift, not “close and dispose.”

Some call this semantics or splitting hairs, but I assure you, it is not.

Today, only 2-5% of the entire population of your niche has the desire and the ability to buy what you are selling this very moment. That applies to everything from Girl Scout Cookies to BMWs to yachts. (Maybe only .2 to .5% for the yachts.)

(But 67% of them will buy in the next 12 months and 80% will buy in the next two years, which means you need to be following up to really grow your sales, but that’s the subject of another post and webinar.)

So trying to close people that aren’t ready is like forcing sumo wrestlers to pole vault. Sure, one of the little ones may make it over but the rest will just be disasters…and they’ll ask you to pay for the snapped poles and cracked limbs while their family members post your disasters online.

“When you open well, more products will you sell” (says The Yoda Whisperer.) When you focus all of your energy on the close, it creates a tremendous amount of pressure on you and the prospect.

You’re wondering “how long will this take” and “is this just a waste of time” and the prospect is wondering “how long will this take” and “is this just a waste of time?” (Yes. You’re both thinking the same thing.)

The longer you spend with a prospect that is resisting you, the more tempted you become to either discount because you want to get SOMETHING out of this encounter that has taken so much of your time and energy, and the prospect is going to either demand more concessions because you’ve taken up so much of her time OR she will go ahead and close to get it over with, then hit you with buyer’s remorse, extra demands, or both, because she feels as though you pressured her into buying and once the adrenaline rush has subsided she is uncomfortable for letting you manipulate the deal like you did.

You can be an excellent sales person by being excellent in sales.

And being excellent in sales does not require you being a pushy jerk. (Quite the opposite in fact.)

There are four main tenants to being excellent in sales as taught to me in 2006 by my sales training mentor, Steve Clark:

1. Selling is a calling.

2. Serving is its purpose.

3. Questioning is the process.

4. A sale may be the solution.

Do you feel that being in sales is in your bones?

Do you strive to improve in order to not just make more money but to truly help others with your product or service?

Do you realize that Yap Yap Yapping is NOT the way to conduct yourself on a sales call?

Are you okay with not making a sale when you realize it was not in the best interest of the customer to order from you at that particular point in time?

Then you’ll benefit from this free 3-part video series on sales excellence.

Starting today I’m releasing the first video to help you separate yourself from the amateur selling pack.

You can watch it here for free now. (No opt-in required.)

More specifically you’ll see:

• How to set the proper expectation going into a sales call.

• How to know if selling really is a calling for you.

• Where “structure” and “content” come in to play during a sales call.

And finally, use these proven selling principles with ease, on demand, naturally and as often as you want to sell more, faster, at higher margin, with less stress and more fun.

(Oh, yeah,…these concepts work in any industry, in any part of the world because I’ve used them since 2006 to sell 7-figures worth of tech stuff to Google, $635,000 sales & CRM training gigs to Dell, and hundreds of individual sales to realtors, chiropractors, laser eye surgeons, attorneys, SEO experts, self-defense instructors, insurance agents, financial advisors and dozens of other industries as well.)

This first video will only be up for free for a couple of days so check it out right now and I’ll see you there.

Talk soon, Wes