As sales people we hear it all the time – it’s all about driving to The Close. When are you going to close that deal? What do you need to do wrap this up?
The majority of sales training for the last several decades has been focused helping the sales person close the deal. There are techniques to Trial Close, to Pre-Close, to Soft Close, and even to Reverse Close. That one is where you actually tell the client that you can certainly see that they are not yet ready to take advantage of this great offer, so let’s just forget it for now – a bit of negative psychology that sadly worked. And sadly many complex B2B sales people in this world are still doggedly working on their Close.
For them, for all of us, I have just two words – STOP CLOSING!
Wait, what?
Yeah, I just said that. Stop closing. You’re probably thinking, what do you mean, I should stop asking for the order? Nope, I did not say that. I’ll explain a bit later.
It’s time to make a mindset shift. Then we will shift our methodology. Shifting our thinking about The Close is critical. In the past The Close was seen as the grand finale. We all fell prey to that central theme. And while once The Close was the end, now it’s just another point on the way to this question: What’s next?
In past years, (for me decades), we have all been a part of or led sales training where a group of trainees is give a sales role playing situation to analyze, create a client pitch deck and then present a story to a panel of sales judges. The winners of the competition get the sales geek of the year award. Been there and done that a bunch!
As a trainer and a judge, I was always amazed by the groups of professional sales people that would do all that work and make brilliant customer pitches, and then neglect to ask for the order.
My experience has been that about half of the teams would not ask for the order. In my early years I saw this as a fatal flaw of the trainees. Teams that did not ask for the order were booted out fast. However, a role-playing simulation like this has a fundamental limitation: it cannot capture the scope of client engagement that needs to happen in the sales process. We were busy scripting a great pitch that ended with handing the client a pen to have them sign on the dotted line. The Close was also The End.
This is the real problem: we have assumed that the most important step in the selling process is the close. We see it as the end point of our client engagement –we “drive to the close” – when really, asking for the order is not the end at all.
Even in highly transactional selling like the Fuller Brush man or selling Girl Scout cookies door-to-door, the seeming end point of closing is really just the NEXT step in the never ending client engagement process. Right on the heels of getting the order, comes the Verification process where our aim is to clearly get a shared understanding of the value that has been created in the clients eyes by the work that you have done. From the verification process you escalate the discussion to other needs that that were identified through the journey in the first transaction. And the cycle of client engagement starts again.
There are 5 basic sections to the development and delivery of insight to a client and the drive to a closure is one of them. You’ve gotta ask for the order – it’s just not the end that it seems it would be. It is actually the springboard to the NEXT piece of business with the client. The door is never CLOSED!
