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4) Close (step four of the sales cycle)
Contrary to what you may have heard before, you SHOULD NOT be waiting until the close to find out whether or not you’re about to get a customer. As you should already know by now, you should have a great idea during and after the presentation part of the demo whether or not your prospect’s going to buy.
It really is disheartening when you hear about people being ‘hard closers.’ This has never been the philosophy of our company. You could call us ‘persistent qualifiers’ or ‘persistent de-procrastinators,’ but I doubt anyone could ever accuse us of being hard closers!
The close is, however, a very necessary part of the sale. Sales people who are timid or fear actually going into the close are missing out on a huge component of the sale. I had one of my mentors one time put it like this: “Imagine NOT closing the deal. Instead, you just sit there in front of your prospect trying to figure out what to do next. To me, this is REAL pressure. In fact, your prospect knows what’s going on, and without a smooth, painless close, you can usually cut the air with a butter knife.”
So make sure you follow a close. In our company, we give much flexibility with almost all parts of the sales, the close is one part that we encourage people to follow WORD FOR WORD. It is very inspiring when you know it’s time to close the deal and you can fall right back on the correct words to use, the right way, at the right time. Kind of like a comedian using the same routine successfully night after night.
Failure to HAVE a close or worse- failure to even try to close, is like a dentist needing to pull your tooth, tying the string around it, pulling on it gently, but just not quite going the whole way to relieve you of your pain!
Components of the Close
With our sales cycle, there are two main components of the close. First, the price build-up, and second the actual closing steps leading to signing the agreement.
Price Build-up
If you’re currently failing to do a price build-up, you’re really missing out on one of the biggest tools you could use. You see, everybody has all these relativity points floating around in their mind. To prove this at our sales conferences, I’ll often go around the room and ask each person if a certain desk in the room is ‘big or small.’ Invariable, I always get mixed answers based on each person’s relativity point about what represents a ‘big or small’ desk. I can then get almost everyone on the same relativity point by painting some pictures of what I consider a big desk. We have this HUGE conference table in one of our offices. This sucker is like 15 feet long- you can literally put like 20 chairs around it. Now once I’ve described this monstrosity of a table, I ask the question again whether the same certain desk is big or small. Now this time, everyone says, “small.”
The same thing applies to the price of your product or services. I don’t care what the price is, if you don’t set the relativity points on your own, you’re running a huge risk that the decision maker is going to think whatever amount you name is a ‘big’ amount of money.
The way you establish the correct price build-up is by ‘building-up’ your price to be able to ‘deflate’ the price down to whatever price your product is. I can best explain this with an example. Say your product costs $45,000. You build you price up by throwing out MUCH larger numbers.
“Joe, you know, most people were wondering how much one of these would set them back. Well, I was talking to Tina over at ABC corp, and she told me they just spent $150,000 on a new main frame! Can you imagine $150,000 for one piece of equipment? Now Chris, over at ESC, told me a new press they just bought was almost $120,000! And Tina and Chris were willing to make the investment for all the advantages they could get. Well, the best part about this XYZ is, it’s not $150,000, $120,000, or even $100,000! The whole thing with installation is only $45,000! ISN’T THAT GREAT!
Now if you followed this, you just witnessed me saying, ‘is only $45,000!” I don’t know about you, but there’s no such thing as an ‘is only $45,000.’ But the funny think is it doesn’t matter how much your product is whether a $200,000 home or a $950 ad in a newspaper. If you don’t establish a price build-up, eve a DOLLAR can sound like to much. Read the next example:
We’ve had a lot of fun trying to see who could do the biggest price build-up. I mean totally CRAZEY build-ups. One example is when we were getting $25 donations from businesses to buy small ads in a school newspaper. Now believe it or not, we caught ourselves failing to do price-build ups even for a stupid $25 ad! So upon realizing this, we decided to insert a build-up, and for fun, we wanted to make it a GOLIATH build-up to ensure we always closed the deal. Our price build-up ended being something like, “You know those ads attorneys run on the back of the phone books? I guess those things are like $100,000 a year! And even direct mailers usually cost around a grand to $1500. The best thing about this ad is it’s not $100,000, $50,000 or even $1500. Nope, instead, you get this HUGE ad in the school newspaper for a full 3 months for a mere $25 bucks. Can you believe it? You want to pay in quarters, nickels, or dimes?”
Closing Steps
All the ‘closing steps’ represent are a series of trial closes or temperature questions leading to the BIG QUESTION: YES OR NO (of course we’d never ask it like this)
Immediately after the price-build up, it’s time to ‘trigger’ the closing steps. Our company uses a 7 step close which results in the client actually signing the contract. It’s completely smooth, contains NO PRESSURE, and is built to make an entirely enjoyable transition to the order process. Without using a pre-planned close, you will usually hit a few bumps, and at this fragile time of the sale, YOU CAN TOTALLY BLOW THE SALE by putting any type of pressure on your client!
We start our close (example below) by bringing the order form into view. In fact, as mentioned in another part of our training courses, we often use the order form as a visual so we avoid ‘shocking’ the prospect when ‘going for it!’
Here’s our close:
Mr. Jones, first of all, we’re reserving spots in our schedule. By making sure our schedule’s set right, we can make sure we do a great job for everyone. Can you see why my schedule books so far in advance? (temp question)
The first thing we do is a front design. That way we have plenty of time to make any art changes if needed. Who would be the one to handle the front design? (temp question)
Would I mail a copy of the front design or email it? (temp question)
What’s the address where I should send the design? (temp question, immediately look down at the order form)
And let me go ahead and get your phone number and zip (temp question, keep
going)
O.K. let me make sure I got this right (slip around to his or her side of table, low and slow, and repeat info back to d.m.)
O.K., if this looks o.k., I just need your ‘o.k.’ here (put pen at top of contract, tilt slightly, and ‘roll the pen’ to the prospect as you hand him the contract.) This ‘pen roll’ has taken on legendary status in our company! But it’s a completely harmless way to get the contract and pen in your prospects hands with natural momentum!
They sign or they don’t (normally they will if you elicited the correct responses along the way, and as I mentioned before, we like to close when we have a fairly high confidence level that it’s a done deal.) BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY, ALWAYS CLOSE!
Now that we have their signature, we can complete the rest of the logistics of the sale (delivery date, etc), and most importantly, we can THEN go on to payment arrangements.
If you attempt to close your client but run into a last minute objection, NEVER FEAR, just use the feel, felt, found system to answer the objection, and go right back into the close. I mean, you can totally use the same close 3 or 4 times in a row. They never catch-on that you’re using the same close. Just say, “Like I said Mr. Jones, I’m just reserving spots in my schedule, by making sure my schedules
right….”
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