Stupid Closing Tricks

Last week I put up a post about “Baseball Farm Teams, the WSJ, and Sales Talent”. I got a comment that made a GREAT point worth its own post.

From David Belden, Director of BusDev of HubPages:
“Your quote about 1995 calling and wanting their sales techniques back is hysterical! I’ve definitely had that same though when people have tried the classic 1980’s “closing” techniques with me. My thought is that if you can help me understand and see why it’s the right fit for us to do business, you won’t even have to “close”. I’ll be excited to do the deal and get started. But if you need to use closing techniques like the proverbial car salesman, then you’re trying to close too early and haven’t gotten me to the point where I see the value and fit.“

AMEN!! David my brother, you nailed it.

The more you try to sell to companies and buyers who aren’t a great fit, or aren’t ready…the more you need to depend on a sales process and closing tricks. In other words, a great sales process won’t help much (or, I suppose you could say it becomes critical) if you’re spending time on companies with a low chance of buying.

This might sound like common sense, but it unfortunately isn’t very common for companies to drill into understanding why some prospects buy and others don’t, and then force themselves to not waste time on the latter group. Why?

First, it takes a lot of time and effort, and people are so busy running around selling to the wrong people that they don’t feel like they have time to figure out who the right people are. I’m not kidding, although I wish I was.

Second, there’s an inherent bias across the board (management, salespeople, marketers, investors…) to want to be able to market and sell to more people and bigger markets. The inclination is to broaden the profile of a target buyer, not sharpen it! One result of this, besides low close rates and longer sales cycles, is that press releases of a company end up filled with gobbledygook language and words that tell buyers nothing, like “solution”, “enterprise-size”, “competitive weapon”, and “infrastructure”.

But –
A) The better you can identify the companies and people most likely to buy, and…
B) Understand the few key problems that cause them to buy (a very small subset of their total problems), and…
C) Communicate how your product can solve those problems and impact their business…
Then the more customers will come to you and the less the sales team will have to depend on cheesy closing tricks.

Some of the more irritating tricks:
* The tit-for-tat/now you owe me close: “I’ve bent over backwards for you so far. Can I depend on you to…”
* The assumptive close: “Would you rather wrap this up and get started on this Friday, or next Wednesday?”
* The don’t-miss-out close: “I can get you a special discount, but only this month.”
* The just-ask close: “Have we won your business?”
* Or one of the worst…”other than that, are there any other reasons why you would not want to place your order today?’

These scream “I don’t care about you – I only want to get this sale closed”. They might be perfect for used car salesmen or telemarketers, but not for intelligent b2b buyers who’ve heard this time and time again. These kinds of questions, actually, the intention behind them, reduces buyer trust.

So what to do? Even more important that focusing on the sales process is nailing your ideal target market and buyer profile, and making sure you can explain IN ENGLISH (not jargon) how you can help. Just make it simple (which is harder than explaining it in a complex way…which is why everyone makes it too complicated).

And, for salespeople, instead of pushing to close (which is all about you)…make it all about them. Focus your intentions on really helping the prospect understand if there is a fit or not, and if there is, when the best time for them (not you) would be to begin. This kind of intention and attitude helps builds the trust that will increase your close rates. If you can really fight your craving to push to close, and focus on truly helping the prospect, everyone will win.

OK, a last idea. As I see the trend, it will be much more effective and productive not to “push to close”, but instead open yourself up to “receiving sales”. More on this another time.

Here’s a link to the post I originally referred to, where David posted the comment:
(http://salesmachine.blogspot.com/2007/10/baseball-farm-teams-wsj-and-sales.html)