People are always asking,
"Okay. So how do I close the sale?
What do I have to do to close more sales?
I'm not closing enough sales and I need to close more."
Well, this is really the perennial question
of really any sales advice, right?
How do we close more sales?
There's a lot going on in that question,
but there are some absolute critical keys
to closing more deals.
So in this video, I'm going to show you nine critical keys
on how to close the sale.
Check it out.
Number One- Stop focusing on the close.
This is really one of the absolute biggest aha moments
that I've ever had in sales.
Probably like many of us, when I first began selling,
I was really focused on, "Okay, what am I going to do
in order to actually close the deal?
What do I say? Do I slide the contract across the desk?
Do I ask for the sale?"
And the reality is, is that what you're actually doing
at the close is really unimportant.
What matters is, what are you doing leading up to the close?
One of my mentors used to always say, start strong,
finish strong.
If you're starting off the sales interaction strong,
you're going to provide lots of value.
You're going to demonstrate lots of value.
You're going to understand their challenges
better than anyone else.
And as a result, they're going to naturally think,
"Okay, you know what?
This is someone that I want to buy from."
And so, regardless of what you're doing
at the end in the close, it doesn't really matter.
What matters that you did all of those key pieces up front
to make sure that, you know what?
This is someone that the prospect is interested
in buying from, from the beginning.
Number Two- No sales breath.
Now you're thinking, "Sales breath. What is that?"
Have you ever been in a buying situation
where you just got the sense
that this salesperson absolutely needed to close the deal?
Like in order to even just pay rent
or to pay their next car payment?
Now, many of us have been in that situation.
I've been in that situation and maybe some of us
are actually in that situation right now.
But even if you need to close a deal
in order to pay rent or to put food on the table,
you cannot let your prospect feel that.
You cannot let them know that.
That's the ultimate sales breath.
It shows desperation. It's like in dating.
If you're on a date with someone
and you just get the sense that they're so into you already,
you're like a little bit like, "Eh, I think I'm good."
That's exactly what our prospects feel like
when they feel that we absolutely need to close the sale.
Even if you have to close the sale,
you have to mentally think to yourself,
"I am financially independent and I don't need this sale."
That's the mindset that we've got to be thinking about
in order to demonstrate strength, as opposed to weakness.
Number Three- Disqualify.
Disqualification is one of my biggest passions in sales.
Most salespeople have been taught that we need to persuade,
and we need to convince prospects to do business with us.
But the reality is,
is that you don't have to convince anyone to do anything.
What you need to do is determine
if the person in front of you
is in fact a fit for what you offer.
That's all that we really need to focus on.
So we're going to be taking them through a process
of asking them questions, to just determine,
"Is there a real fit?"
And what happens is that in that process,
the prospects start to actually see inherent value
in what we're doing.
The reality is is that if someone needs to be persuaded,
they're going to have read your marketing material.
They're going to have read other stuff.
They're going to kind of know if this is something
that makes sense.
So what our job really, as sales people is,
is to qualify or in this case,
disqualify people that are not a fit.
And then only focus our time on people
that are truly qualified.
Number Four- Drop the pitch.
Now, I still hear the word pitch all the time
in sales training, and sales techniques,
and from sales managers and from CEOs of companies,
they say, "My people need to have a better pitch."
And my response is always the same,
"No, they don't."
You do not need a better pitch.
Your job is not to be a dancing monkey
who just tap dances and gives some magical pitch
like we see in the movies or on Mad Men
or on all those TV shows where there's just like
this amazingly persuasive pitch.
That basically assumes
that the person you're selling to is dumb.
And the people that you're selling to
probably aren't stupid.
In fact, they don't need the sales pitch at all.
What they need is to have a conversation
to determine if there's fit.
That's where disqualification comes in.
No pitch. Drop it.
It's super old school.
And if anything, it's hurting your sale, not helping.
Number Five- Answer questions with questions.
Now, there's a lot that goes into this concept,
but the reality is that your prospects
are going to be asking you questions.
And again, think of the traditional old-school sales person.
Most old school sales people when they get a question,
they go right into tap dance mode and they say,
"Oh, well, that's a great question.
And let me tell you why we can do this.
Or why we're the best, or how we're so much better
than everyone else."
But what a modern professional salesperson actually does
is wants to understand why the prospect
is asking that question in the first place.
This is not about evasion.
This is simply about determining
what is most important to the prospect.
So instead of rushing to answer
every single one of your prospect's questions,
like we're just some expert, instead,
we want to slow it down and we want to find out
why that's important to them in the first place.
So if a prospect says something like, "Well,
can you guys offer more service with this?"
Most salespeople jump into, "Oh, of course.
We can offer even better service,
and we can do this and that,"
but think to yourself for a second.
Why did the prospect ask that question in the first place?
So what a professional salesperson might say
to the question of, "Can you offer more service?"
They might say something like, "Oh,
that's a really good question.
Help me understand what prompted you to ask that
in the first place."
And now the prospect is going to tell us
why they care about more service.
Maybe the last time they went through this process,
the service was disastrous or there wasn't enough service,
or they're actually really worried
that they're not going to understand how to do X, Y, Z.
Getting to that is so much more important
than answering the question about service.
Because most of the time it's like an iceberg.
And most salespeople are just dancing around
the top of the iceberg.
But what's really important is what's underneath.
Number Six- Sell to your IPP.
Now you're probably wondering, "Well,
what does IPP stand for?"
IPP means your ideal prospect profile.
So this idea of only selling to your IPP
means that there are so many people out there
that probably could find use for your product or service.
But there are only a smaller group of people
who are truly your ideal prospect.
People that actually have the budget,
they have the money, they have the need,
they have the challenges that you solve,
and they're going to become good clients.
That's your IPP.
So you want to really tightly define who is your ideal,
not who is anyone that could buy what you sell,
but instead who ideally,
if you could get in front of this person,
you would be psyched to have a conversation with.
That is your IPP.
And also clarifying, who do you not want to sell to?
When you are selling purely to your IPP,
you are going to be closing so many more sales.
Because let's face it,
even if you put the greatest salesperson
in front of someone who's not a good fit, it doesn't happen.
Or maybe it does occasionally,
but that's still a waste of time.
You'd rather be strong in your process,
but also be in front of the absolute ideal prospects.
That's the key to closing a lot more sales,
not just because your process is right,
but because you're in front of those better people.
Number Seven- NSO.
NSO stands for next step obsessed.
We must be next step obsessed.
One of the things that I hear a lot these days is,
"My sales cycle's really long. It's just going on and on.
And prospects are, you know, taking weeks, months,
years to close."
I think to myself, "Well,
how strong are you in establishing next steps
every time you're talking to a prospect?"
And the reality is that most sales people
are when they're in front of a prospect,
they immediately put themselves in this position
to then follow up on the prospect later on.
And our rule of thumb is you should always schedule
your next step with a prospect
when you're in front of the prospect right then and there.
So if you're on the phone with a prospect,
or you're on a Zoom, or you're face to face,
you want to be scheduling that next step in that meeting.
So that way there's never follow up
and you're just always obsessed about next steps.
And by the way, if a prospect is unwilling
to schedule a next step with you,
it's probably a good sign,
a good indicator that we're in trouble.
So by scheduling that next step, we now are, first of all,
getting a barometer of where the prospect is actually at,
and we're holding the sale together.
This is what avoids all that slippage
and all that leaky bucket kind of selling that we see
where prospects are just kind of
slipping through the cracks.
Number Eight- Solve.
Now, traditionally, most salespeople think, "Okay,
I need to pitch, or I need to present to my prospects."
We don't use either word.
What we really focus on is solving.
We want to demonstrate simply
that we can solve our prospects challenges.
So the first step that we talked about is disqualifying.
So if you're disqualifying prospects
or understanding what's going on,
you're learning about their challenges,
you're finding out what's going on, what they really need,
and then the next phase is that we're going to solve.
We need to demonstrate that we can solve the challenges
that they have mentioned.
Almost think of it like a canyon.
And in the middle of the canyon is just no man's land.
And we want to avoid that.
But your prospect is on one side of the canyon
and they want to get to the other side of the canyon.
So they need a bridge in order to get
from one point to the other.
And your offering is that bridge in many ways,
because they can't get there on their own, most likely.
And so they're going to need that bridge,
or they want a better path, at least to getting there.
We've got to demonstrate that we are the bridge
from one side to the other.
Number Nine- SW cubed N.
SW cubed N stands for: "Some will,
some won't, so what, next".
One of the biggest hurdles, mentally,
that I see a lot of salespeople struggle with
when it comes to closing deals,
is that they get really hard on themselves
when they don't close a deal.
And so that way, when they beat themselves up
after they don't close a deal,
then they go into the next deal
and they're taking that baggage with them.
Every time a sale doesn't happen,
we just have to take a deep breath and say, "Okay,
some will, some won't, so what, next."
Now I'm not saying that we shouldn't learn
from every interaction, you absolutely should learn
from the last interaction.
Any sale you don't close,
we want to learn, if there's a way to get feedback, great.
But at the end of the day, if it's over, it's over.
And that's okay.
Just mentally move on,
forgive yourself, learn from it,
take the best lessons into the next,
but we don't want to take that baggage, that frustration,
that toughness on ourselves into that next situation,
because that's how we get that sales breath
in the first place.
So at the end of the day, you're going to close some deals
and you're not going to close others.
Some will, some won't, so what, next.
So there are nine critical keys on how to close the sale.