The Truth about Closing

You've probably been taught over the years to think of closing as a big event, the key event on which all selling is focused. Steve Marx shows you why it's smarter to think of closing as a process.

Salespeople often work themselves into a frenzy about The Close. The run-up to The Presentation involves revision after revision and rehearsal after rehearsal. The Day is preceded by sleepless nights and The Hour by sweaty palms. The bigger the price tag, the sweatier the palms and the more preemptive is the entire process of preparation. And sales managers who ask about that upcoming presentation every day for a week serve only to amplify the anxiety.

Okay, so maybe I oversold it. But you know there is a lot riding on the submission of a big proposal, and you take it darn seriously. It takes a lot of your time and attention-your bandwidth, to use the latest jargon-and you know that a big-enough mistake could deep-six the whole thing. Where might the mistake be? The price? The delivery schedule? The installation process? The payment terms? The third-party supplier? The measurement or monitoring? Who knows?

You should know. You can know.

The truth about closing is that it never happens all at once. Your effort to make it happen all at once-to focus all the decisions into one document and one day-is like trying to push an elephant through the eye of a needle. You're defying nature, asking for the impossible. It's why the prospect almost invariably says… all together now (because all of you know what the prospect almost invariably says)… "I need some time to think about it."

The prospect knows what you too should know. You're not asking for A Decision; you're asking for A Set of Decisions.

Unless all you're selling is a simple commodity, for the prospect to give an overall Yes to what you're proposing, he has to be able to say yes to each element, each aspect of it. He has to think through all the angles, not just the pieces and parts you presented so clearly and persuasively in your formal proposal, but a lot of other issues and considerations known only to him. These little decisions are interdependent and many of them must happen in sequence in order for you to get the Yes you're seeking. So, of course, he needs "some time to think about it."

If you looked at closing as a process rather than an event, you'd have fewer sleepless nights and sweaty palms, and your prospect would need a lot less time to say Yes. The truth about closing is that it never happens all at once. The notion that it does is a myth that probably developed because we assemble all the pieces and parts into a single document called a proposal. But the world's best salespeople know that the proposal document should not be a collection of decisions to be made, but rather a summary of decisions already made!

The world's best salespeople have relocated the proposal from the middle of the sales process to the end. Rather than gather up all the decisions to be made at once-as if that were even possible!-sales pros work shoulder to shoulder with their prospect in building the plan. They recognize that the big Yes they're seeking is really a string of incremental yeses. (Just think back to the last time you bought a car… was it one decision or a string of decisions, starting with "I guess I really need to replace this thing.")

The first decision your prospect must make, of course, is the decision about you and the value you might have for him. Plenty of salespeople recognize this as a separate decision, but they fail to see all the other little decisions along the way to the big Yes. If you're selling a tailored solution of any kind, a product or service that involves customization or configuration or application or installation, the details are numerous. If your proposal gets any detail wrong, it could upset your applecart. If you get several details wrong, you won't even get a call back from that prospect.

All those details represent risk, and opportunity. Your opportunity-the one that's missed by most but perfected by the pros-is to work interactively with your prospect in developing the proposal. Don't develop it by yourself, or using only your staff. Work together with your prospect and his staff. Let each aspect of that configuration or customization begin life as a half-baked idea or a trial balloon, and let it be modified, tweaked, honed, or if necessary rejected.

Take the mystery and the risk out of the process-for your client and yourself. Turn The Close from a looming giant mountain into a series of no-sweat molehills. The pros sell interactively, and often get their Yes before ordinary salespeople get their Maybe. They spend less time working on the prospect-and more time working with the prospect. Selling interactively often happens fast, with frequent conversations and collaborations, some in-person, some by phone, some through email. By the time it's all on paper, the prospect has already vetted, problem-solved, and approved everything.

Your prospect really does "need time to think about it." Your job is not to take that time away from them, but simply not to deliver the proposal until they've put the time in and built the proposal with you.

Steve Marx has been selling, helping salespeople, and consulting on the development of sales organizations for nearly his entire career. In 1983, he founded The Center for Sales Strategy, a consulting and training firm specializing in the needs of media, advertising, and marketing sales organizations. He is the author of the new book "Close Like the Pros-Replace Worn-Out Tactics with the Powerful Strategy of Interactive Selling." Download Chapter One of the book free of charge at Steve's site, http://www.interactiveselling.com/. or email him at SteveMarx@interactiveselling.com.