Tips and Tricks to Closing a Sale
- Closing a sale can be one of the most difficult stages of a sales cycle.
- Be organized, Stay focused, Consult your customers, Don't get emotionally involved, Know when to retreat, and Don't overcomplicate the sales close.
Learning how to close a sale can be one of the most difficult practices as a sales professional. It can be emotional, it can be anti-climactic, or it can be the most exhilarating feeling during your sales cycle. All the time you spent prospecting, selling, and following up with customers is about to pay off. However, a successful closer can mean the difference between signing the dotted line and walking away without a deal. The following are tips and tricks to ensure you properly close sales.
How to Close a Sale
Be Organized
Organization can make or break your ability to close a sale. Many deals will take several hours, days, weeks, or months to close and you need to keep track of each client if you expect to properly close the sale with them. Prospecting software and specific programs meant to monitor, track, and evaluate your sales leads and clients are essential tools in managing your relationships. Customers do not like being forgotten, even if it is on a moot or trivial point. Your ability to manage multiple clients at differing stages of the sales cycle will be critical to your success. If you cannot afford software or do not have the time to maintain this kind of software, a simple whiteboard or binder will accomplish the same thing.
Stay Focused
Focus on the customer, the sale, and how you’re going to finish the sale as quickly as you can. This is a fine balancing act for most salespeople, as you do not want to pressure your customers into making a decision before they are ready. You may also get trapped discussing elements of your product that you have already covered, or you may lose sight of the fact that your difficult customer may still be a successful sale. Stay focused, stick to your guns, and wrap up the sale as quickly as you can without balancing your customers interests with your own.
Consult Your Customers
Your customers are the key to your success. They are the ones you must satisfy, and they are the ones you must negotiate with in order to close a sale. Using basic selling skills, you should know that simple discussion with your customers can work wonders for continued selling success. Somewhere during the sales process, consult your customers on what they expect from you as a salesperson, and what they expect to achieve through the purchase of your products. Being honest with them will allow them to feel comfortable in being honest with you. You will also want to consult your companies after you have completed the sale in order to maintain rapport and encourage future sales. You will find it much easier to close a sale with repeat customers or referred customers, than you will with new leads. Further, feel free to ask your clients for testimonials on your salesmanship or ability to satisfy their needs. Your ability to close the sale may hinge on your reputability.
Do Not Get Emotionally Involved
Check your ego, emotions, and personal interests at the door. Ensure you do not bring them into the closing process. You will take unsuccessful deals harshly, and that will adversely affect your confidence and motivation. Further, you need to appear neutral to your customers so they do not feel like they are being sold a bag of lies.
Know When to Retreat
Sometimes the best prospects will turn into flops. As a salesman, you need to recognize when your customers are just not interested in completing the sale. Experienced salespeople will suggest body language is the biggest tell of the way in which your customer plans to proceed. If they are fidgety or not focussing entirely on you and the product, you may want to be cautious with spending too much time trying to sell them. The easiest tell for couples, is to have one of them defer decision to their partner. If one of your customers defers decision, you can almost guarantee they are not interested in closing the deal with you. Recognize this and retreat accordingly. You cannot afford to waste time trying to sell products to someone with no interest in purchasing.
Don’t Overcomplicate The Close
Sales professionals will often spend the most time in the closing stage of a sale. They have pounds of paper work to fill out, tons of declaration pages, and a lot of jargon for their customers to read and acknowledge. Customers are not interested in spending precious time and money on filling out and completing extensive sales forms. Try and efficiently consolidate forms and policies into one or two documents at most. Give your customers the ability for a ‘quick close’, whereby you will prepare all the documents and articulate it to them, and they will simply sign the documents. Your customers will appreciate this effort, and you will not have to worry about losing a sale due to overcomplicating the closing process.
If you follow these simple tips and tricks on closing sales, you should be well on your way to managing your sales success!