When Do I Close A Sale?
by Mark Hunter
You feel good about the customer you’re talking to. You feel like they really want what you have to offer. Based on your feelings, you quickly proceed to lay out an offer for your customer, but suddenly, the customer starts throwing out objections. You go from feeling excited about making your quarterly quota to feeling hopeless.
Learn more about when to close a sale in my video:
If you talk to 10 people about this issue, you’d probably get 10 different theories about how to solve it. The solution does not have to be complex. The answer boils down to simply answering this one question: do you know what challenge / issue / opportunity the customer is trying to solve? Until you have the answer to that question, you will not be able to close the sale. Let’s not kid ourselves – customers don’t want to buy anything. What customers truly want is to satisfy a need, and that need might be obvious or it might be tangled up in something much bigger.
Often, the customers does not even know the real reason they are looking to buy and that can make answering this question so tricky. The customer may have thought something initially and even told you; however, between then and the time you close, their need changed. A key reason why it changes is because of your questions to the customer and the ensuing thinking they did. Don’t view this as an issue to be avoided. It is a benefit to be exploited.
You owe it to the customer to probe and ask about why they’re looking to buy. Just because the customer wants to know the price does not mean you’re obligated to give them a price. If you quote a price before you know their need, you’re doing the customer a disservice.
When you close early, you risk of closing the sale based on a customer’s false belief. Your goal is to close the deal on the full value of what you can deliver. When you close the sale on the full value, you raise your worth in the eyes of the customer.
When it does become time to close the sale, you owe it to the customer to repeat to them their need / issue / opportunity that you’re going to solve by them buying from you. This simple approach to closing helps the customer stay on track. It helps point out why they’re buying and gives you an anchor point should an objection arise. If the customer does raise an issue, you are set up to ask a follow-up question that ties their objection to their need to buy.
Not long ago, I was getting ready to close with one of my customer’s and they objected telling me the price was too high. Immediately, I came back and asked the customer a question about the issue they needed to solve. When I got the customer thinking about their problem again, the price suddenly became a non-issue and they bought. I closed the sale.
So, the rule is simple: never attempt to close a sale until you fully understand the customer’s need and reason for buying. The more you are able maximize the size of the customer’s opportunity / issue / challenge, the more you are able to maximize the price.
If you’ve missed the other blogs in this series, be sure to go back and read them. You won’t want to miss out on this valuable content. For your convenience, I have included all of the links below.
Blog Post and Video: Week 1: How Can I Tell If I Have Qualified Prospects or Just Bad Leads?
Blog Post and Video: Week 2: Confidential Information
Blog Post and Video: Week 3: Knowing the Customer’s Timeline to Buy
Blog Post and Video: Week 4: Does Your Call to Action Engage the Prospect?
Blog Post and Video: Week 5: Fake Prospects, Fake Buyers, Fake News
Copyright 2019, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Result