When it comes time to confirm, you will certainly encounter customers who say no, and mean no. Don't despair. An excellent alternative plan is to have your customers place a small order with you. Tell them you are not expecting them to make a wholesale change in suppliers, but ask them to place a small order to test you out. The proof is in the pudding. It's okay to be #2, just ask the people at AVIS Rent-a-Car. If you are successful at getting and delivering a few small orders, it won't be long before you build up to getting the lion's share of their business. Chances are your unsuspecting competitor won't know what happened until it's too late. I have personally converted several accounts from a no to a know to a yes by using this strategy. Customers can be creatures of habit and usually go with what's been tested and proven. Your #2 strategy provides an opportunity to showcase your stuff while building confidence and trust in you. Remember, the fifth pillar of success is Patient yet Persistent (Chapter 2). Quiet persistence, coupled with patience, ultimately pay off handsomely with the reward of becoming their #1 supplier.
Always act like a professional. Don't take the customer's rejection personally. Recognize it as a business decision based on circumstances you may be unaware of. Be grateful for the opportunity to meet and discuss the possibility of doing business. The professional handling of a no sale situation actually helps build a sound relationship by developing a spirit of professionalism and persistence. The customer will be much more receptive to a #2 strategy if you handle the no sale situation professionally. Remember, if you can't make a sale, make a friend.
One of the greatest pleasures of selling is the adrenaline rush and elation when the customer says, "Yes, let's do business." This is the moment of yes. There have been many private dances in customer's parking lots, clenched fists pumping through the air accompanied by triumphant shouts of, "Yesss!" and smiles that make dentists proud. Confirming the sale is the pinnacle of achievement—all your efforts have paid a handsome return. Unquestionably, the greatest thrill for a sales entrepreneur is the moment of yes when the customer agrees to buy from you in the interest of a honest, mutually beneficial solution.
Become comfortable with using the five magic words and make them part of your professional equity. Confirming with these five words communicates confidence and offers a refreshing change for the customer. Another tremendous advantage is that this approach is universal—the same five words can be used regardless of what you are selling. Big-ticket items, long sales cycles, short sales cycles, a product or service, it doesn't matter—the five words must be applied to every possible sales scenario. Sales entrepreneurs understand that the power of asking is what ultimately separates a professional salesperson from a professional conversationalist.
Be #2
Doubling Your Close Ratio
Recall that approximately 80% of purchases occur after the order has been requested five times and yet only 10% of salespeople ask five times before quitting. Likewise, 40% of salespeople ask only once, then quit. These 40% quit for a variety of reasons: impatience, the craving for instant gratification, poor follow-up, no time-management system, or just simple laziness. There is no doubt that these statistics are shocking, but customers are the victims of these lackluster performances on a daily basis.
Imagine having to confirm five times before you get a yes. That means, on average, there are four knows before a yes. That's a lot of work! Some authors suggest selling is a numbers game: talk to ten people, get five presentations, close two deals. That sounds like a lot of work—not selling very smart. It bears out the fact that the average close ratio is only 20%. That means, on average, salespeople close only two out of ten potential opportunities. Funny, I always thought selling was about people, not a game with winners, losers, and average, mediocre performances. Don't fall victim to the numbers game, condemning your career to a life of mediocrity. Don't measure your success against the masses. By comparing yourself against the averages, you only fuel a false sense of productivity. I say set your own standards. Don't take pride in being average—it's too easy and not very satisfying.
Remember that confirming is not an event but a process that begins within minutes of meeting the customer. Customers are very quick to pass judgment, wasting no time deciding if you are likable and trustworthy. The first step to doubling your close ratio is to ensure the first six steps of your sequential model have been completed to the customer's satisfaction.
Hence, if close ratios are a meager 20% that means the customers' ratio is 80%. Ouch! Customers are closing more often than we are. They sell us on the concept of not doing business with them. They offer a multitude of excuses, objections, and justifications all in the interest of selling us their "no." The problem is we are too quick to accept their rejection and with a bruised ego return to the adult day-care center to lick our wounds and seek support. Sound familiar?
So, what is a good close ratio? I would suggest that as a sales entrepreneur your target should be no less than 40–50%. That means if you approach ten potential customers, ones with a need and a bag of money, you should confirm at least four to five. Sound daunting? It isn't. Some top-notch sales entrepreneurs are confirming up to 75% of potential customers.
Start by evaluating your current ratio. Track it for a month or two and reality will quickly reveal itself. It may not be as high as you think it is. If yours is higher than 20%, congratulations, you are in the minority. But I will remind you, your objective is 40–50%. Proper execution of your Sequential Model will certainly contribute to doubling your current close ratio. It simply means building rapport and trust as you navigate through the first six steps of your model coupled with the confidence to ask for their business. Customers expect to be asked; don't disappoint them. They get irritated by reps who fail to complete the sales call with no direct close. You represent a solution to their needs, so the only outstanding issue is to ask them. If you don't someone else will—and be rewarded with a bag of money. Hence, taking your close ratio to 40% is not an impossible, arduous objective.
However, I caution you, don't strive to achieve a 100% confirmation ratio. Not only will it never happen, you don't want 100%. You couldn't handle it. You're already time-starved with what you have. Free up time by firing C accounts (and C activities) and increase productivity by doubling your confirmation ratio on A and B opportunities. If a 100% confirmation ratio is your goal, then work at McDonalds or Burger King. Everyone who walks in buys something. When was the last time you heard this conversation in McDonald's:
"May I help you?"
"Oh, no thanks, just looking."
My point is this: Achieving a confirmation ratio of 50% is hard work, and yet it can be very rewarding. Success is hard work. A job that has a 100% confirmation ratio generally pays minimum wage.
Nine Tips for Confirming the Sale
- Ask a confirming question only after you have effectively bridged a minimum of two appropriate features to benefits.
- Help people make buying decisions by pointing out how your value-added solution will benefit their business.
- Highlight how the benefits outweigh the costs; create value.
- Successful confirmation isn't an isolated tactic, it's creating value throughout the Sequential Model.
- If you can't confirm, you didn't successfully complete a prior step—planning, discovery, or presenting a creative, value-added solution.
- Before asking for a decision, expect customers to say yes—mentally picture them saying it.
- When you ask people for a buying decision, be quiet until they respond.
- A confirming question asks for a decision. A trial close such as, "What do you think of my presentation so far?" calls for an opinion.
- If you can't make a sale, make a friend.
Read More..
When to Confirm
When does one confirm the sale? When have you earned the right to ask this most feared and sacred question? The answer remains elusive, subject to broad interpretation, often founded on your interpretation of perceived buying signals. The majority of sales literature suggests confirming, "When the prospect is ready and communicates a buying signal," or, "When the buyer appears ready." I have always marvelled at the ambiguity in terms of when to confirm. Several authors suggest that you rely on little more than your own perception of body language and discrete buying signals to interpret when they're ready to buy. Unless body language or buying signals are very obvious, you run the risk of misinterpreting the customer's nonverbal communication. I agree that body language is a powerful component of the communication model, but not as the sole method of interpreting when to close. Everyone is different, just as behavioral flexibility suggests, each individual has a unique body-language style (Chapter 6). Socializers adapt their body language differently from Directors but they could be thinking the same thing. I don't think that we can apply a universal set of standards to effectively and accurately interpret body language.
When discussing body language at my seminars, I often notice a participant leaning back in his or her chair with arms folded. I ask the participant not to move and point out their posture to the class. The class usually agrees that the school of body language would have us interpret that posture as detached, uninterested, and guarded. I then validate my theory by asking the participant with folded arms, "Are you comfortable?" The answer, not surprisingly, is usually, "Yes." My suggestion is not to concern yourself with body language unless it's obvious or unless there is a drastic change during the sales call. Let your customer be comfortable without interpreting posture as a negative buying signal. The only real body language that I respond to is if my customer gets up and leaves the office. Then I clue in that perhaps the call isn't going as well as I'd hoped.
So, when do you confirm the sale? Confirm the sale when you have successfully bridged a minimum of two features to benefits. You have now earned the right to ask. One bridged benefit is usually not enough to convince them to buy, which is why I suggest a minimum of two. If the customer says yes, that's great. Go to Step #8. If they say know, then go back to feature fishing and continue to bridge. As we can appreciate, each customer is different. Some only require two benefits to confirm, others may require several. Once again, customers may simply need to know more before they say yes.
Three Ingredients of a Yes
Just as a good fire needs three ingredients to burn, so does a successful confirmation. Take away any one of the three ingredients and you have no fire, no sale. The three ingredients of a Yes are: rapport, trust, and the power of asking. Just as with the five rights of passage in our definition of selling, you can't take away or fail to establish any one of the three. Unfortunately, many salespeople create rapport and trust comfortably, but fail to ask a direct, honest, confirming question. Sometimes they do ask, but have failed to first create rapport or trust. Would a customer give you a bag of money if he trusted you but you failed to ask? Not likely. Would he say yes if he didn't like you or trust you? Not likely. It's all part of engineering commitment. You start confirming the sale the second you come in contact, by telephone or otherwise, with your potential customer.
I find it amusing to hear the different excuses as to why a customer didn't buy. Sales representatives are the best "fire-dancers" on the planet. Each probably has 50 excuses, all conveniently memorized, and of course none blame themselves. During my years as a sales manager, I could have written a book on. "The reasons why I didn't get the sale." No doubt it would have challenged David Chilton's book, The Wealthy Barber, as an international all-time best seller. I offer only one reason why a salesperson didn't get the sale and ended up in second place. My reason doesn't make me popular but it's inarguable: "You didn't get the business because you were outsold." Pure and simple. Strip away all the excuses and that's what's left. The customer had a need and a bag of money and decided to give it to your competitor. Why? Your competitor probably offered a better, value-added solution having asked, better, smarter questions.
Is It No, or Is It Know?
Time for a spelling lesson. It's important to understand the difference between no and know. Sales representatives spell no as no, taking the meaning literally as more rejection, another opportunity lost. (But of course you can't lose something you never had.) Conversely, sales entrepreneurs spell no as know: the customer simply needs to know more information before making a positive buying decision. It's not interpreted as rejection but more as an invitation to explain the possible benefits of doing business. By saying know, the customer has not yet seen the value in your offering and needs to know more about your tailored solution. This means going back to feature fishing and scrolling your corporate menu for appropriate features (hot-buttons), then bridging to create a benefit package worthy of consideration. That's value. Upon hearing a know, you might consider asking the customer: "What is the single barrier preventing us from moving forward?" A candid response may spotlight a potential objection that when managed effectively produces a yes. Until the customer sees value, you'll continue to hear knows.
Remember, earlier in the book I defined selling as the process of disruption. Making a change in suppliers or adding a new supplier to the list is scary at the best of times. Customers experience fear and anxiety just as we do. Your benefit package has to be convincing enough to disrupt customers into change. Customers will continue to say know if there is a bigger yes offered by the competition.
Five Magic Words
Okay then, how do I confirm the sale? The Sequential Model offers a refreshingly simple approach to confirming. In fact, the apparent simplicity of it usually invites suspicion. "That's it, it's that simple?" Let me give you the five most powerful words you'll ever say when working through your Sequential Model. Look your customer square in the eyes, and with all the confidence you can muster say these five magic words .....
"May I have your business?"
—and don't say another thing until the customer has responded.
That's it! Five words. So simple that I dedicated an entire page to them. These words reflect clarity, sincerity, innocence, and professionalism. Go ahead, put the book down and say them aloud. Say them again. These five words are applicable to all four behavioral styles. Any one of the four styles will appreciate the intent and clarity of your question.
As you can clearly see, your Sequential Model need not rely on clever closing gimmicks to trick people into buying something they don't want. The beauty of this approach is that you know what you are saying, and the customer knows what you are asking. Forget about memorizing 50 different power closes—keep it simple.
What often sabotages this clean, refreshing approach is the confusion generated by the numerous books available on closing skills. Many of them, by title alone, suggest the need to build an inventory of closing techniques. Some books even suggest "The more closes you know, the better you're prepared to face the moment of truth." Nonsense. Consider this passage taken from Dartnell's publication, Close It Right, Right Now!:
Contrary to the popular belief that closing is an "end-game," or a final manipulation that sparks agreement, closing is a constant and continuing activity. I warm to the salesperson who shows interest in me. That helps me decide in his or her favor. I am attracted by a sales presentation that gives me clear information. That helps me favor that product. I appreciate learning about how the product fits my needs and benefits me. That helps me exclude other products I may have considered.
In the absence of all those good things, I am not likely to buy, no matter how clever the salesperson is in trying to button up the sale. In fact, I am driven from closing when I perceive too much cleverness in the procedure.
I have seen numerous books outlining countless closing techniques, all advocating the need to have a ready supply of closes to apply when needed, and all suggesting that an inventory of closes is directly related to your success. One such publication goes so far as to offer: "Twenty-Nine Special Closings That Rock Holdouts and Crack Hardcases." Another publication, The Sales Closing Book, offers "more than 270 powerful sales closes that can skyrocket your sales and income." The ultimate prize for trickery goes to a publication that offers this gem: "35 Tactics for Psychological Manipulation: The Master Closer's Mind Game List." Some typical closes include:
The Whispering Close
The Blitz
The Airplane Close
The Half-Nelson
Lost Sale Close
Extra Incentive Close
Ego/Profit Close
P.O.W. Story
Conditional Close
Puppy Dog Demo
The Silent Close
Callback Close
The Columbo Close
Return Serve Close
The Negative Close
Door Knob Close
The Grind
Emotional Close
Mutt and Jeff
Last Resort Close
Assumption Close
Imagine the mental gymnastics required to sort through all those memorized "closes" to decide which one to use. Unbelievable! I think the only thing that will skyrocket will be your level of stress and anxiety.
Once again, the entrepreneurial sales call should be a dialogue, a conversation between two human beings. Forget about memorized closings, putting cute names on closing techniques, or rehearsed scripts. These memorized closes are often manipulative, guerrilla approaches that compensate for not being good.
Customers like to be asked and they respect the salesperson who asks for their business in an honest, confident, nonmanipulative manner. However, research suggests that in approximately 70% of sales calls, there is never a direct request for the business. It may seem like an unbelievable statistic given that confirming is the final effort of a gold-medal performance (second place is the first loser), but it's true. Many salespeople attempt to confirm the sale but end up skirting the issue with a weak, unconvincing request to do business. A common attempt at confirming sounds like this:
S: Is there anything else I can show you or answer for you today?
C: No, thank you. You've answered all my questions and I have all the information I need.
S: Okay then. Well, let me leave you with our most recent brochure and a copy of my presentation. Mr. Smith, let me ask you, are you available next week?
C: Yes, I expect to be around.
S: Great. Why don't I give you a call early next week and we can discuss my proposal further and see how you feel about it. Is that okay?
C: Sure, that's fine.
S: Great. Thanks for your time.
A classic unsuccessful close. The salesperson has avoided asking a direct question to buy and is leaving with nothing more than hope and a sense of accomplishment. Of course, in the meantime, the salesperson is totally vulnerable to the prey of the competition. As coincidence would have it, the competition shows up the very next day offering the customer the same solution, but the difference is that she exercised the power of asking. She wins the gold, the salesperson wins nothing more than experience. I implore you to safeguard yourself against the competition and reevaluate your confirming tactics. No customer, at least that I'm aware of, will ever reward you for just showing up and making a good sales pitch. Ask yourself: Is my confirmation a direct invitation to purchase? Is it clean, honest, direct, and nonmanipulative? Test it out on fellow sales entrepreneurs, your sales manager, or your mentor.
Confirm the sale with a direct, simple question.
Ask: Did I ask for their business?
Now, before you unceremoniously discount my confirming theory, appreciate that I'm only suggesting this approach (the five words) in the interest of simplicity, honesty, and the power of asking. I recognize that there are other tactics to confirming. In fact, I endorse more than one approach. For example, simply ask your customer, "Since we both appear to be in agreement, what's our next step?" or alternatively ask, "Where do we go from here?" You can preface this confirmation question with a summary statement outlining the accepted benefits.
Read More..
Confirming the Sale: Closing
People buy from people. Better yet, people love to buy. The buying experience can be very rewarding and can satisfy many of the motives to buy: ego, prestige, status, greed, joy of spending money, peace of mind, and so on. The ideal sales process is a mutual journey of honesty, trust, and respect as you and your customer work in harmony through the Sequential Model. When the journey is mutual, confirming the sale is not a matter of if, but when.
Traditionally, this step is referred to as "closing the sale." However, the word "closing" has negative connotations that conjure up images of unscrupulous sales representatives using manipulative, guerrilla tactics designed to coerce unsuspecting customers into buying. Traditional closing techniques typically violate the sales relationship. Customers today are tired and irritated by these offensive, manipulative, unethical arm-twisting tactics.
Make buying easy for your customer by confirming the sale using a nonmanipulative, straightforward approach and presenting a practical, value-added solution. Confirming is the pinnacle of selling achievement. It is when the customer awards a gold medal to the salesperson who delivered a win-win, value-added performance. However, confirming does not happen in isolation from the total sales process. You need to be engineering commitment throughout the entire sales call because anything you do or say, at any step, will either erode or enhance the sale. Chronologically, the confirmation comes as Step #7 of the Sequential Model, but be cognizant that your success at this point is based on a series of buy-ins or confirmations throughout the journey. Confirmation simply means to create a shared sense of enthusiasm to do business then exercise the power of asking. The ideal situation is a sales entrepreneur who can confidently ask for the business and at the same time be diligent in building a relationship by asking smart questions. Don't underestimate the power of asking.
"Man who wait for roast duck to fly into mouth, wait very, very long time." (Chinese Proverb)
Why is it that so many salespeople become paralyzed with fear at the thought of closing? Even when they have successfully navigated through the previous six steps they still fail to ask for a buying decision. The reasons are as diverse as customers themselves. The most common one is fear. Fear of rejection, fear of sounding silly, fear of failure, fear of upsetting the customer, the feeling of not being good enough or worthy enough to ask. All valid reasons, but unfortunately this becomes a negative habit pattern that seriously compromises our success at confirming. In the interest of harmony and not offending a potential customer, we unknowingly sacrifice our own agendas by failing to ask.
Psychologists agree that the fear of asking is learned through negative conditioning experienced as early as childhood. Our parents, teachers, siblings, and even friends have all contributed to nurturing this debilitating virus. No one is born with it. Your fears are all learned and reinforced through repetition by those around you, even yourself. As one lady said when finally asked out by a fellow she admired, "The trouble with you men is that you often reject yourselves before you give us women a chance to." She was elated when he finally asked her out, and without hesitation accepted his invitation. The same analogy applies to salespeople. We often reject or doubt our own proposals or presentations long before we give the customer a chance to. However, because it is a learned condition, it can be unlearned as well, and sometimes very quickly. I suggest there is a direct relationship between low corporate self-esteem and negative self-talk, and your confidence to ask for business. Confirming demands an attitude of confidence, expecting the customer to say yes. Anything less puts you in entrepreneurial quicksand. Just as the Chinese proverb suggests, don't expect rewards such as roast duck or a confirmed sale unless you ASK.
The modul of Closing:
Five Magic Words
Is It No, or Is It Know?
Three Ingredients of a Yes
When to Confirm
Nine Tips for Confirming the Sale
Doubling Your Close Ratio
Be #2
Read More..