Closing Techniques (That Really Work!)

Stephan Schiffman

• Publisher: Adams Media
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781440520273
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Many salespeople can line up prospects, recite the benefits of their product or service, and stir the interest of their client. But when it comes to actually closing the deal, they fail and the sale falls apart. That's where sales guru Stephan Schiffman comes in—and saves the sale. In this book, Schiffman reveals the pioneering techniques that have helped more than half a million salespeople nail the sales that matter. This book includes chapters on:

• the four words to avoid during meetings
• why salespeople shouldn't mix business with pleasure
• the most important word when closing a sale
• working existing accounts

PART
1

The Fundamentals

CHAPTER 1

A Third of a Season

I believe that selling is not complex.

Surprising as it may seem, that’s a minority opinion. There are a lot of sales experts out there who will tell you that I’m dead wrong, and that sales is a very complicated matter involving elaborate levels of persuasion and interpersonal manipulation. These people have written a lot of books. Most of the modern sales books, I think, are really rehashes of old, essentially confrontational techniques that came into vogue in the 1950s—or even earlier.

I Decided to Read a Lot of Books

As part of the research for this project, I bought and read every single book having to do with the topic “closing the sale” that I could get my hands on. After reading them all, I found out that most of them had essentially the same message. If anything, the emphasis would vary slightly from book to book, but the central idea was identical.

Each book stressed either outside research or in-person “prob-ing”— and then making a presentation meant to close the sale. And each of these books—there were dozens of them—ended up giving you specific techniques that you could employ to convince the person to buy.

And my feeling, after reviewing those books, was that this common (actually, nearly universal) approach to training salespeople was one of the chief reasons people often feel that sales is ridiculous today.

Closing the Sale—The “Tricks of the Trade”

Closing the sale is not a gimmick, but you’d never know it from reading the books that are out there. One of the books I came across passed on 187 different tricks to use with prospects, each designed to convince him or her to buy. There are a lot of them. Most are remarkably dumb.

One trick they tell you to pull is to roll your uncapped fountain pen across the desk to the prospect, who will pick it up to avoid being spattered. You then quickly slip your order form underneath the pen and say something like, “Well, since you’ve already got the pen in your hand and the contract in front of you, you might as well sign.” (I am not kidding. Someone really wrote this stuff.)

Another trick is to draw a vertical line down a piece of paper, asking the prospect to work with you to develop “pros” and “cons,” then making the prospect promise you that, if, “working together,” you and the prospect come up with more good elements than liabilities, the prospect loses the game and has to buy. (Of course, if the prospect can come up with enough negatives to outnumber your positives, then you lose the game and have to leave the prospect’s office.)

By the way, someone actually tried that two-column technique with Mike, one of the salespeople in our office. You want to hear how it went? The salesperson, who did not ask Mike anything about how he planned to use the product he had to offer, said, “All right, Mike, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to draw a line down the middle of this sheet. Here’s one column that says reasons to buy, and another that says reasons not to buy.”

The salesperson then proceeded to list about twenty “reasons” for Mike to buy what he had to offer. Then he looked at Mike and said, “Okay, your turn. Why don’t you want to buy this?”

Mike said, “Because I need to think about it.”

The salesperson wrote that down and said, “Okay, need to think about it. What’s the next reason?”

Mike said, “Because I need to think about it.”

The salesperson said, “Okay, looks like we’re all done. Now look at this sheet. On my side, I have twenty reasons for you to go with us. On your side, you have two. Can you give me even one more reason why you shouldn’t buy from us?”

Mike said, “Yes. I don’t like you.”

That, not surprisingly, was the end of the conversation and the end of that sales cycle.

There are dozens of other ridiculous techniques the “experts” want you to use.

Here’s my favorite. You’re supposed to look at the prospect with big, hungry, puppy-dog eyes and say, “Mr. Prospect, if you don’t buy from me, I’ll lose my job.” That’s right—you’re actually supposed to try to shame the prospect into concluding that if you don’t get the sale, you’re going to lose your house, wander the streets, and perhaps yield your firstborn child to the boss.

Now, let me tell you something. If you’re willing to say that, I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that you are looking at your career in the wrong way. If you’re willing to place your relationship with the prospect on the hope that pity, rather than trust in your ability to deliver the goods, will carry the day, then you should probably think about getting out of sales. If you believe anyone who tells you that the way to initiate a business relationship is to encourage the prospect to think, not of his or her goals, but of your problems, then I respectfully submit that you should be looking for another line of work.

But if, like me, you feel a natural revulsion at the idea of saying that to a prospect; if you feel there must be some way to build a bridge that allows you to deal with the prospect as a fellow business person, rather than as a supplicant, or someone to be manipulated, or an opponent; if you prefer dealing in solutions to pleading poverty or playing games—then keep reading. I wrote this book for you.

The Dangers of “It Works for Me”

Some people may claim to use the methods I just outlined—and their innumerable variants—with success. Don’t listen to them.

Point One: Unless you are completely incompetent, you will close about one third of all your sales whether or not you use stupid techniques like the ones I’ve just mentioned. Let me put this idea into a sports context. The worst baseball team of the twentieth century was probably the 1962 New York Mets, a legendary squad of “has-beens and never-weres” that has been the subject of more books, articles, jokes, and stories than most pennant-winning clubs. Now, the New York Mets lost more games that year than any other modern club. But you know what? They also won forty games.

They won forty games! Isn’t that remarkable? Suppose the team captain sits down with a reporter after an old-timer’s game and says, “Well, you’ve got to remember, we didn’t lose ’em all. So I guess having the lowest fielding percentage in the league was a plus. I guess posting the lowest team batting average in the National League must have been good for something. I guess having two twenty-game losers and another guy who won three and lost seventeen really was a pretty good starting rotation. I guess having a reliever whose earned-run average was 4.53, who never saved a single game, and who walked a whole lot more batters than he struck out was a real stroke of genius on our part. So what if he was out of the big leagues the next year. We won forty games!”

What do you think of that assessment?

More to the point, which team would you rather play for? The ’62 Mets, who stank up the joint but had forty wins, or the ’62 Yankees, the team that followed through on a decades-long commitment to excellence and professionalism—and, at the end of the year, after having appeared in their twenty-third World Series in thirty-six years, won the championship?

Point Two: You are also going to lose about one third of your sales no matter what you do. Here again, we can look to the baseball diamond. Those 1962 Yankees lost fifty-three games out of 162, almost exactly a third of a season. Their competition showed up. Some days the Yankees lost. It was part of the game. And it’s part of your game as a salesperson, too. You’re going to get one third and you’re going to lose one third. Pretty much everyone in your league can count on that.

Point Three: What counts is what you make happen with the remaining third. Not the one third you’re going to win anyway. Not the one third you’re going to lose anyway. The last-place team in the American league in 1962 was forty-seven and a half games behind the Yankees; the Mets were sixty games behind the first-place team in their league. Take the average of the two, and you’re looking at about fifty-four games—one third of the season. That’s the difference between the pennant-winner and the team in the cellar. The one third of the games that could go either way. Those are the ones you have to try to win.

Don’t Use the Cheap Stuff

It is the premise of this book that you can’t win those “middle-third” sales by using the amateur techniques of tricking, manipulating, or lying to your prospects and customers. If you don’t believe it, you are certainly welcome to try the kinds of maneuvers I’ve been complaining about in this chapter. But I should tell you here, I’ve trained hundreds of thousands of salespeople in 900 companies throughout the world, and I’ve seen the kinds of people who win those “middle-third” sales. Trust me. They don’t play like the Mets did in ’62. They play with pride, like the ’62 Yankees. They make commitments and keep them. They are pros.

CHAPTER 2

The Definition of Sales

Closing is certainly part of selling—but what is selling?

You can get a lot of different answers from a lot of different people. Any number of experts might define sales in terms of making someone else do something that you want them to do. Or projecting yourself so strongly (“standing out from the other messages”) that an organization basically has no choice but to stop ignoring you. Or delivering a competitive advantage to someone in your target organization. Or knowing an industry inside and out so that you hear about opportunities first and act quickly. Or finding a need and filling it. (This one is particularly dangerous in my opinion, because it doesn’t take into account the fact that, these days, when someone needs a copier, or an insurance policy, or a window-washer, or whatever, that person is not likely to sit around “needing” it for long, but is instead going to pick up the phone and call someone and have the problem resolved by four that afternoon!)

Simplify, Simplify

My definition of sales is a simple one.

For me, sales is asking people what they do, how they do it, when they do it, where they do it, why they do it, and who they do it with— and then helping them do it better.

It’s from this perspective—and not from any other—that we will be approaching the task of closing sales.

For too many salespeople today, closing is a little like the kids’ game, Pin the Tail on the Donkey. You walk into a room, are blindfolded and spun around, and are pointed in the general direction of your goal. Maybe you hit what you’re supposed to every once in a while, but usually you don’t.

It was great fun, but you don’t need to bother with it now. You’re not a kid anymore, and there’s no reason for you to play games with your career. If you follow the ideas I outline in this book, you’ll enter the closing stage with your prospect with your eyes wide open. And that’s the way it should be.

CHAPTER 3

No Gimmicks

Rather than stringing you along for the rest of the book, I’m going to pass along, right here and right now, the key technique you’ll use and adapt to close your sales. I want you to know before we go any further how simple I believe good selling is—or, at any rate, can be. This is the technique that I use myself, and that I teach in my seminars. It’s not a gimmick. It’s a nonconfrontational, straightforward approach that is rooted in the relationship I’ve developed with a pr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Introduction to Fourth Edition
• Introduction
• PART 1: THE FUNDAMENTALS
• PART 2: BREAKTHROUGH IDEAS FOR CLOSING SUCCESS
• PART 3: RETHINKING YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE PROSPECT
• Epilogue: Beyond the Close
• Appendix A: Sample Cold Calling Scripts
• Appendix B: Sample Sales Dialogues
• Appendix C: Seven Questions You Should Be Able to Answer about Your Prospect Before You Try to Close the Deal
• Appendix D: Six Tactical Questions You Should Be Able to Answer about Any Prospect You Plan to Close
• Appendix E: Eight Foundation Principles of Effective Negotiating
• Appendix F: Eleven Practical Rules for Negotiating the Best Deal
• Appendix G: The Sales Negotiation Model
• About the Author