Closing Is Over-Rated…Advance The Sales Campaign

By Jerry Stapleton, Stapleton Resources
 

Since the beginning of recorded time the salesperson's job description has had three parts: communicating information, building relationships, and facilitating transactions. As a result of this third one, "closing the sale" was born.

I like to ask groups of salespeople to complete the following sentence: "In any company, salespeople exist to...?" Usually, around seventy percent of them say the equivalent of "...close deals!" This might seem like a good thing, but it's not.

The Traditional notion of closing is counterproductive

Traditionally-minded salespeople have a "close mentality." A close mentality is counterproductive for three reasons:

• It creates an artificial sense of optimism and control over the actual closeability of a sale that may not be closeable at all, at least right now, or that may not even be real in the first place. This results in salespeople chasing bad business.

• It creates "decision-maker myopia," causing salespeople to attempt to close the sale with contacts who may have no power whatsoever to do so.

• In an insidious way, it creates "sales tension." Even without using tired old closing techniques, a closing mentality translates into transactional language or into a subconscious—or in some cases very conscious—focus on the "deal." As a result, Traditional salespeople send a certain, "transactional energy" that customers sense; and it causes them to put their guard up against being sold. This defensiveness reduces information flow from the customer to a trickle. It also quite negatively affects the salesperson's professionalism and credibility.

Salespeople who operate with what I call a Business Resource Mindset focus on "advancing the sales campaign." The difference between "closing" and "advancing" the sale seems minor; it's anything but. For starters, sometimes advancing the sale means walking from the sale.

Advancing the sale requires finesse

By constantly assessing the customer urgency, the fit, and the winnability—i.e. the reality of the sale—Business Resource salespeople end up closing more sales than Traditional "closers" do because they minimize transactional energy, understand the true closeability of the sale, and know who closeable contacts are.

 

Business Resource salespeople are remarkably clear-eyed about what is and isn't good business and they act relentlessly on that knowledge. They know when—and how—to "go for the close"...and they do it with amazing finesse, not with tired old clichés.

Shift your thinking and adjust your words

Business Resource salespeople are as passionate and hard-charging as their Traditional (dare we say, "aggressive") counterparts. It's just that their passion isn't directed toward myopically "closing the deal;" it's directed toward advancing—indeed accelerating—the sales campaign in a realistic way.

How? First, do everything you can to shift your thinking away from closing the sale to advancing the sales campaign. Then, shift your language. For starters you'll have to lose the words and phrases that you've unwittingly inherited from the various strategic sales training programs you've been through (they're all built on the Traditional Sales Mindset).

Think you're up to the challenge? Try, for starters, eliminating your use of the word "decision" in your discussions with customers (and let them hear the word "fit" a bit more often.)

Would you like to know more? To hear Jerry Stapleton’s commentary on this column, click here. Jerry's audio appears at the top of the linked page and can be downloaded as an MP3 file.

Jerry Stapleton of Stapleton Resources is author of "From Vendor to Business Resource", a ground-breaking book that encourages salespeople to move away from traditional selling based on product, price and personality. He can be reached at jstapleton@stapletonresources.com, or go to his website, www.stapletonresources.com.

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