Month: June 2019

One of the main points we make in our training and coaching is that throughout your sales process, from prospecting to close and beyond, you have to be able to get out of your head and see things from your prospect or client’s perspective.

In fact, if you review some of our past posts, you’ll see examples from some of our trainers and sales execs who tried every way imaginable to secure a meeting with a prospect and failed to get their attention every time.  Yet when they stopped focusing on what they wanted to bring to the table and focused instead on the challenges that their prospect brought to the table, they were able to secure high quality meetings with better overall close rates.

This is an important concept throughout the history of sales. In fact, one of the phrases that I constantly heard in the early days of my sales career was, “If you want to sell what John Brown buys, you must see the world through John Brown’s eyes.”

And yet, many companies continue to be product-centric in their training and coaching, focusing on how to push product features and benefits and less on the strengths and skills of the salesperson. Don’t get me wrong- presenting product features and benefits is necessary to make the sale, but it won’t get you in the door or engender trust from your prospect. To do that, you need an additional set of skills, strengths, and the coaching to enhance them.

Tyson Group Conducting ALSD Training on Prospecting

That’s why Allison Schuller, Vice President of Sales at Tyson Group, will take this topic on at the 2019 ALSD conference in Chicago.  This year, ALSD will hold it’s 5th annual Sports Sales Training Forum during the conference. It’s all pure sports sales training.  And Allison will lead a session on prospecting that focuses on seeing the world through the customer’s eyes. After all, if you want to sell what John Brown buys, you must see the world through John Brown’s eyes.

If you are attending the Sports Sales Training Forum on July 1, be sure to attend Allison’s session, “Prospecting: Drillbit vs Holes” to get your prospecting process back online. And if you haven’t registered yet, there’s still time. You can register for the entire conference  here at the ALSD site.

When making cold calls and opening sales calls on the phone, you need guideposts, touch points of some kind to help guide your interaction.  Now, some sales trainers would say you need a script when cold calling. However, I think a cold calling script is too rigid. A sales rep must be flexible and address people where they find them mentally and attitudinally, not where the script says your prospect should be.

Besides, most sales reps use the script as a crutch, reading it like a nervous speaker reading their PowerPoint slides while delivering a presentation.

In its most basic form, a script gives you an outline of your opening process when cold calling. But to make it your own, you need to have flexibility and awareness so you can respond appropriately to your prospects and earn their trust.

So, let’s trade the traditional, worn out cold calling script for a general outline of your opening process. This will give you a better chance of engaging your prospects when you have them on the phone.

6 Powerful Ideas to Master the Art of Cold Calling

Here are 6 ideas to review. But remember, be flexible and adapt your process to your individual situation and your prospect.

1. Master Cold Calling by Getting Your Prospect’s Attention.

Sometimes, simply using your prospect’s name is enough. Most sales reps, when they open a call, talk about themselves, their company or their product to be interesting. As I told my team in the call center, your name is not an attention-getter. No one knew you before you call, and they’ll probably forget you 10 minutes after you end it. If you want to be interesting to other people, be interested in them. So, be different. Use the prospect’s name to get their attention.

You can find additional ideas on opening your call by getting your prospect’s attention here.

2. Show Them That They are Important to You

Share what you know about them: verify their title; compliment them on something that they have achieved; make a statement about their industry that they may not know. Find a way to tactfully display your knowledge of them and their issues. It shows them that you consider the relationship important.

3. Ask a Question Bearing on Time

People are busy and chances are always good that an unexpected call will catch someone in the middle of an activity. Now if you left a previous message stating that you were going to call at the designated time and they were expecting your call, ask them how much time they have set aside to talk. I hammered this point so often when developing my call center that to this day, my director of technology continues to ask at the start of our meetings, “How much time you got for us?”

Ask a question related to their time constraints. Your prospect will appreciate the fact that you cared enough to ask.

4. Tell Them Why You Called

This is the general benefit that you supply to their industry. Remember that you can’t make a claim about their specific situation until you can perform a diagnostic session with them. However, you can state some of the benefits that you have supplied other clients in that industry. If you have examples or testimonials, this would be a good time to roll them out.

5. Don’t Make Promises

When we first started selling training over the phone, my team faced a lot of challenges. One of the biggest challenges was that my team of fresh college grads was calling older, seasoned business owners and making statements like “we can improve your business by X%” or “we can add Y% to your bottom line.”  These were college grads! They had no real-world experience and no credibility. So naturally their “pitch” came off like it was being read from a note card. Instead of reading your script from your cards, tell your prospects about the results your product or service obtained for your current customers and that you may be able to do the same for them. But you won’t have a good idea until you can sit down with them for a diagnostic session.

Remember, you don’t know the specifics of their environment or circumstances. So don’t make broad claims and promises until you’ve had a chance to review their situation.

6. Run Your Trial Close

Ask them if they have time for some more questions or if they are open to a face-to-face meeting. You always want to use a trial close. This tells you if the prospect or client is open to advancing in the sales process.

Adaptability, Flexibility, and Awareness are Key Elements in Cold Calling

Remember, these are guidelines to include in your general process for opening a cold call. Your goal is to get to the next stage of your process.

Also, remember that no two people are alike. Adapt and arrange these guidelines in your process in response to your individual prospect’s needs and expectations. Stay aware of what your prospect is saying and doing to fully leverage the power of these ideas in your process.

Adaptability, flexibility and awareness are necessary elements for success. Dump the rigid track of using a script when cold calling and prospecting. If you have these elements at your disposal, you will be free to make adjustments as you move the sale forward and you will move more prospects into your pipeline.

For additional insights into prospecting and cold calling, pick up a copy of Selling is an Away Game, available online at Amazon, fine bookstores and many Hudson News locations.

This post on cold calling was originally published on Oct 6, 2015  and updated on June 26, 2019.

This post on cold calling was originally published on Dec 19, 2016  and updated with current material on June 19, 2019.

I was reading a blog post put out by another sales trainer titled “7 Ways to Make Cold Calling Easier”. It got me wondering, where do these tips come from? Were these ideas formulated by this trainer or were his insights rehashed from basic advice you can find anywhere? Was his advice based on empirical data, or was it based on opinions from his experiences in sales? And at that moment, I had an epiphany. This wasn’t the first time I came across a basic ‘tips to cold calling’ post. And it wasn’t the first time I was turned off by an article like this.

What to Watch for When Getting Cold Calling Tips.

You could choke an entire farm of horses with the various articles published every day about cold calling. In fact, Google users search the term “cold calling tips” on average about 2,000 times every month. However, if you type “cold calling tips” into Google , it will return over 100 million posts, pages, and articles.  And most of these, like the previously mentioned post, are based on opinions, personal experience, or just vague, outdated ideas. You need to be careful not to follow fluff or general opinionated advice. Rather, make sure the advice and ideas you find are practical, have some data-based evidence behind them, and they work for your team.

Over the 5 years we ran our call center, our team made over 1.25 million outbound cold calls and talked to over 150,000 C-Suite, VP, and Director Level decision makers on behalf of B2B organizations in a multitude of industries. Additionally, we have spent the past 15 years training over 10,000 sales professionals. So when you talk about empirical data, we’ve got it!

Based on the tens of thousands of cold calls we have made, the countless bad articles I have read on cold calling, and where we have truly seen sales professionals make cold calling work for them, I wanted to provide you with 7 cold calling tips to avoid, and what you should focus on instead.

Want more ideas on coaching your team to increase their sales performance? View the on-demand webinar, How to Drive Sales in the Face of Business Uncertainty here.

1. When Cold Calling, Don’t Read the Script. Own Your Material!

Many trainers tell you to write out a script for your cold calling sessions.  A script that you stick to implies you know what the prospect is going to say. You have no idea what your prospect is going to say. No one does, not even the best salespeople. Good sales calls are bob-and-weave conversations. Own the conversation!

Higher Success Rate Tip: Map out talking points and give yourself the freedom and ability to maneuver. Build guide posts, like a sales GPS to help you navigate the sales landscape with agility. Ask questions around pain points, issues, and the topics they are getting heat from their bosses about at the moment. Learn the ins and outs of your product so you can suggest next steps. Also remember: there’s a difference between “this is what our product does” and “this is what our product will do for you.” People are more responsive to the latter.

2. Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect, It Makes Permanence!

Many trainers say, “Practice, practice, practice”. Wow, that’s novel! This isn’t advice. It’s common sense. Ever heard of Malcolm Gladwell and the 10,000-hour rule? Practice does make you better when you are practicing the right thing. I practiced my golf swing a ton without a coach. That resulted in me perfecting my hook! You must practice with the right coaching!

Here is the problem. Often, these training sessions will have you practicing with peers. That’s not a good approach. Rather, record yourself. Judge the feel; the look; how you sound. Also, make sure you press your trainer to show you how it’s done. If they’re coaching you on cold calls, have them pick up the phone and make a few calls. If they can’t make the call themselves, then you know you’ve got someone who can’t practice what they teach! Theories suck unless you can execute on them.

Higher Success Rate Tip: Practice with actual prospects. Start with “colder” calls that you can afford to mess up. Work through conversations and issues that come up on those calls, as opposed to practicing scripts with your peers.

Take a look at any field — notably medicine. It’s nearly impossible to get better unless you fail, fail, and fail again.That’s how products in medicine get to market.  It’s the same with sales. Through testing, you become acutely sensitive of what works and what to change. You’ll have some awful calls in this period, but it shapes you for later.

Here’s a test. Ask your trainer to make a few cold calls in front of the team. Did they get a target decision maker on the phone? Were they able to move the conversation to an appointment? How ‘practiced’ are they?

3. “Set Aside Some Time for a Call” Is the Wrong Approach.

Some trainers focus on this: “set aside time to make your calls.” Again, this isn’t a strategy, it’s common sense. Plus, you need to keep your prospects in mind when you are picking the times to call. Just because Mondays and Wednesdays between 10-2 are convenient  for YOU to make calls won’t yield a high success rate if all of your prospects are busy at that time.

Higher Success Rate Tip: Understand the best times to call. For example, there’s a 164% better connection rate from 4-5pm local time zone than 1-2pm. Many people would totally miss that, assuming that prospects are checked out by 4pm. However, the best times to call are usually the AM. That’s just a random fact to showcase how people often don’t base decisions off real data. There’s tons of data out there about sales call optimization. Use it.

Additionally, leave voicemails. The voicemail may be dying, but it ain’t dead yet. And voicemail still counts as a sales touch. Also, follow up your calling activity with emails. Emails are ridiculously easy to send and customize in modern business. If you do 10 calls and don’t get a connection, send out 10 personalized emails later that day.

4. Warming Up for Cold Calling Sessions Isn’t Necessary.

Trainers will tell you to spend time warming up before you start making calls. You’re not a relief pitcher in the ALCS. You’re cold calling. Dive right in and start talking to people.  Smile, dial, use the trial and go the extra mile!

Higher Success Rate Tip: You do need some type of plan for how you’re prospecting. Ideally this plan would be strategic and group prospects a certain way according to potential need or market. But if you’re not at a strategic level yet, at least have an operational plan for calling. If you know you’re not a morning person, plan your calls for the afternoon. At 1pm, be ready to start dialing and conversing. When you have a plan, warming up becomes irrelevant.

5. Don’t Wait for the Rejection. Build It Into Your Conversation.

Many sales trainers tell you to write out potential rebuttals for different arguments, wait for the arguments, and deliver the scripted rebuttals. Sometimes this can work, but not as often as you think. Here’s a subtle distinction you need to understand. Objections happen at the closing stages of a sale and actually signify interest in your product or service. In the early stages, like when you’re cold calling, what you get is called a put-off. When you get a put-off, there’s a good chance that the prospect has already made up their mind.

Higher Success Rate Tip: Track your put-offs. What are the common ones? Pricing? Approach? Not right now? Once you know the common ones, you revise your messaging so that you address the put-offs before the prospect can bring them up. For example, if everyone is hitting you on price, get price out in the open quickly with some context. In doing so, you remove a put-off from the prospect’s table. They may still say “no”, but the conversation just shifted a bit, giving you a new window to explore.

Also, ask questions to overcome put-offs. There’s almost nothing better in sales conversations than the ability to ask intelligent, prospect-centric questions.

6. You Don’t Have Time for a Presentation.

I hate it when trainers over-focus on the presentation. In a cold calling context, there really isn’t a presentation. You have 4-7 seconds to get someone’s attention and 7-21 seconds to keep someone’s interest. That’s not a presentation.

That’s not even one slide.

Higher Success Rate Tip: Consider starting with an email. Introduce yourself, mention one connection point you have with the prospect, for example, someone on LinkedIn, explain what you’re selling, briefly mention where you see a value for the prospect, and say you’ll be calling within a specific time period..

Create affinity, build rapport, and connect!

The most common response you will get is “send me information”. That’s fine. It’s not even a put-off. Now you need to figure out what resources to send this person to move to the next step. Remember, humans are typically visual, so don’t send another text-driven email. Insert a chart, graph, product feature, or other another visual that will help capture their attention.

7. Encouragement Is Good. Coaching Is Much Better.

Bad sales trainers are usually cheerleaders, not coaches. If a Patriots wide receiver drops a ball and trots back past a cheerleader, she’ll probably say, “It’s OK, you’ll get it next time!” When that wide receiver gets to Belichick, what do you think he’ll say — if he even speaks to the guy?

That’s the difference. During a cold calling session, a mediocre sales trainer will give your sales rep a pat on the back and say, “Keep at it and you’ll get there.” That isn’t good enough. Good sales trainers are coaches. They will give your team communication ideas, listen in, and coach them to improve your cold calling skills.

Higher Success Rate Tip: Find a trainer who can listen in on your cold calling sessions, identify the areas where you fall short, and help you create a plan to improve those areas. You have a process for the way you sell. But realize that  you should have a process for the way you improve as well. If your organization isn’t getting ideas to build a documented improvement process from your sales trainer, then most of what they’re doing is feel-good fluff.

Hopefully the above 7 tips help you elevate your game and provide a little more substance than other blog posts and articles you’ve come across. Remember when you are prepared and hone your craft, success will follow.

For additional insights and wisdom into prospecting and the sales process, pick up a copy of Selling is an Away Game, available online at Amazon, fine bookstores and many Hudson News locations.

Sales Wisdom I’ve Discovered in my Career

Throughout my time in sales, I’ve researched numerous complex theories, process descriptions, tactics, and strategies. In addition to these, I have also come across a number of quips from sales gurus who try to encapsulate sales success in a simple phrase that can be easily understood, even by a 5th grader.

For example, Zig Ziglar was famous for saying, “Either you’re green and growing or you’re ripe and rotten.”

Not only is this a nice example of an analogy, but it’s a message to all salespeople, young and old, that you need to be learning new stuff all the time. Otherwise, you’ve reached the end of your useful life.

Throughout my training sessions, speaking engagements, and lectures, I’ve peppered my talks with my own version of these sales success tips based on my own experiences. In my book, Selling is an Away Game, they are referred to as “Lance-isms.” Here are a few you can use to put you on the path to your own sales success.

Sales Success Key: Be Your Own Architect. The World is Your Oyster.

This is one I actually heard from my father. I still use it in my sessions to impart upon salespeople that they have the freedom, power, and responsibility to visualize and create their own outcomes. They simply must do the work necessary to reach those outcomes. But as we teach in our sales leadership programs, people will work willingly in a world they help create. And they will work tirelessly to reach a goal they set. So, we coach and encourage salespeople to set meaningful and relevant goals that support the world they envision. In doing so, they find the motivation to propel themselves forward as opposed to having the sales manager hold their hands, constantly micromanage their activities, and sometimes even give them a push.

So, to sales leaders I say coach your people to be independent. Give them the responsibility to act.

And to salespeople striving for sales success, I say be your own architect. The world is your oyster.

Sales Success Key: Don’t Confuse Activity with Results

Back when I ran several training franchises in Ohio, I had a new sales rep who spent a lot of time developing a territory about 70 miles north of our office location. He cultivated some good leads, made some good contacts and we held a few training events in the area. But the trip there and back cost him over two hours every day.  That was over two hours every day that he wasn’t in front of a prospect. That was over two hours every day that he wasn’t selling. That activity may have been necessary to get him up to the area, but it wasn’t getting him the results that he wanted, more sales.

I see this all the time. Sales reps getting caught up in performing busy maintenance work, like updating the CRM – important functions to be sure. But these aren’t selling activities. These are maintenance activities. Remember, don’t confuse activity with results. Use activity to build habits and skills. Then use those habits and skills to get the results you want. If you aren’t getting results, build up some different habits and skills. But focus on getting the results you want. If you do that, you’ll have an easier time of identifying and performing the necessary activities.

Sales Success Key: Stop Spraying and Praying

I was once in the presence of a gifted sales rep who was producing mediocre results. The guy was able to read people quickly and easily. The challenge was in his selling method. He would sit across from the prospect, rifle through a list of features, and watch the prospect for a reaction. When he got a reaction, he would focus on the feature that got him the reaction.

The problem here is that you aren’t interacting with your prospect. You aren’t performing any type of diagnostic conversation. You aren’t helping them to identify and acknowledge their challenges. You’re simply poking them with a variety of sticks, looking for that one, magic stick that will make them jump.

And then you’ll keep poking them with that magic stick hoping for a sale.

Add to the fact that not every sales rep has the skill or temperament to read people that well. They are simply praying that something they sprayed will stick.

Look, to produce consistent results and achieve sales success, you must  be like a scientist or an engineer and adhere to a reproducible and repeatable process. Showing up at a prospect’s door, spraying out a bunch of product features, and praying that something will stick is not a recipe for reproducible results. Be investigative in your approach. Diagnose your prospect’s challenges. Design solutions that solve their challenges or create opportunities for them. And above all else, stick to your sales process.

Remember, If you have to pray for a result, your activity isn’t producing it.

For additional Lance-isms and ideas on achieving sales success, pick up a copy of Selling is an Away Game, available online at Amazon, fine bookstores and many Hudson News locations.

Buying Motives – Rocket Fuel for Driving Your Sales Process and Profits

Before we jump into buying motives and the buying process, let’s revisit the doctor’s office analogy for a review of the sales process.

When the doctor starts asking questions to diagnose your situation, the questions they ask are simple at the start. The questions they ask are based on their own general experience and their historical knowledge of you. For example, they might ask, “What’s your age? When was the last time you were seen by a doctor? How do you currently feel?”

The questions they ask get more specific and have more precision as the questioning process progresses. When the doctor is finished, they will perform an assessment of your responses to determine where the problems are and what might need fixing. Then, based on their experience, expertise, and assessment, they can arrive at a proper diagnosis and make the appropriate recommendations.

This is what we want to do in our questioning process to drive the sales process and profits.

In previous posts, we reviewed a questioning model that builds credibility and trust within the framework of the sales process. This questioning model has four outcomes it’s designed to identify:

This framework provides an overall strategy for your salespeople when they are conducting their sales calls. However, there are additional pieces of information they will need before they will be able to move the sales forward. And these pieces of information need to be tied to the prospect’s buying process.

Identifying the 4 Categories That Govern the Prospect’s Buying Interest

As mentioned before, there are a few more additional pieces of information your salespeople will need to know as they move the sale forward to closure. We’ve already reviewed a strategy that will allow your salespeople to actively build their credibility and reinforce trust. Now, we are talking about generating buyer interest that will drive the sale forward.

There are four areas of buyer interest that we can consolidate this additional information under. Let’s quantify these four areas under the following headings:

Here’s a quick rundown of these four areas of interest.

The Primary Interests

During the sales diagnosis when your salespeople are running through their questioning strategy, they should be able to isolate and identify the main reason the buyer is meeting with them. They should also realize that this is rarely the thing our sales reps are selling.

Your sales reps’ buyers want a solution to their problem. Either that or they are looking for a new opportunity to put them in a new direction. Your salespeople’s buyers buy product and services not because of what they are. Rather, they buy the result of your products. They buy what your products and services can do for them.

Put another way, no one buys a drill bit because they want a drill bit. They buy the drill bit to create a hole.

The Buying Criteria

Buying criteria are the basic requirements necessary to move the sale to close. If your sales reps do not meet these minimum requirements, they cannot move the sale forward. If the primary interest is the thing that the prospect wants and what your product or service will provide, the buying criteria are the required elements that provide context.

As your sales reps move in the field and deal with buyers, they will discover that most, if not all of their competitors have products or services that have similar or the same buying criteria. These are not the elements that you can differentiate your products or service on. But these elements are extremely critical and basic to the prospect’s buying interests. They need to be met just to get their foot in the door.

Some examples of buying criteria could be a low price, specific loan terms, favorable interest rates, or whether the buyer can go forward with no money down. Certain financing options could come into play, ease of use, or an all-inclusive package.

At the end of the day, these are the must haves, the necessary conditions before your product or services are considered an option for the buyer.

The Buying Motives

Next, we consider the buying motives, or the reason a buyer wants something. This is the compelling emotional reason for the buyer to make the decision to purchase, either from your salespeople or from a competitor. Most decisions have one compelling motive to move the sale forward: self-fulfillment, self-preservation, acquisition, relationships or recognition.

Buying motives will typically conform in one way or another to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – physical survival, safety, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization—at some level. It’s a concept that has been around since the 1940s, and it’s usually shown as a pyramid, with basic physiological needs at the bottom, and above them, some higher-order psychological needs.

We’ll touch on this again at a later point but remember that people buy with emotion and justify their purchase with logic. Emotion powers the buying process.

Other Considerations

Lastly, there are the other considerations. These are areas of interest that influence the buyer’s decision. They are not typically requirements of the sale, but if your product or service can meet these considerations, they do play a role in influencing the decision maker. These are the elements that set our products or services apart from the competition. When we understand these factors, we give ourselves a competitive advantage to providing the buyer with a unique solution.

An Example of Leveraging Buying Motives to Magnify the Buyer’s Interest

Here’s an example of how these concepts come into play during the questioning phase of the sales process. Let’s go back to the earlier post where I was buying the Adidas AlphaBounces. Buying the sneakers, the AlphaBounces, was my primary interest. Those shoes were the primary reason I was at that store. White shoes was a strong buying criteria that I was wrestling with. The fact that the shoes had to be clean was another buying criteria although not as strong since it was everyone else who kept putting it in my face.

But the salesman pulled out the buying motive when he said, “Ooooh! These are those shoes” and then painted a very compelling picture heightening the feeling and my desire to make the purchase.

This is a good example of what I said earlier about people buying with emotion. We are all emotional beings, and a salesperson sells to people. People buy on emotion, but they justify their decision using logic. That’s why your salespeople must know those emotional driving factors. It’s not an exact science. But the questioning process your salespeople through during the evaluation process helps the salesperson put the jigsaw puzzle together. That’s why it’s crucial for your sales team to have a solid questioning strategy.

But just because people buy on emotion doesn’t mean you need to sell that way. In the sales process, your team should always use logic and reasoning when moving forward in the sales process.

You’ll find more ideas on creating and leveraging buying motives in your sales process in Lance Tyson’s book, Selling Is An Away Game: Close Business and Compete in a Complex World available on Amazon. Get your copy today!

Previously, we reviewed a few of the classic sales closes and how they don’t work in our current sales environment. There are two other classic closes that we should review to understand how they fit into our new global sales environment.

The Opportunity Sales Close

Here’s a sales close that many organizations still use today. It goes by many names, such as the Impending Doom close, the Now or Never close, or the Opportunity Close. Or as I like to call it, the K-Mart shopper close: “Hey, K-Mart shoppers. Charmin toilet paper is on sale in aisle seven for the next forty-five minutes.  You can pick up a four pack for just forty-nine cents a roll.”

Often, organizations will try to pressure the prospect by giving them a tight time frame, or telling them if they act now, they will get a discount. Infomercials and timeshares are notorious for this kind of close. Our suggestion here is never to lead with this one, because it’s the most manipulative close that can you can use.

An Example of the Opportunity Close Gone Wrong

I once had somebody from a local Chamber of Commerce call me and try this close. We belonged to another chamber at the time, and she asked why we belonged to one chamber versus any of the other local chambers.

She had a great pitch. But I came back, and said, “Listen, doing business with you guys would be a little better with all the incentives you have. Essentially, though, if you can show me that I can get my health insurance like I do now through my current chamber, we’d definitely consider it.”

So, she comes back to me a couple days later, said it wasn’t a problem and asked, “Can we do this?”

It was around June at that time. I said, “Listen, we’re in. Our membership with this other chamber ends in December. We’re just not going to belong to two chambers at once, but I’ll send a letter, give my commitment, blah-blah-blah.”

She was cool about it. She came back in July. “Hey, I want to let you know that our chamber membership here starts August first.”

Then, she came back again in August. “Our chamber starts September first. I just had to let you know our membership fees are going up, and I really think you should take advantage of this.”

“That’s very thoughtful,” I said. “I really appreciate you thinking of me. We’re absolutely in. We’re just not going to belong to two chambers at once. It’s not responsible. We’re a small organization.”

She pushed back. “Lance, I really think this is a good deal.”

I said, “I do appreciate you thinking of me. I’m going to politely decline. We’re in the other chamber.”

What Went Wrong with this Opportunity Close

She came back a third time, but this time hard. I said, “Hey, are you open for some coaching?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, number one, I never gave you the price objection. The only thing I said was we shouldn’t belong to two chambers at once. I told you we’re in. You said we could do it. We’re going to do it. I just don’t want two memberships at once.”

She hits me again with, “I just think this is a great deal.”

“Whoa.” I said. “Stop. Now I’m kind of pissed off. What makes you think I won’t get this discount later.”

“Well, you won’t,” she said.

“Now that you’re challenging me, oh, trust me, I will get the discount when I sign up. Whether or not you get the deal will be completely up to how hard you push me one more time. But I’ll get the rates in December that you’re pitching me now.”

“I don’t think you will.”

“Well, I probably won’t be going through you, but I will call the chamber directly.”

The end of the story? I ended up getting the rates that I wanted. But the point is she just came in too hard with that Opportunity Close. Because the fact is, every objection isn’t over money. My objection wasn’t about money. It was about logistics.

This is why you need to listen to your prospect’s objections and focus less on trying to force the sale with fancy sales closes.

Don’t make this mistake. Download the objections playbook here and navigate sales objections with finesse.

The Balancing Close

The last close I’ll point out involves weighing competing points. It’s what we call a Balancing Close.  It’s also known as the Ben Franklin close because it’s right out of Ben Franklin’s playbook.  In fact. I can’t overstate that, next to Selling is An Away Game, the best sales book you’ll ever read is Ben Franklin’s autobiography. He’s the only American philosopher we had. And he’s one of our only inventors and philosophers.

How did Ben Franklin make decisions? Ultimately, he weighed things. He basically made decisions after considering all the pros and the cons. So, on any major decisions he needed to make, business or otherwise, he would make a T-chart and list the pros on one side and the cons on the other.

If the cons outweighed the pros, he wouldn’t do it. If the pros outweighed the cons, he would go forward.

Well, there’s something to be said about that in sales, because in sales, most decisions are made by weighing and balancing out the value of the outcomes against each other. Remember, people can’t establish value on what they can’t compare and contrast. When I , I compared the value of having them as opposed to not having them.

As salespeople, that’s one of our tools that gives us the high ground. It allows us to help our prospects go through the sales process and weigh options against one another. This works when selling to buying groups and it works when selling to individuals. Because that’s exactly how they’re going to make a decision.

Classic Sales Closes are Based on Decision-Making Tools

As pointed out earlier, these sales closes don’t work in today’s sales environment. Your prospects and clients have too many options, they have too much information, and unfortunately for us, they’ve already decided by the time they’ve contacted us.  So, trying to manipulate the prospect into buying at the end of the process will only insult them.

Consider this: The pros and cons list is a standard decision-making tool taught in management and sales leadership courses. Why not use this tool in the dialogue stage of the sales process or to resolve a sales objection where it can do some good? Why wait until the very end of the process to bring one of your most potent tools to bear?

These classic sales closes are based on standard management and leadership decision-making tools, packaged in a cutesy name and compiled into a big sales cookbook. These sales closes aren’t there to make the prospect’s life easier. They are there to make the salesperson’s life easier.  I submit to you that if you’re executing your sales process, and you can see things from the prospect’s point of view, you can use these tools to build momentum throughout the sales process all the way to its natural conclusion.

Remember, closing is based on the momentum you’ve built up until that point. And just like with the plane, it’s going to land. How smoothly it lands is all a matter of how well you did in guiding it toward the runway.

For more ideas on closing the sale, check out Lance Tyson’s book, Selling Is An Away Game, available on Amazon. Get your copy today!