10/04/2024
Hello there, Mr. or Mrs. Reader. Since you are already here reading this post, may I ask you a question? Would you like to buy an elephant I am selling? I’ll sell it to you at a great price. The entire elephant is only $29.99 if you buy it today. Would you like to purchase it? No!? Why the heck not? You should buy this elephant; it is the best price I’ve ever sold an elephant for. Wouldn’t you let me ship it to your home?… NO you say!? Are you a crazy person!?
Here's the point: Many people have heard the phrase, “Always be closing,” but it’s never really made clear exactly what that means. When you give a thorough sales presentation, but wait too long to ask for the prospect’s purchasing decision, you will sound an awful lot like the first example in the above elephant story to the customer. You have nowhere to go but to keep asking for the order and trying to overcome objections. Selling this way is the quickest way to make sure every one of your prospects feels mountains of sales pressure. Since you have already told them every feature and benefit about your product, there is no new information to share, resulting in you awkwardly just asking for the sale over and over again, hoping to magically overcome their every objection.
Waiting to ask for the sale until the end of your time together, or more commonly, being too timid to ask early on whether the customer would like to buy your product or not, is a mistake many salespeople make. Even after giving the best presentation in the world, if you wait too long to ask for the sale you’re left with absolutely no where to go if the customer says “no.” To them, by the end of your sales sequence, an elephant is an elephant—they’ll either want to buy it or not and often times you’re only left with price negotiations to possibly still close the prospect. The problem with this is, after desire (whether interested or not interested) has been established in their minds, price is rarely important enough to close sales.
To dramatically increase the odds of selling your product to people, you must ask (or imply) early and often that the customer should own your product. This is what “Always be closing” means. Having several additional product details to share with your prospect along your journey together keeps them interested enough to continue a conversation with you (the most important part of successfully selling) while learning more and more about your product’s compatibility to their lives.
New information is always required for someone to make a new decision. That’s what we’re attempting to do with every customer, like learning later that the elephant is only six inches tall, or most importantly, that it is made of solid gold. To give you a more applicable example than selling an elephant, let’s pretend for a moment that you sold social media marketing, and a new prospect calls you to inquire about your services.
Customer: Hello, I’m interested in social media marketing for my business. Can we talk about that?
Salesperson: Hello there, and congratulations for taking this first step! Social media marketing supercharges your influence, and you’ll love its effect on your business. Tell me a bit more about your business.
Customer: (Talks about their business)
Salesperson: Wow, yeah, you should totally do it! Whether it is with us or somebody else, I’ve seen proper social media marketing do wonders for many businesses similar to yours. You’ll love it. Tell me, what are you looking to accomplish?
If you noticed, in the above example I closed the prospect early (already three times!) about the idea of getting social media marketing, not on my specific product or price.
Many readers may initially think this to be too aggressive, but in reality, it’s not one bit salesy. If said genuinely enough, statements like these come across to the customer only as if you are very excited for them and a very firm believer in the services you sell—both of which are great things. See, many sellers incorrectly focus on differentiating themselves from the competition, when in reality, if you just focus on the customer’s great idea to own the category of the product or service that you are selling, and actively let them know that you’re nearly as excited as they are about this process, they’ll go with your solution every time.
Many of the times people don’t buy things from you is because they don’t end up buying at all, or are making their decision solely based on price. Swimming in the prospect’s brains with them, to actually feel the excitement and true reasons for their interest in shopping, then making them commit to the decision of buying something, is what will win you the job every time.
