Books Unwound

This is part of an in depth review of  The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies, by Chet Holmes.  We will focus on 1 section at at time and distill the best information to help your business now.  This should not be considered a replacement for the actual book, which will usually have a lot more in depth information as well as stories, which are an important way to communicate the essentials.  If you find the information in these posts helpful, I recommend buying the book or borrowing it from your library.

Chapter Ten: Sales Skills

6 Steps to Closing the Sale

This chapter provides a lot of in depth information about sales skills and the steps to take when closing the sale. As always, I will try to highlight the best information. Sales is an area that can use work in a lot of businesses, even ones that don’t technically have a sales force.

Many businesses leave the sales process up to the salespeople. This results in a wide array of approaches, most of which are ineffectual. The superstar sales people are naturals at putting repeatable systems in place. But you can’t cross your fingers and hope that your sales staff will figure it out. You need to build a system for sales just like you need to build systems for everything else in your business.

Here are Chet Holmes’ six steps to closing the sale.

Step One: Build Rapport

This seems like a wrinkled old sales concept at first. But Holmes is actually talking about building relationship. He suggests that you build rapport before the sales pitch. No funny baloney sales chatter. Endeavour to become friends with your clients.

One great way to build rapport is to start the whole sales process through an event or party. Get the prospects to come to you and to enjoy themselves. Get to know them a little and then move toward the sale.

Here are some great ways to get a relationship going:

• Ask questions and be interested in the answers
• Be humorous
• Share their pain
• Show that you care (by really caring)
• Find out where your lives intersect (common interests)

Step Two: Find Out the Need

Your success in sales will increase dramatically if you are addressing the buyer’s need. At a company level, you can find out the needs of your ideal customers by conducting a survey. On the sales level, there should to be enough flexibility to recognize unique need and respond accordingly.

Always seek out the need before you try to sell. If you don’t, you may be wasting your breath selling something that the buyer does not need. Or maybe you are not hitting on the need that your product solves that is most important to the buyer.

From a system standpoint, you should develop a list of questions to ask that will help sales people identify buyer needs. Then, you need to train, with scripts and materials, the answers to those needs.

Step Three: Show Value

Once you know the need, you can show the value of your product or service. The value should be directly related to the need.

Value not only shows the prospect that you can answer their need, but it shows the prospect the bigger picture. At this point you might share testimonials or your core story. This is where you begin to hook the buyer. This is also where you would provide an education to the buyer. This all goes toward establishing your business as the leading expert in the industry.

Step Four: Create Desire

Once you have shown value, you need to focus on getting the prospect to want what you have to offer right now. There are many things you can do. The goal is to bring into focus the need and the plan to solve the need. You can walk the prospect through a series of questions which will let them talk themselves into your solution. You can present market data that makes a decision obvious. The important thing is to get the prospect to see the negative impact of not acting and the positive result of acting.

If you can reframe the prospects current situation so that it is no longer acceptable to them, you are within a breath of getting the sale. So, spend time doing just that. Show them a better way and make them see that where they are at is not where they want to stay. Holmes points out, “if your prospects are comfortable with the current situation, they are not motivated to change.”

Step Five: Overcoming Objections

Objections threaten to derail any sale. The first thing you need is a system to identify objections in the qualifying stage of the sale. This can go hand in hand with finding out the need. By finding out the need and asking a few questions, you can usually understand what common objections may come up and then neutralize them.

There will be times when hidden objections come up before the close, and you need to have a plan to handle them.

First, view every objection as an opportunity to close. This isn’t hubris. Instead, its about executing a good plan. When a prospect says that they want to buy, but then list something that is standing in the way, you have been giving a golden opportunity. They have basically agreed to buy from you, you just need to have an answer for their objection.

When you get an objection like this late in the game, you need to always agree with it validity. This will disarm the prospect and give you the opportunity to work together on solving the objection.

The next key step, and one that is often missed, is to isolate the objection. Ask if this objection is the only thing standing in the way of a purchase. If the answer is yes, you know that if you can solve the objection, you will get the sale. So you need to let them know that they have a valid objection, and then ask them if it is the only thing standing in the way of making a purchase.

Now you ask the prospect if they will buy if you can find a way to neutralize their objection. If the answer is yes, you are very close to getting the sale. You just need to show them how you will overcome the objection. There are many ways to do this, from showing them data to changing the pricing structure to adding on a little extra service.

Step Six: Close the Deal

There are lots of tricks and practices for closing the sale. But the best thing that Holmes says here is that people are usually bad at making decisions, and that it is your job to help them make a decision.

Most people are very happy when they buy something. Think about when you buy something. You are usually excited to get it and use it. The same goes for all buyers. As long as you are not selling a scam or a lemon, you should be proud that you are helping make buyers happy. You are solving a problem, filling a need, or satisfying a desire.

The reason most sales people have a hard time closing has nothing to do with they buyers. It has everything to do with the self esteem of the sales person. If a sales person has low self confidence and a fear of rejection, he will not do a very good job closing the sale.

The trick is to refocus on what you are providing to the buyer. You are providing a great product or service, yes. But you also need to provide them with help making a decision that will benefit them. Once you realize that people have a hard time making a decision, even benefiting decisions, you will see how important the role of a sales person really is.

Closing the deal is about all of the prior steps, but as a step unto itself, it is just helping the prospect make the right decision.

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Coming next: Chapter 11 – Follow Up and Client-Bonding Skills

Buy or Not: This book is a buy.  It can be used as a manual for reshaping your business which you will refer to time and again.  Buy this book at Amazon.

Bradford Shimp helps small business owners and entrepreneurs build successful businesses.  Read his blog at www.allbizanswers.com.  Follow Bradford on Twitter.

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