When I first got into selling I was told that to be successful I would have to learn how to CLOSE the sale. Indeed in that company, there was an elite group called “THE CLOSERS”.

This was a small band of highly experienced, highly regarded sales people, whom I was told, knew the “secrets” of closing the sale. Their powers were mystical and their fame legendary.

I was in awe of them, and occasionally had an opportunity to accompany one of them on a sales call to observe up close the magic they could work.

Mostly this involved asking confronting questions, bamboozling the prospect with clever answers to their objections, and then using silence to apply pressure.

I couldn’t believe the audacity of these manoeuvres.

I remember sitting in silence one day for at least 5 minutes waiting for one prospect to respond to a particularly confronting close. 5 minutes sitting in silence is a very long time. Try it sometime and you’ll see what I mean.

It was embarrassing… and it worked!

I just couldn’t see myself being that high pressure. I thought to myself, “I’m not going to make it if I have to do that”.

The truth is, high pressure, tricky closing techniques used to work, and to some extent they still do.

This is one of the reasons that many sales people and sales managers still believe that the most important phase of the sales process is closing the sale. Frankly I disagree.

Almost every week sales people tell me that if I could show them how to close, then they will immediately become more successful.

Some Sales Managers invite me to speak at their Sales Conferences and tell me that what their sales people need, is to be shown more effective ways of closing the sale.

Mistakenly they believe this will provide the much-needed “magic wand” for immediate success.

30+ years in sales and training sales people have taught me…

The 5 SECRETS to closing the sale

I’ll share these with you in a future article,

In the mean time have a great week – make it a great week.

Stumble it!