It takes a combination of sales strategy, talent, and trust to close a sale. This concept holds true both for B2B and B2C sales professionals, regardless of the degree of complexity in the sales process.
The close is, of course, the most important part of a sale, and yet many salespeople are not specifically trained in this particular art of the sale, and as a result may be missing opportunities to make deals because they are just not quite going about trying to close sales properly.
When it comes to sales training closing techniques can indeed be taught, and that is exactly what we do in any and all of the sales trainings we offer at Pearl Lemon Sales.
Understanding the customer’s needs early in the sales cycle is critical to successfully closing a sale.
It’s vital to take a proactive strategy to include all stakeholders in the buying decision and regularly analyze the viability of the opportunity in order to plan your next best move.
While regularly assessing and strategizing their approach for moving the opportunity forward to closure, sales professionals should keep the following points in mind.
To enhance the case for why the consumer should buy and why the consumer should buy from them, the sales professional must continually seek chances to engage and influence stakeholders.
By creating relationships with the decision-making group and using those relationships to create alignment and drive consensus, the sales professional can keep the momentum going toward the close.
These goals are easier to achieve for salespeople who are mindful of their customers’ purchase process. This can be a complex thing, and without specific sales training closing techniques it may not be something salespeople, even very good ones, are confident about doing the right way.
Specific sales training in closing techniques teaches salespeople about the basic purchase process from the customer’s point of view. What does that look like from a very basic standpoint?
The customer’s purchasing journey isn’t always smooth; momentum shifts, stops, and even reverses. Timelines grow hazy, and parameters take on new forms
The basic steps of the purchasing journey should be recognizable to most salespeople:
Examine — Do we need to take action?
Investigate – What options do we have?
Evaluate — What should we do?
Ensure — Are we certain?
Negotiate and Commit — How can we get the best deal?
What has changed is that the Internet and easy access to more pre-purchase information than ever before means that customers are often far better prepared going into the purchase process, and there are now secondary processes within each phase we covered above.
Integration: As the consumer continues to learn and integrate new information into their thinking, new stakeholders are brought into the process.
Refinement: As the client gains clarity on the issue and results, the integration of information and people causes them to refine their thinking around the need and best-fit solution.
Finally, they must align and realign stakeholders in diverse emotional states with a range of needs around the decision to buy and the best-fit solution, using their improved thinking and possibly a change in requirements or decision criteria.
These changes in the consumer purchase process indicate that the customer is doing more to understand the solution’s risk/reward profile, compare one provider to another, involve all stakeholders, use provider competition as a bargaining weapon, and evaluate the solution’s potential ROI on a regular basis. All of which can seem to pose additional challenges to salespeople trying to close a deal.
No matter what they are selling, and to whom, salespeople need to know how to close. We offer lots of different sales training programs at Pearl Lemon Sales, but they all include a focus on the art of the close. Just what sales closing skills can you expect your sales people will learn and home when working with us? Here’s a look at some of the most important:
Understanding Consumer Needs: Salespeople will learn how to effectively conduct research and brainstorm dialogue to find, explore, and develop customer needs and purchasing criteria, then translate those needs into actionable recommendations.
Asserting Perspective: We teach salespeople how to present a point of view in such a way that it reframes thinking, allowing the customer to avoid unnecessary pauses, make the best judgments, and achieve the business goals they require swiftly and efficiently.
Obtaining Consensus: Salespeople will learn how to determine and traverse the needs and opinions of various stakeholders in order to lead the buyer to a choice and to differentiate the solution and selling organization, clearly positioning its value as it relates to the buyer’s demands.
Resolving Customer Issues: We show your sales team how to get to the source of the customer’s objections and offer a solution that builds trust and moves the sale forward without compromising terms or reducing the deal amount.
Presenting Effectively: Presentation is key when on the journey to closing a sale. Sales training from Pearl Lemon Sales teaches students how to articulate value in a clear and concise manner that serves multiple demands.
Control: While it’s important to make a customer feel like they are in control, in reality a good salesperson is always the one driving and controlling the negotiation process. We show students how to maintain control of the negotiation and steer it toward a mutually beneficial resolution that benefits the seller and protects the relationship.
Your sales team is a driving force behind both your business’ survival and its future growth prospects. Salespeople who have undergone sales training in closing techniques close more deals, which means more revenue for you and greater job satisfaction for them, a bonus in itself, as employee turnover not only disrupts the flow of your sales strategies but cuts into that bottom line you are trying to increase.
Whatever your current sales challenges, sales training from Pearl Lemon Sales can help you overcome them.
Contact us today to learn more about just how we can help you.
If you have any questions, please do get in touch with us! If you’d prefer to speak directly to a consultant, book a call!