Ch 2: Obtaining Commitment - Closing the Sale
[2] Obtaining Commitment: Closing the Sale
The Huthwaite research shows that success in the major sale depends, more than anything else, on how the Investigating stage of the call is handled. But not everybody would agree with this conclusion. For many writers, Obtaining Commitment is the most important step of a successful sale. When we were beginning our research, not knowing where to start, I approached a number of experts for advice. These people—writers, trainers, and experienced sales managers—generally suggested that we should start with Obtaining Commitment, or closing, as they generally called it. Closing, they told us, was the stage of the sale where the most crucial elements of success would be found, so that’s where we should begin our research. I was particularly impressed by this consensus on closing, because these experts didn’t seem to agree about very much else. Consequently, our first research studies centered on closing, with the objective of finding which closing techniques were most effective in the larger sale.
Like all researchers, I began by reading, looking for some useful clues to guide our investigations. I spent a couple of weeks in the library searching for all I could find about closing the sale. I plowed through more than 300 references. Every book on selling had at least one chapter on closing. Some, like “101 Sure Fire Ways To Irresistibly Close Any Sale,” had, as the author so modestly put it, “a lifetime’s experience of closing success packed into a mere three hours of reading.”
I was fascinated. Here were magic answers to the problems of generating business. The closes I read about included the good old standard techniques that every seller knows, such as:
Assumptive closes. Assuming that the sale has already been made, one asks, for example, “Where would you like it delivered?” before the customer has agreed to buy.
Alternative closes. One asks, for example, “Would you prefer delivery on Tuesday or Thursday?”—again before the customer has made a purchasing decision.
Standing-room-only closes. One says, for example, “If you can’t make a decision right now, I’ll have to offer it to another customer who’s pressing to buy it.”
Last-chance closes. One says, for example, “The price goes up next week, so unless you buy now,...”
Order-blank closes. One fills in the customer’s answers on an order form, even though the buyer has not indicated a willingness to make a buying decision.
In addition to these bread-and-butter techniques, I found a whole encyclopedia of more exotic closes, such as the Sharp Angle, Ben Franklin, Puppy Dog, Colombo, and Double-reverse Whammo. My initial research uncovered literally hundreds of closes, and in the intervening years I’m sure that new closes have continued to appear with impressive regularity. Just last month I was reading an airline magazine that mentioned the Banana Close—a new one for me—and on the same day my junk mail contained a hard-to-resist invitation to learn more about the Half-open Close—a hidden secret of sales success that I’d somehow missed.
No other area of selling skill is as popular as closing. This is true however you measure it, whether by number of words written, number of instructional hours, or number of feet of training films endured by each new generation of salespeople. I was once told by a leading editor that he wouldn’t publish any book on selling unless it had the word closing in the title. In surveys of sales managers, asking them what skill they would most like to increase in their people, closing has always emerged a clear winner. So there seems to be widespread support for the old selling proverb, “The ABC of selling is Always Be Closing.” In this chapter I’m going to be asking:
How many of these closing techniques actually work?
In larger sales, how do such factors as price and buyer sophistication influence the success of closing?
What Is Closing?
Unfortunately, very few of the writers who have so persuasively filled volumes on how to close have defined the term closing. Crissy and Kaplan wrote a number of articles in the 1960s where they called it “the tactics used by the salesman to induce purchase or acceptance of the proposition.” As a researcher, I find this definition too broad. At Huthwaite we needed a more limited, and more precise, way to define a closing behavior, so in our studies we defined closing as:
A behavior used by the seller which implies or invites a commitment, so that the buyer’s next statement accepts or denies commitment.
In more digestible English, a close is anything that puts the customer in a position involving some kind of commitment. This definition covers the whole spectrum from simply “asking for the order” to using the wildly complex “12-step staircase” technique.
The Consensus on Closing
Closing is a fertile area for sales gurus. Before I review Huthwaite’s studies, let me introduce some of the points that other experts have made.
J. Douglas Edwards, called by his disciples “the father of closing,” suggests that, on average, successful sellers close on their fifth attempt and that the more closing techniques they use, the more successful they are likely to be.
Alan Schoonmaker is even more specific about the success of closing. He, too, claims that research shows that successful sellers close more often and use more types of closes. And like J. Douglas Edwards, he favors the magic number 5, saying that “you haven’t done your job if you quit without asking for the order at least five times.” I paid particular attention to Schoonmaker because, at the time, I was developing a training program on the larger sale for IBM and I knew that he was working on a similar program for one of IBM’s competitors.
P. Lund, in his book Compelling Selling, advises you to close whenever possible—“even when you’re miles away from the order.” Another popular writer, Mauser, is more restrained, advising you to have a considerable number of closing techniques at your disposal so that if one fails, another can be used “until it is hoped one eventually hits the mark.”
I could go on, but I think I’ve made the point. The consensus among writers on selling seems to be this:
Closing techniques are strongly related to success.
You should use many types of closes.
You should close frequently during the call.
Starting the Research
I started my research into closing in the late 1960s. At the time I was still a university researcher, and the only thing I knew about selling was that it was an interaction between people where money changed hands—and so I reckoned I should be able to find companies who would give me research funds to find out how to make that money change hands more quickly. I was right. Large multinational companies were interested and I got my funds.
Talking with Salespeople
My next step was to meet with as many salespeople as possible. I spent a lot of time in branch offices, meetings, and informal gatherings just listening to people talking about selling. I was surprised how often, and how enthusiastically, the conversation turned to closing techniques: “I heard a good close the other day,” they’d say, or “Have you tried the Gelignite Close?” or “You know the old ‘my pen or yours?’ routine? Well, last week.…” I was convinced that a good indication of the usefulness of a sales technique would be whether salespeople talked about it on their own time. By this measure, closing was certainly emerging as a winner.
But that’s not all: at about this time I was involved in an evaluation study of some training programs being run for experienced sellers. I questioned participants and found something that further convinced me that closing might well be the most important of all selling skills. The average participant could list four different closing techniques but was unable to give more than one technique for opening the sale or for handling objections. Less than half of the people I questioned could specify a single technique for investigating customer needs beyond just “asking questions.” The group seemed to know more about closing than about everything else in selling added together.
Closing for Real
Talking to other people certainly influenced my opinions. But there’s nothing so powerful as a real-life personal experience—which was what finally convinced me that closing is by far the most important of all selling skills. I had left my safe university job and had set up the Huthwaite organization. Now, I realized, selling wasn’t just an academic study for me. I had to sell my services or go hungry. So I enrolled in a sales-training program—and paid particular attention to the area of closing techniques.
In the week following the program, I had an appointment with a potential client with whom I’d been talking for several months in an attempt to sell this client a research project. I decided to try an Alternative Close. I’ll never forget the result. “Would you prefer the project to begin in September or in November?” I asked, a little nervously. “Let’s start in September,” my client answered—and I’d gotten my first big sale. I was delighted. I said the magic words and was rewarded with an order. I doubt if even J. Douglas Edwards, the father of closing, could have been more enthusiastic about closing than I was at that moment. For more than a year after my first success, I closed the hell out of everyone. I now realize that I probably cost myself and my company a lot of lost business during that year. But at the time I was a totally convinced hard closer. After all, my personal experience showed that using an Alternative Close had given me my first big piece of business. I knew closing worked.
I look back on my enthusiasm for closing with real embarrassment. From what I now know about success in the larger sale, I see closing techniques as both ineffective and dangerous. I’ve evidence that they lose much more business than they gain. What made me turn against methods that seemed so important to my own success? The rest of this chapter describes the series of studies that finally convinced me that traditional closing techniques have no place in larger sales.
Initial Research
We started our research at Huthwaite with the clear expectation that we would find a strong positive link between the number of times a seller closed and whether or not a sale was made. I confidently expected that the magic number of five closes per call, which both Edwards and Schoonmaker recommended, would turn out to be correct.
Unexpected Results
Our first study took place in a large office-equipment corporation. One way to establish a link between closing and success, we reasoned, would be to travel in the field with sellers and watch how many times they used a closing technique during the call. If the writers on closing were correct, we should expect to find that calls with a lot of closes would be more successful than those where the sellers didn’t close so often. We went out and watched a total of 190 calls. From these we took the 30 where the sellers had closed most often and compared their success with the 30 calls where the sellers had closed the least.
As shown in Figure 2.1, the results were not what we’d expected. Only 11 of the high-close calls resulted in a sale, while 21 of the low-close calls did so. This finding wasn’t exactly good news for the often-quoted “ideal” figure of five closes per call. But I wasn’t discouraged: one small study certainly couldn’t shake my faith in closing. Perhaps, I reasoned, there was something wrong with our methodology. Further examination of our results did reveal some potential weaknesses. For example, it’s possible—just by chance—that the low-close calls were on customers who were prepared to buy anyway, so the seller didn’t need to close; similarly, the high-close calls might have been on more resistant customers. Another problem was that our sample, although statistically significant, was small. We had no way to control for intervening variables.
Figure 2.1. Success of high-close versus low-close calls.
Clearly, just on the basis of this study, we couldn’t conclude that closing techniques were ineffective. In a letter to my client explaining our findings, I wrote, “We have not yet succeeded in demonstrating the link between closing and success.” But, looking back, we couldn’t call this study a resounding victory for the “close early, close hard, and close often” school of selling.
Uneasy Feelings
Research isn’t only numbers. By watching closing in 190 calls, I’d begun to get some uneasy feelings that I couldn’t quantify. If I’m honest with myself—though I’d not have confessed it at the time—my first misgivings about closing could be traced back to this study. For example, I noticed a distinct antagonism from some customers, especially professional buyers, when any closing technique was used beyond simply asking for the order. In one of the calls, the seller and I were thrown out by an angry customer after an interchange like this:
SELLER: So, Mr. Robinson, you see that our product is clearly best for you—if you’ll just sign here. (Assumptive Close)
BUYER: Just a moment—I don’t see... I haven’t decided.
SELLER: But, Mr. Robinson, I’ve shown you how we can improve the efficiency of your office and save you trouble and also money—so if you could decide when you’d like delivery.… (Assumptive Close)
BUYER: I’ll do no such thing. I’m not making a decision this week.
SELLER: But as I’ve explained, this model is in great demand. I can let you have one now, but if you wait till next week, there could be a several-month delay. (Standing-room-only Close)
BUYER: That’s a risk I’ll have to take.
SELLER: Would you prefer a month’s trial installation, or would it be better for your budget to buy outright? (Alternative Close)
BUYER: I’m going to throw you out of my office. Tell me, would you and your friend in the corner prefer to go of your own accord, or would you like me to call security?
As the seller so ruefully remarked to me after the call, it doesn’t seem fair when the buyer uses an Alternative Close to throw you out. We met several episodes like this one and they were enough to sow those first seeds of doubt about closing, particularly in the larger sale.
Attitude Problems
At about this time I had an opportunity to look at closing from a completely different angle. The marketing director of a major chemical company approached us with a problem.
“I’m worried,” he said, “about some of my salespeople. They’ve got a wishy-washy attitude toward closing sales. They’re not aggressive enough. I know that they can close—they’ve had training—it’s just that some of them have an attitude problem. Can you help?”
It was too good an opportunity to miss. My colleagues and I agreed to devise a closing-attitude scale to compare the salespeople’s attitudes with their sales records, hoping ultimately to devise an attitude test that could be used to screen new applicants. Those who scored high on our closing-attitude test should have a greater sales potential. The marketing director and I expected, of course, to find that sellers who had a favorable attitude toward closing should be making more sales.
In order to find the attitude of the 38 members of the sales force, my colleagues and I measured their level of agreement (or disagreement) with 15 key statements about closing. The method we used is what’s commonly called a Lickert Scale. If you’re the kind of person who likes to test yourself, you’ll find that I’ve included the scale as Appendix B to this book, together with instructions for how to score your own attitude toward closing. You’ll probably get a truer picture of how you feel about closing at present if you score the scale now, before you’ve had a chance to be influenced by the rest of this chapter.
When we used this test in the chemical company, we found that 21 out of 38 sellers had a score above 50, which we had taken to be the minimum score for us to classify their attitude as “favorable.” We then compared the sales results to find out whether the group that had a favorable attitude toward closing was, in fact, making more sales. We were taken aback by the results, which are shown in Figure 2.2. As you can see, those sellers with a favorable attitude toward closing were below target, not above it. Our hopes for a closing selection test were dashed. What’s worse, the marketing director didn’t believe the results and threatened to fire me unless I could come up with something more convincing.
Figure 2.2. Attitude to closing and sales results.
As you might imagine, I tried hard to explain away our findings. It was possible, I argued, that those people whose results were poor were made more anxious by being given the test. As a result, they may have cheated and filled in the scale the way they thought management wanted—thus giving those with bad results a falsely positive attitude toward closing. But this sounded unconvincing, even to me. I was beginning to have doubts about the effectiveness of closing.
While we were carrying out this study, a number of research teams all over the world were investigating the links between attitude and behavior. Their results, particularly those of Martin Fishbein,^1^ were indicating that you can’t use attitude scales to predict behavior accurately. Fishbein was showing, for example, that just because you get a high score on the closing-attitude scale, it doesn’t mean that in actual sales calls you’ll close more often than those who have a less favorable attitude. Our own research in other areas was confirming that the links between attitude and behavior were much weaker than we’d imagined. Consequently, we were moving more and more toward methods for directly observing sales behavior. We were glad to leave attitude and questionnaire studies behind us. The best test of how people actually perform is to watch them in action. Our development of new behavior-analysis methods would, we hoped, allow us to do this and would provide us with much more solid evidence about the effectiveness of closing.
But even though we found some respectable reasons to dismiss our chemical company study, I was still worried. The little data we had gathered was showing some very puzzling things about closing effectiveness. We needed more studies.
The Effect of Training
An ideal opportunity for further research on closing came when a hightechnology company asked us to evaluate some intensive training in closing that it was designing. The company wanted us to answer two questions:
Did sellers close more often after the training than before it?
Was there a relationship between increased closing and sales success?
We were delighted to be presented with another opportunity to test the contribution of closing to sales success. We went out on 86 calls with a group of 47 sellers before the training took place. We wanted to find their existing levels of closing.
After the training, we went out with the sellers again, this time to find out whether their use of closing had increased and what effect this had had on the results of their calls. Once again, closing turned out to be negatively related to success. After the training, the sellers used more closing techniques—so in one sense the training was effective. However, because fewer of the calls succeeded, the overall effect of the training was a decrease in sales (Figure 2.3).
Figure 2.3. Effects of training in closing on success.
By now we were much less surprised. Finding an association between closing and lost sales was getting to be a habit with us. The trainers we were working with, on the other hand, certainly didn’t expect results like these. They were taken aback and advanced several ingenious explanations for the fall in results. We were forced to take very seriously one of the possibilities they put forward. They argued that, by definition, any new skill feels awkward and uncomfortable. Before the training, the sellers were behaving in their own natural way; after it, they were trying to use new techniques and, inevitably, were not coming across so naturally to their customers. This, the trainers argued, could cause a temporary drop in sales results.
We found this possibility plausible enough to concede that we still didn’t have conclusive evidence on the effectiveness of closing. But at least we could test out the idea that the fall in sales resulted from a temporary unnaturalness. What if we went out with the sellers again after 6 months? By that time the new closing skills would have become part of their natural selling style. We could test whether they were still using the closing techniques and, if so, what impact this was now having on the success of their calls. Everything was arranged for what I hoped would be the first conclusive study of closing effectiveness.
Then, a month before the research was due to begin, the company announced a massive reorganization of its sales force. With all the changes, there was no point in going ahead. Another great research study bit the dust and, once again, we found ourselves out in the market looking around for a new company that would give us facilities for studying closing.
A Glimmer of Light
It was while I was searching for a client to sponsor new studies of closing that I came across a claim by one of the big training companies that its program in closing increased sales results by more than 30 percent. In the study we’d just completed, we’d found that training in closing caused a fall in results. How was it that this company was achieving success? Could it be using closing techniques that were more effective than the ones we’d been investigating? I managed to get hold of its program and was surprised to find that it didn’t contain anything new or different. In fact, it used a considerably less sophisticated approach than the one we’d been evaluating.
So I made contact with the company and challenged it to show me the evidence supporting its claim that training in closing could bring a 30 percent increase in sales. As it happened, the company’s “research” consisted of letters from satisfied clients, one of whom had said that after the training there had been a 30 percent increase in results. There was no hard data. But there was an important clue. The satisfied clients were all organizations whose size of sale was very small. The 30 percent claimant, for example, was a company selling magazine subscriptions door to door. Then it struck me. All of Huthwaite’s studies of closing had been in larger sales. Could it be possible that closing techniques worked when the sale was small, but failed to work as the size of the sale increased?
The more I thought about this idea, the more I liked it. There were very good theoretical reasons for believing that this might be true. Closing is a method of putting pressure on the customer. And psychologists now understand quite a lot about the impact of pressure on making decisions. Put very simply, the psychological effect of pressure seems to be this. If I’m asking you to make a very small decision, then—if I pressure you—it’s easier for you to say yes than to have an argument. Consequently, with a small decision, the effect of pressure is positive. But this isn’t so with large decisions. The bigger the decision, the more negatively people generally react to pressure.
I make this sound like some great new discovery, but of course it isn’t. Since the dawn of history, would-be seducers have known that the effect of pressure is negatively related to the size of the decision. The hopeful young man who uses an Alternative Close such as “Would you prefer that we sit here, or shall we sit over there?” will usually succeed because he’s asking for a small decision. However, the classic Alternative Close of “My place or yours?” has a far lower hit rate because the decision it asks for is much larger.
If my theory was correct, then the larger the decision, the less effective the closing techniques were likely to be. But how could we test this? Was there a way to set up an experiment to test the effectiveness of closing as the size of the decision grew larger? I didn’t want to set up artificial laboratory experiments, yet I didn’t know how to validate the idea in any other way. Then one day we were presented with the perfect opportunity on a plate.
The Photo-Store Study
A leading chain of photographic stores had just decided to train its salespeople in closing techniques. This had been a controversial decision for the chain, and not all of its senior management liked the idea. One of the managers had attended a seminar where I’d spoken rather skeptically about closing. He was from the antitraining faction—and he secretly brought us in to test whether the new training was going to be effective.
It’s never ideal when clients ask you to do research designed to prove that their preconceptions are right. Normally this is the kind of assignment we avoid. But everything else about this research opportunity was so perfect that I just couldn’t turn it down. The really attractive element was the store’s policy of rotating its salespeople. One day a seller would work at a counter that sold cheap goods, such as films, tapes, and accessories. The next day the same person would move to one of the counters where more expensive goods were sold, such as high-priced cameras, hi-fi equipment, and videos. We had the perfect way to control for the impact of decision size on closing success. When the store trained its people, we could observe the impact of the training one day when they were selling cheap goods and then, with the same people and the same training, observe them the next day when they were selling goods on the expensive counters. It was ideal.
Closing and Decision Size
Using the methods taken from our earlier studies, we watched the salespeople at work before the training took place. We measured three things:
1. Transaction time. How long did each sale or attempted sale take?
2. Number of closes. How often did the seller use a closing behavior during the transaction?
3. Percentage sale. What percentage of the transactions resulted in a purchase?
First, let’s look at the results collected when people were selling low-value items (Figure 2.4). Before training in closing, the average transaction time was just over 2 minutes, the seller used an average of 1.3 closes, and 72 percent of the transactions resulted in a sale. What was the effect of the closing training? As you can see, after training the transaction time was shortened, the number of closes increased, and so did the success rate. As a busy store owner, I would be delighted with a result like this. The shortened transaction time means that I can serve more customers or use fewer staff. What’s more, although the increase in sales from 72 to 76 percent isn’t big enough to be statistically significant, it is in the right direction. Not only is the sale faster, but it also looks to be more successful.
Figure 2.4. Closing and price: low-value goods.
We, too, were impressed with these results, if only because it was the first time in our research that we’d found anything positive about closing techniques. But the real test was yet to come. Would the training in closing be equally successful with higher-value goods?
We observed the same salespeople after the same training. The only difference was that they were now selling more expensive items. We found that the transaction time after the training was shorter and that the number of closing behaviors predictably increased (Figure 2.5). But what about the success rate? Before the training, 42 percent of the interactions we observed had resulted in an order. This was much lower than the success rate with cheaper goods, but it was hardly surprising. People don’t usually come into a store to look at a roll of film and say, “I’ll go away and think about it,” although this often happens with more expensive purchases. However, the figure that interested us was the success rate after training. We found that the program in closing, which had increased the success with cheap goods, had reduced the success with more expensive goods from 42 percent down to 33 percent.
Figure 2.5. Closing and price: high-value goods.
Two Conclusions
How should we interpret these results? The first finding is that, with both high- and low-value goods, the average transaction time is reduced as the number of closes is increased. So we can draw the conclusion:
By forcing the customer into a decision, closing techniques speed the sales transaction.
This would be an important finding—and a big plus for the use of closing techniques—if your business were a low-value retail operation or involved door-to-door selling of low-value products. If there’s a queue of customers waiting for your attention, or an infinitely long street with doors on both sides just waiting to be knocked on, then the shorter the sale, the more customers you’ll be able to serve.
But this is not usually the problem in larger sales. You normally want more time with each customer, not less. In most major-account sales forces, the most common complaint is that you can’t get enough time with the right people. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone in larger sales say, “How can I cut down on the time I’m spending with key decision makers?” However, a number of companies have called Huthwaite in to advise them on ways to increase sales time with customers. My point’s a simple one: In small sales it’s generally desirable to keep the transaction time short; in larger sales—for a whole variety of reasons—a shorter transaction time has few advantages and many penalties.
The second conclusion we can draw from our study is about the relationship of closing to price:
Closing techniques may increase the chances of making a sale with low-priced products. With expensive products or services, they reduce the chances of making a sale.
As we’ve seen, this conclusion comes not only from our research but also from the general psychological rule that pressure is more likely to be effective with small decisions than with larger ones. The average price of the high-value goods in our study was just $109. That’s peanuts compared with the average decision size in most sales organizations I work with, or for most readers of this book. But if closing techniques become ineffective in a $109 sale, then they are likely to be even more ineffective as the size of the decision climbs into the tens or hundreds of thousands. You might argue, of course, that spending $109 of your own money may feel just as big a decision as spending $10,000 from a company budget. And you might be right—nobody really understands the complex psychology of perceived decision size. But the general rule remains. Closing techniques, like all forms of pressure, become less effective as decision size increases.
Closing and Client Sophistication
It was clear from our studies that closing is less effective as the size of the decision increases. But is this just because of price factors? I wondered whether there might be some other reasons. On the whole, large purchasing decisions are made by more sophisticated customers—such as professional purchasing agents or senior executives. These people see dozens of sellers each week and may even have been through sales training themselves. Could it be that a closing technique that might work on a less experienced buyer would be ineffective or even have a negative effect on customers who were more sophisticated?
My first indication that this might be true came when I was working with the central purchasing department of British Petroleum. I’d been observing their buyers at work, doing research from the other side of the table. One of the BP senior buyers was particularly ill-disposed toward the use of closing techniques. “It’s not closing itself that I object to,” he told me, “it’s the arrogant assumption that I’m stupid enough to be manipulated into buying through the use of tricks. Whenever a standard closing technique is used on me, it reduces the respect between us—it destroys the professional business relationship. But I’ve got my own way of dealing with it, as you’ll see.”
The following day I was watching an attempted sale and saw the buyer’s method in action. The seller was in the vending machine business and supplied plastic cups. At one point in the call he used an Assumptive Close, saying “Mr. P., you’ve agreed that our cups are cheaper than your present supplier, so shall we make our first delivery of, say, 20,000 cups next month?” The buyer said nothing. He opened a drawer in his desk and slowly took out a box of 3 × 5 index cards. He shuffled through the box and selected one with [ASSUMPTIVE CLOSE] typed on it, placing it face up on his desk. “That’s your first chance,” he said. “I give people two. If you use just one more closing technique on me, then it’s no sale. Just so you know what I’m watching for, look through these cards.” And he handed the cards across his desk to the seller. On each card a well-known closing technique was typed. The seller went pale—but didn’t try closing again.
Was this buyer an exception? Some monster with a perverted hatred of closing? I don’t think so. Most professional buyers have an unfavorable view of closing techniques. I once trained professional buyers from three large organizations in a program that developed negotiating skills. I circulated a questionnaire among 54 of these buyers that included the question:
If you detect that a seller is using closing techniques while selling to you, what effect, if any, does this have on your likelihood of buying?
Their answers were:
More likely to buy 2
Indifferent 18
Less likely to buy 34
Nobody knows better than I do that this type of questionnaire data isn’t a very reliable guide to actual behavior. But despite all the limitations of this kind of evidence, closing techniques certainly don’t seem to be favorites with professional buyers. I’ve seen a number of books and training programs which claim that sophisticated buyers react very positively to the use of closing techniques because it’s a sign that they’re dealing with a professional. That’s dangerous nonsense. There’s not one scrap of evidence to back that sort of assertion. The few existing research studies all suggest that the more sophisticated buyers react negatively to the use of closing.
Closing and Post-Sale Satisfaction
In Chapter 1, I pointed out that one of the characteristic differences between small and large sales is that larger sales usually involve some form of ongoing relationship with the customer. Your job doesn’t just end with the order. So it’s an important question to ask what effect closing has on the post-sale relationship. Unfortunately we’ve never had an opportunity to study this in larger sales. However, we did help one retail organization carry out a consumer goods study that proved to have some disturbing implications for sales of any size.
The training manager of a retail chain had attended a seminar run by Huthwaite on behavior measurement, and he was keen to try his hand at some research. He asked me for help in choosing a suitable project. “How about a study on closing?” I suggested. Some of the salespeople in his organization had been trained in closing techniques, so he decided to investigate whether customer satisfaction after the purchase was related to the seller’s training in closing.
Between 3 and 5 days after the purchase, he and his team followed up 145 customers and asked them to rate, on a 10-point scale:
Their satisfaction with the goods they had purchased
The probability, if they were to make similar purchases in the future, that they would buy from the same store
As shown in Figure 2.6, the sellers who had been trained in closing had lower satisfaction ratings on both questions. What does this mean? The most likely interpretation is that, in using closing techniques, the sellers put pressure on customers to make a decision. Most people are less satisfied with decisions that they feel they’ve been pressured to make than with those which they believe they’ve made entirely of their own free will. This suggests that there’s even more reason to be cautious about the use of closing techniques in larger sales, where the customer’s post-sale satisfaction may be an important factor in future selling success.
Figure 2.6. Closing and customer satisfaction.
I could, of course, criticize some elements of this study. For example, it doesn’t have any behavioral data collected during the actual sales themselves. And there’s another possible weakness—the store had trained more of its younger people than its most experienced sellers. So perhaps this study is saying that customers are less satisfied with purchases from more junior salespeople. But despite any criticisms of its methodology, this study is one of the very few that has ever tried to collect data on the relationship between sales training and post-sale satisfaction. Until more detailed studies comes along, I advise you to heed its warning.
Why Is the Rest of the Army out of Step?
For several years after I’d collected all this data about the effectiveness of closing, I was very reluctant to share it with people. As I showed early in this chapter, closing was not only seen by the majority of writers to be the most important part of the sale, it was also almost a religion with many salespeople. On the few occasions when I’d mentioned these findings in public, I’d had a bad reception. I was once pulled off the stage by an angry sales trainer in Los Angeles who didn’t like the research I’ve presented here. History is full of stories about researchers whose ideas aren’t recognized at first, but it wasn’t the rejection that worried me. My concern was that it didn’t seem possible that I was right and so many others were wrong. Experienced salespeople, their managers, their trainers, and the experts who write books on how to sell aren’t fools. How could they be devoting so much time and energy to a set of techniques that not only don’t work but, in larger sales, are actively counterproductive? What’s so compelling about closing?
What Makes a Compulsive Closer?
The answer came to me during a seminar I was running with the California management consultant Roger Harrison. In one session that Roger was conducting, the topic was ineffective behavior patterns and their causes. He explained to the class that sometimes people continue to do things that don’t bring results, all the while believing strongly that what they are doing is effective. “Hmm, like salespeople who believe in closing,” I thought. Roger went on to suggest that there are only two reasons why people would continue to behave in an unsuccessful way. Either they are crazy or there’s something in their environment that’s rewarding and encouraging the use of the ineffective behavior.
The more I thought about this, the more it gave me the explanation I’d been looking for. I remembered the time when I, too, had been so enthusiastic about closing. How did I get “hooked” into becoming a hard closer? It all went back to the time I nervously tried my first Alternative Close: “Would you prefer the project to begin in September or in November?” In replying “Let’s start in September,” my client rewarded my use of a close by giving me the business. I said the words—I got the order.
When I stopped to think about it, closing behaviors were the only ones, out of the 116 we studied in our research, that were directly rewarded or reinforced by orders. Like so many other salespeople, because my close was rewarded with an order, I’d somehow assumed that using the close had caused the order. Of course, from what I now know, it was the way I’d developed my client’s needs that had brought me the business. It had nothing to do with my close. The project would have gone ahead with or without my new closing technique.
At last I understood why closing received so much attention in selling. It was the most immediately rewarded of all sales behaviors. Ask the customer a good question that develops needs and you don’t instantly get rewarded with an order. But use some magic closing catch phrase at the moment of decision and—some of the time—you’ll get a rewarding “Yes, I’ll buy.” (Incidentally, any reader who understands the theory of reinforcement will also recognize that “some of the time” rewards are even more powerful than “all of the time” rewards in causing a behavior to continue.)
As a result of this insight, I became more comfortable about our research and its implications. It was indeed possible that our research was right and most of the rest of the world was out of step. Since our studies, of course, many other people have come to the same conclusion that closing techniques are ineffective or even damaging in larger sales. I’m delighted nowadays, when I talk to people about closing, to find that I no longer get the antagonism that our work once aroused. I’ve been seen by many people as a sworn enemy of all closing techniques. If J. Douglas Edwards is the father of closing, I’ve sometimes been described as its assassin. But that’s not quite fair. In low-value sales, given unsophisticated customers and no need to develop a continuing customer relationship, closing techniques can work very effectively—and I’ve no criticism of their use. But I’m assuming that, as a reader of this book, your business comes from the larger sale, that you deal with professional buyers, and that you form lasting relationships with your customers. If so, then closing techniques will make you less effective and will reduce your chances of getting the business.
But You Must Close
It may sound as though I’m saying that you shouldn’t try to close the sale—that because closing techniques are ineffective, you should somehow wait for the sale to close itself—but clearly this doesn’t work either. Many sales managers have groaned inwardly as they’ve listened to their less experienced people reach the Obtaining Commitment stage of the call and then fail to close. They’ve heard something like this:
NEW SELLER: So, is there anything else I can tell you about this product? CUSTOMER: No thanks. I think you’ve answered all my questions.
NEW SELLER: Good. Good. You’re sure there’s nothing else I haven’t covered?
CUSTOMER: Not that I can think of.
NEW SELLER: OK (horrid pause) uh ... perhaps I didn’t mention that it’s got dual voltage.
CUSTOMER: Yes. Well I’m overdue for another meeting and ...
NEW SELLER: (with some desperation) It’s also got an instruction manual in Spanish... if you need Spanish.
CUSTOMER: Look, Mr. Newman, I’ve got to go.
NEW SELLER: Um. Are you sure I’ve answered all your questions?
What’s wrong here? An inexperienced salesperson is afraid to bring the call to a conclusion and, as a result, the customer is getting impatient.
This certainly happens in real life—and it’s often noticeable in the selling of professional services. We’ve worked with First National Bank of Chicago, using Huthwaite’s models to train calling officers. David Zehren of First Chicago, while agreeing with us that closing techniques are generally overused in major industrial sales, points out that in banking there’s often the opposite problem. “We haven’t had a problem with excessive use of closing techniques,” he explains. “If anything, we feel it necessary to lean in the other direction. Customers expect it. They get irritated by calls that don’t have a clear understanding of what comes next.”
David Zehren isn’t the only one to voice this concern. We’ve worked with several of the big eight accounting firms, and their training staffs share the same perception. If the overuse of closing is a problem in many industrial and capital goods sales, then its total absence may be an equally severe problem in some service industries. While most of our clients fully accept that the most crucial part of the sales call is developing needs, those in the professional services area justifiably want their people to take a stronger role in obtaining commitment from customers.
Sales training, over the years, has clearly put much too great an emphasis on closing. But it would be equally unfortunate if we let the pendulum swing so far the other way that we began to teach people never to close at all.
There’s hard data to support the conclusion that an absence of closing can be a real danger. We conducted some research with Bob Boyles of American Airlines to find out whether the complete absence of closing was even less effective than closing too often. Boyles and his team had been experimenting with some of our behavior-analysis techniques in American Airlines to monitor the skills of their sales agents.
The success rate in calls with no closing whatsoever was only 22 percent, compared with a 61 percent success rate in one-close calls (Figure 2.7). Notice, however, that the least successful calls were those with more than two closing behaviors, where the success rate was below 20 percent. So it seems that, despite all the disadvantages of closing techniques, calls with no closing whatsoever are unlikely to be effective.
Figure 2.7. Number of closes versus success rate.
Where Do We Go from Here?
The American Airlines investigation involved relatively small sales. Although I’m not sure whether we’d have found the same results in a comparable study of major sales, this research does raise an important issue. The seller must obtain some kind of commitment from the customer for the call to be a success. But how can you get a commitment from your customer without risking the penalties that come from using closing techniques?
Everything I’ve written so far in this chapter is about how not to obtain commitment. I’ve said that traditional closing techniques are ineffective or have a negative effect when:
The sale is large, involving high-value goods.
The customer is sophisticated: for example, a professional buyer.
There is a continuing post-sale relationship with the customer.
All that I’ve said suggests that closing techniques are not the best way to obtain commitment from the customer in a major sale. But what should you do? As we’ve seen, doing nothing isn’t effective either. The sale doesn’t close itself.
Obtaining the Right Commitment
The first step in successful closing is to set the right objectives. The starting point for obtaining a commitment is to know what level of commitment from the customer will be needed to make the call a success. If this book was about simpler sales, then there wouldn’t be much need to explain what success means or to worry about its detailed definition. In a simple sale, a successful commitment is an order—and if you don’t take an order, you’ve failed.
So, closing in a simple sale can have one of two outcomes—an Order, where you take the business, or a No-sale, where the customer turns you down. But as the sale becomes larger, it’s not so straightforward. In major sales, relatively few calls result in an Order or a No-sale. Earlier I mentioned the case of a friend in the aircraft industry who went for 3 whole years without taking an order. At the same time, he didn’t have any outright refusals that could be called No-sales. All his calls were somewhere in between. They made slow but modest progress toward his ultimate goal—an order in several years’ time.
In most major-account sales forces, fewer than 10 percent of calls result in an Order or No-sale. In these larger sales it becomes more difficult to judge whether a call has been closed successfully. For example, suppose you’re selling me a computer software package to help me with my inventory control. At the end of the call, I say to you, “Look, I’m convinced that your inventory system is what we need. But I can’t make such an important decision alone, so I’d like to fix for you to come back next week and talk to our production controller.” It’s clear that the call has achieved something, yet it hasn’t resulted in either an Order or a No-sale. It’s somewhere in between. However, because it’s brought about another meeting, perhaps we could say that the call has been successfully closed.
But can we say this about every call that results in an agreement to a further meeting? Suppose, after you’ve explained the benefits of your inventory system, I say, “I’m not sure. Perhaps we could talk about it again some other time. Why don’t you call me in a few months to fix another meeting.” It’s quite possible that I’m agreeing to a future meeting just to get rid of you. When you call next month you won’t be able to get through to me and the meeting may never happen. Just getting an agreement to a future meeting isn’t an adequate measure of whether you’ve closed successfully.
Defining Closing Success in Larger Sales
So what’s the test of closing success? What’s the result, or outcome, that allows us to say that one call has been successful while another has failed? In our early research at Huthwaite we took the coward’s way out. We said that a call was successful if it met its objectives. But I soon discovered that the amazing human capacity to rationalize away unwanted events would make this definition unworkable.
I’d been traveling with a sales rep in New York City. We made a disastrous call on a customer who became so irritated with the sales rep that we were asked to leave. Afterward, as we stood on the sidewalk recovering from the experience, I was filling in call details on my research form. In response to the question “Did the call meet its objectives?” I wrote, “No.” This upset the sales rep mightily.
“But I did meet my objectives,” he protested. “I decided, part way through the call, that we didn’t want to do business with this guy because he sounded like a poor credit risk. So, rather than insult him by telling him this directly, I engineered things so he threw us out. In this way I was able to terminate the call without the embarrassment of explaining that I couldn’t do business with him because his credit was poor.”
Over and over again, in our early research, we had salespeople respond in this way, telling us that whatever happened in the call had been exactly what they had planned. Call objectives can too easily be rationalized afterward to fit the events. Obviously we needed a better criterion of closing success than the simple question “Did the call meet its objectives?”
Our next attempt was a little better. We asked the seller to give us objectives in advance. We then assessed whether the call had succeeded in meeting the objectives we’d been given. In this way we were able to prevent sellers from rationalizing away their failed calls. But it wasn’t a perfect system. I remember one person telling me in advance that the objective of her call was “detailed exploration of the customer’s organization structure.” At the start of the call, the customer unexpectedly revealed that, as a result of an evaluation his firm had carried out, he had decided to place a major order with the seller. She and I walked away, an hour later, with all the paperwork completed for $35,000 of business, but she didn’t find out a single thing about organization structure. Yet one could hardly say that the call was ineffectively closed just because this initial objective hadn’t been met.
We still needed a better way to measure closing success.
The method we finally chose involved dividing the possible outcomes of the call into four areas (Figure 2.8):
Figure 2.8. Call outcomes and sales success.
Orders
Where the customer makes a firm commitment to buy. “We’re 99.9 percent likely to buy” would not be an order, as generations of sales managers have wearily pointed out to their new and inexperienced people. To be an order, the customer must show an unmistakable intention to purchase, usually by signing some kind of paperwork. Needless to say, calls that result in orders are less common in larger sales than most sellers would like. So there are relatively few occasions when you can close for the order.
Advances
Where an event takes place, either in the call or after it, that moves the sale forward toward a decision. Typical Advances might include:
A customer’s agreement to attend an off-site demonstration
A clearance that will get you in front of a higher level of decision maker
An agreement to run a trial or test of your product
Access to parts of the account that were previously inaccessible to you
All of these represent an agreement with the customer that moves the sale forward toward the ultimate decision. Advances take many forms, but invariably they involve an action that moves the sale forward. In larger sales the most common objective of closing would normally be to obtain an Advance. Successful closing in the major sale starts by knowing what Advance you can realistically obtain from the call.
Continuations
Where the sale will continue but where no specific action has been agreed upon by the customer to move it forward. These calls don’t result in an agreed action, yet neither do they involve a “No” from the customer. Typical examples would be calls that end with a customer saying:
”Thank you for coming. Why don’t you visit us again the next time you’re in the area.”
”Fantastic presentation, we’re very impressed. Let’s meet again some time.”
”We liked what we saw and we’ll be in touch if we need to take things further.”
In none of these cases has the buyer agreed to a specific action, s there's no concrete sign that the sale has progressed. In our studies, we classified calls that closed with Continuations as unsuccessful. This may strike you as a little unfair. After all, it seems harsh to say that a call has been closed unsuccessfully if the customer says positive things, such as “We’re impressed” or “That was a great presentation.” However, having worked closely with buyers over the years, I can no longer accept positive strokes and compliments as reliable signs of call success. Too often I’ve seen customers make these positive noises at the end of a call as a polite way to get rid of an unwanted seller. In our studies we wanted closing success to be measured by actions, not by nice noises. That’s why we classified Advances as successful and Continuations as unsuccessful. Whether a call has been successfully closed should be judged by customers’ actions, not by their words.
No-sales
Our final category is where the customer actively refuses a commitment. At an extreme, the No-sale customer makes it clear that there’s no possibility of any business. In a lesser way, it can be a No-sale if the customer won’t agree to a future meeting, say, or denies your request to see a more senior person in the account. The test of a No-sale is that the customer actively denies you your principal call objective. There’s not much dispute that a call resulting in No-sale should be classified as unsuccessful.
Why am I making such a fuss about the different outcomes of a sales call? “Surely,” a critic might say, “only researchers are interested in defining call outcomes. There’s nothing useful here for helping people close more sales.” On the contrary. Our studies of top salespeople consistently showed that they had a clear understanding of these different outcomes and that they used this understanding to help them close calls more effectively by turning Continuations into Advances. What’s more, by understanding what kind of Advance would be required to make a call successful, top people set the kind of realistic closing objectives that moved major sales forward.
Let me illustrate this by contrasting the performance of two salespeople, each selling industrial pumping equipment. First, let’s look at John C. He’s relatively inexperienced, having spent only a year in major sales. In this extract from an interview with him, judge for yourself whether he’s clear about the difference between an Advance and a Continuation and whether he understands how this difference relates to success in closing the call:
[INTERVIEWER:] What were your objectives for this call?
[JOHN C.:] Oh,... to make a good impression on the customer.
[INTERVIEWER:] “Good impression”?
[JOHN C.:] Well, yes, making the customer feel positive about us.
[INTERVIEWER:] And any other objective?
[JOHN C.:] To collect data.
[INTERVIEWER:] Data? What kind of data?
[JOHN C.:] Oh, useful facts. Stuff about the account. Just general information.
[INTERVIEWER:] And were you trying to get a specific action from the customer?
[JOHN C.:] No. Like I say, it was mostly building a relationship and finding facts.
[INTERVIEWER:] In your judgment, how successful was the call?
[JOHN C.:] Quite successful, I think.
[INTERVIEWER:] Why do you say that?
[JOHN C.:] Well, for example, the customer said he was impressed by my presentation.
[INTERVIEWER:] Did the customer agree to any actions as a result of the call?
[JOHN C.:] Uh,... no. But I think he liked my presentation.
[INTERVIEWER:] So what will happen next with this customer?
[JOHN C.:] We’ll meet again in a couple of months and then we’ll take things further.
[INTERVIEWER:] But, looking back on the call you just made, the customer didn’t agree to an action that moved the sale forward?
[JOHN C.:] No. But I’m sure the call contributed to building a good relationship with the account. That’s why I think it was a successful call.
John C.’s reaction is typical of inexperienced sellers. He thinks he’s closed the call successfully because he received some positive strokes from the customer. But, turning to our definitions of call outcomes, his call has resulted in a Continuation. There’s been no specific action agreed upon by the customer that progresses the sale. Like many new salespeople, John’s call objectives—collect data and build a relationship—don’t directly contribute to getting an Advance. After I traveled with John, his manager told me, “You know what John’s problem is? He’s a weak closer. I wish someone would teach him a few good closing techniques.” I’d prefer to say John’s problem was that he didn’t know what Advance he was seeking from the call. Consequently, he didn’t have anything to close for. His problem was one of call objectives, and there’s nothing that closing techniques could do to help his success until he was clearer about the difference between a Continuation and an Advance.
In contrast, let’s hear Fred F., one of the company’s top salespeople, talking about his approach to a typical call:
[INTERVIEWER:] What were your call objectives?
[FRED F.:] I wanted to get some movement because I knew we’d meet competitive pressure and I didn’t want to let the grass grow under my feet.
[INTERVIEWER:] Movement?
[FRED F.:] Yes. You see, I feel that if a call’s worth making, it’s got to do something—to push the sale forward in some way. Otherwise, you’re wasting both your time and the customer’s.
[INTERVIEWER:] Could you give me an example of a call objective that shows this “movement”?
[FRED F.:] Sure. In this case what I wanted was to get their chief engineer to come to our factory for a feasibility discussion with our technical people. Now that takes the sale a step forward—and it would also mean that while he was talking with us he wouldn’t be spending time with the competition.
[INTERVIEWER:] And was the call successful?
[FRED F.:] Yes and no. I didn’t get their chief engineer because of some internal issues. So in that sense I failed. But during the call I saw a chance to go forward in another area. The customer told me that they’ve just gotten the go-ahead to build a new plant in Jersey. They’re setting up a project team to write specifications and choose suppliers. So I asked him if he’d call the team’s hydraulics engineer and fix a meeting for me.
[INTERVIEWER:] And he did?
[FRED F.:] Yes, we meet on the 23d.
[INTERVIEWER:] And that moves you forward?
[FRED F.:] Of course. It puts me in on the ground floor. On the 23d I’ll try to get their hydraulics guy to specify us as a supplier both for pumps and specialist pipework.
Notice how Fred F.’s objectives were about getting an action, or Advance, and that he judged the call’s success in terms of the movement it produced. It’s this action-oriented approach that characterized the successful people we studied. They wanted Advances, not Continuations. It was their clarity about what constituted a realistic Advance that allowed them to know what they were closing for in the call. People who consistently aim for Advances rather than Continuations are often described by their managers as “good closers.” In fact, their success comes from how they set call objectives rather than from how they close. Fred F. was highly regarded by his management as a strong closer, but in the several calls we made with him we didn’t see him use any closing techniques.
I’m often asked by sales managers for advice on how they should coach their people to close more successfully in major sales. The simplest and most effective advice I can offer is this: Teach your people the difference between Continuations and Advances, and help them become dissatisfied with setting call objectives that result only in a Continuation.
Setting Call Objectives
The secret of strong closing in a major-account call is to question your objectives ruthlessly. Don’t be content with objectives like “to collect information” or “to build a good relationship.” Of course, these are important objectives—after all, every call affords opportunities to collect information and to improve relationships. The problem is that objectives of this kind just aren’t enough. They lead to Continuations, not to Advances. They may lead you to close for the wrong objective.
In your call planning, always include objectives that result in specific action from the customer—objectives like “To get her to come to a demonstration,” “To get a meeting with his boss,” or “To get an introduction to the Planning Department.” In this way you’ll be planning like the top salespeople in our study. You’ll be looking for Advances, not for Continuations.
Obtaining Commitment: Four Successful Actions
But however well you set your call objectives, you’ve still got to gain the customer’s commitment and acceptance. Huthwaite’s studies of success in the major sale show that effective salespeople use rather simple and straightforward ways of obtaining commitment. We found that there are four clear actions that successful people tend to use to help them obtain commitment from their customers:
1. Giving attention to Investigating and Demonstrating Capability. Successful salespeople give their primary attention to the Investigating and Demonstrating Capability stages. In particular, they take much more time over the Investigating part of the call (Figure 2.9). Less successful sellers rush through the Investigating stage; as a result, they don’t do such an effective job of uncovering, understanding, and developing the needs of their customers.
Figure 2.9. Four stages of a sales call.
You won’t obtain commitment in a major sale unless the customer clearly perceives a need for what you offer. The most effective people we observed were the ones who did an outstanding job of building needs during the Investigating stage. As a result of the questions they asked, their customers came to realize that they had an urgent need to buy. You don’t require closing techniques with a customer who wants to buy. So the first successful strategy for obtaining customer commitment is to concentrate your attention on the Investigating stage of the call. If you can convince buyers that they need what you are offering, then they will often close the sale for you.
2. Checking that key concerns are covered. In larger sales, both the product and the customer’s needs are likely to be relatively complex. As a result, there may well be areas of confusion or doubt in the customer’s mind as the point of commitment nears. Less successful sellers go ahead and close, ignoring the possibility that their customers may still have unanswered questions. This is often how they’ve been taught to sell. Most sales-training programs actually recommend that you use closing as a means of bringing doubts or unanswered questions to the surface, but this is not what successful salespeople do. We found that sellers who were most effective in obtaining commitment from their customers would invariably take the initiative and ask the buyer whether, there were any further points or concerns that needed to be addressed.
From our observations, a doubt or concern that is given in response to a closing technique tends to be antagonistic, as this brief example illustrates:
[SELLER:] (using Assumptive Close) ... so I’ll arrange for our technical people to set up a demonstration next week.
[BUYER:] (who has an unresolved concern) Hey, wait a minute, I’m not sure whether I’m ready for a demonstration.
[SELLER:] (using Alternative Close) Then would it be better if, instead of setting it up for next week, I set it up for the week after?
[BUYER:] (feeling pressured) Now, not so fast. You still haven’t explained how this leasing arrangement would work. What are you trying to hide?
By using closing techniques, it’s true that the seller has brought the customer’s concern to the surface. But was it necessary to do so in such an antagonistic way?
A more successful seller would have checked that all key concerns were covered before trying to bring the call to a conclusion. For example:
[SELLER:] (checking that all key concerns are covered) Well, I think that covers everything, Ms. Brown. But before we go further, could I check whether there are any areas that you feel I should tell you more about?
[BUYER:] Yes, you haven’t mentioned the terms of the leasing arrangement.
[SELLER:] Then let me cover that now. The way it works is...
In this example, the customer’s concern has been brought to the surface by the seller’s initiative. Instead of being an antagonistic protest from the buyer, it has become a simple query.
3. Summarizing the Benefits. In a larger sale the call may have taken several hours and covered a wide range of topics. It’s unlikely that the customer has a clear picture of everything that has been discussed. Successful salespeople pull the threads together by summarizing key points of the discussion before moving to the commitment. In smaller sales, the use of a summary may not be necessary, but in a larger sale it will almost always be a helpful way to bring key points into focus just before the decision. So, summarize key points—especially Benefits.
4. Proposing a commitment. Many books on selling point out that the simplest of all closing methods is just to ask for the order. Consequently, the phrase “asking for the order” is a common one in sales training. But from our studies, “asking” is not what successful sellers do. In all the other stages of the sale, asking behaviors are much more successful than giving behaviors—as we’ll see later. But it’s here, at the point of commitment, that successful sellers don’t ask—they tell. The most natural, and most effective, way to bring a call to a successful conclusion is to suggest an appropriate next step to the customer. For example:
[SELLER:] (checking key concerns) Is there anything else that we need to cover?
[BUYER:] No, I think we’ve discussed everything.
[SELLER:] (summarizing the benefits) Yes, we’ve certainly seen how the new system will speed your order processing and how it will be simpler to use than your present one. We’ve also discussed the way in which it can help you control costs. In fact, there seem to be some impressive benefits from changing, particularly as a new system would get rid of those reliability problems which have been worrying you.
[BUYER:] Yes, when you add it all up, there’s a lot of value to us from making the change.
[SELLER:] (Proposing a commitment) Then I might suggest that the most logical next step would be for you and your accountant to come and see one of these systems in operation.
How do you know which commitment to propose? Put simply, there are two characteristics of the commitments proposed by successful salespeople:
- The commitment advances the sale. As a result of the commitment, the sale will move forward in some way.
2. The commitment proposed is the highest realistic commitment that the customer is able to give. Successful sellers never push the customer beyond achievable limits.
I’ve saved the last word on closing the sale for an old friend and colleague of mine, the Swedish consultant Hans Stennek. At a time when my research was controversial and was generally rejected by most people in selling, Hans was very supportive. “I’ve never been a believer in closing,” he told me, “because my objective is not to close the sale but to open a relationship.” I couldn’t have said it better.
^1^ Fishbein, M.; Ajzen I., Attitudinal Variables and Behavior: Three Empirical Studies and a Theoretical Reanalysis, 1970, Washington University, Seattle.