I was listening to a sales podcast and the expert guest was lampooning some typical closes as outdated, insulting and useless. He was relating how early in his sales career he had come across these closes and they didn’t work. Naturally he had written his one book with a better alternative. I was thinking about what he said and asked myself are these typical closes actually outdated or not? Everything is contextual so it is hard to give a bullet proof undertaking, but I think they still work and it is all in how we deliver them that makes the real difference.
All of this discussion presupposes we have done a proper job in all the stages of the sales cycle leading up to asking for the business. We must have developed trust with the buyer. That means we have worked out the stye of business communication they prefer. Are they super direct or do they want to have a cup of tea together and get to know each other first? Are they highly detail oriented or do they prefer big picture discussions and don’t want to get into the weeds?
Have we dug deep enough in asking questions to fully understand their needs or are we missing some crucial insight. Often buyers won’t share all their dirty laundry with a salesperson they have only just met and they keep key information from us. That means our proposed solution may not fit their needs perfectly and we won’t get the deal done. Did we explain our solution in terms which makes sense to their situation and they can see how they can adapt it into their company? When they raised some issues were we able to deal with them fully and eliminate all concern and doubt?
All of these conditions have to be met, before we raise the issue of buying the solution we are proffering. Once we get to this stage, we can vary how we ask ,based on the client and how the preceding conversations have played out. If the client is the direct type, then we can ask a very direct question such as “shall we go ahead?”. They won’t be offended and will prefer we get moving, because for them time is money.
If they are a “let’s have a cup of tea” type then something less direct might be needed. We can ask a question which requires them to make a decision for something in the future. The alternative of choice close works well here. We can say, “I know that planning and coordination within your firm are both important aspects of why you are so successful as a business, so to help me serve you properly, would you like to start next month or would the month after that be better for you?”. You will notice I set this question up. I didn’t just say, “Shall we start this month or the next month?”. It is best to link the phrasing of the question to the context of the conversation, to make sure you are demonstrating you are sensitive to their interests around the timing and not pushing you own wagon, because you need the commission sooner rather than later.
Another close looks at a small detail they will have to decide after they have purchased. Again, we should try and link this expression to the context of the previous conversations. We can say, “I notice that there is quite a push from the Government to move things across from paper to digital formats. This digitisation policy varies quite a bit amongst our clients. In this regard, would you prefer paper or if we send you a digital invoice, will that satisfy the accounting team in your firm?”. Whatever the answer it implies that they are willing to buy and pay. It is also critical that the tone of our voice does not vary when we get to the close. It must be a smooth transition to the sharp end of the decision and yet be seamless and comfortable, as if this was the most ordinary thing in the world.
If we are pushing for a deadline to be met regarding the buying decision this can come across as crass and pushy to the buyer, so we need to set this one up carefully. We can say, “Head Office has been very helpful to us here in Japan by making a discount available on the purchase, if it takes place before the end of next month. Normally, they don’t do many discount offers, so this is a rather rare occasion. It does however provide a nice 15% discount on the purchase and the deadline still has a couple of weeks to run before they withdraw the offer. Do you think that the leadership team would like to enjoy the discount before it disappears and make the agreement before the cut off date?”.
A similar close is the so-called last one in stock approach. Again, this come across as a bit dodgy unless we handle it correctly. We can say, “Demand for our widget has actually been surprisingly stronger than expected. Also, as you know, there are still major issues with supply chain for a lot of products and our case fits into that category too. Actually, it has been much more difficult that usual getting re-supplied and everything has slowed right down. If we can make a decision fairly soon, I am positive I can guarantee supply of the widget and I know that this will be a big help to your business to not have to wait for the re-supply process to kick in and risk delays. Are your procurement team in a position to make a decision fairly soon in order to secure supply?”.
All of these closes are what I would call “soft sell” and therefore highly appropriate for Japan. The important point is to provide some context around the close, so that the whole presentation comes across as logical and natural.
Riffraff inhabit all corners of the business world, but the sales profession suffers more than many others. Bankers do all sorts of evil things with our money. Stock brokers do all sorts of evil things with our money. Real estate agents tell one version of the truth to buyers. Government officials purloin our money. Everywhere you look, someone is ripping us off. However, these industries and institutions do not get blanket smeared with the failings of the few, like in the case of salespeople.
We are our own worst enemy in many ways. There is a taint to the profession, an odious odor, scandalising the hallways. Desperate people do dumb things and tell lies to buyers. There are no common standards of conduct being adhered to in the sales profession. You just become a salesperson by dint of putting your hand up for a sales job. After that point, you are free to unleash your reign of terror and destruction on all around you.
“I am not like that” you may say, but how would the buyer know that? They have been trained to expect to be ripped off by salespeople. It is one of my pet hates with the profession. Lo and behold anyone who calls me up and starts with a lie. Starts with a lie? How could anyone be that stupid, you might be wondering?
Well, have you heard this one before, “Hello Mr. Story, how are you today? I am from XYZ company and we handle a range of investment products. One of our representatives will be in your area and so are you available for a meeting next week?”.
This industry of selling investment products is tricky. I know, because I oversaw the sales of these products at the Shinsei Bank and the National Australia Bank here in Japan. What makes them difficult is you can’t hear, see, touch, smell or taste these intangibles. Investment products are abstract ideas. The buyer will have no idea if the decision to buy was a good one, for many months and in some cases, many years.
So the obvious thing we are all buying is the trust that what we have been told will in fact happen. Given the trust element is so vital, how could the leadership at XYZ company come up with a sales script, built on a bald faced, blazen lie? Amazingly, this is the first thing coming out of their mouth. Reality check: their representative won’t be in my area. That is a total fabrication, a complete lie, a nefarious fiction. Why? They think that somehow this will convince me to see that person. When they call, I ask them which area their representative will be in. They panic, look at the suburb address on their screen and blurt out “Akasaka”. So I ask, “Well given Akasaka is quite a big place, which exact part of Akasaka will they be in next week?”. More blustering and panic, because now we have gone totally off piste.
Japan is a very honest culture. This means though, that when people tell lies, they never admit to it. They never take any accountability. Instead they will tell you anything, in order to not admit that what they told you was crap. They try and move the blame back to you, by claiming you misheard or misunderstood what they were saying.
This honest culture can blind us to this quaint trait to lie. So when we are leading our salespeople, we can’t just assume because everyone is so honest in Japan, that our salespeople won’t lie to the client. This is also a culture where the buyer is GOD and whatever the buyer wants the salesperson will make happen. This can include lying, breaking the rules, over promising and being disingenuous. The delivery component of the company cannot easily deliver on salesperson over-promised goodies. Now we have a new set of problems to deal with, as sections within the company start to feud amongst themselves. Or they agree to a deal that is bad for the business. Being truthful with clients also means delivering bad news too. Salespeople in Japan have to be guided to do this, because of their own accord, they will avoid it every time, hide it and prefer to sow chaos internally.
It is important to state and keep re-stating what should be obvious – don’t lie to buyers. We have to explain we would rather forego a deal than get it by lying. This gets harder when their bonuses and commissions are linked to the sale. Also, a hard-nosed selling culture will force people into positions where they will compromise their personal and the firm’s integrity to do the deal. Do you recall the Suruga Bank catastrophe? They had been a very aggressive lender in the market. They wound up reaping the whirlwind of negative media coverage, because of all the lies told by the bank staff to get loans written. In America, the famous Wells Fargo organisation had a similar issue with staff creating fake accounts to meet aggressive quotas. The real costs of those episodes played out over many years and it took Wells Fargo’s shares five years to recover from this branding disaster. Suruga Bank has never recovered and it’s share price has been trashed since these incidents came to light.
We may have our own aggressive targets too, but we also have to ensure that we are guiding people along the correct path of how to make those targets. If we all agree that trust of the buyer is key, then we can start to build that trust by ensuring that our salespeople are never lying to the buyers, in order to make a sale. We have to remind salespeople of one very important thing. We are not after a sale. We are after repeat orders and these only come when there is a track record of trust.
The solution to this lying salesperson problem doesn’t arrive from outside. John Wayne is not going to come charging over the sand hill, heralded by a bugle call, to our rescue. This is an inside out process and we have to start with our own sales operations and clean them up. If we do this consistently over time, we can isolate the baddies and contain the harm they do to us. None of us want to work in a profession that stinks. Our job is to develop good people in sales, rather than good salespeople.
Sale’s solutions are what make the business world thrive. The client has a problem and we fix it, our goods or services are delivered, outcomes are achieved and everybody wins. In a lot of cases however these are only partial wins. Problems and issues are a bit like icebergs – there is a lot more going on below the surface than can be spotted from the captain’s bridge. The salesperson’s role is to go after the whole iceberg and not just the obvious bit floating above the waterline.
The standard sales interview is based on two models comprising the outer circles surrounding a metaphorical bull’s-eye. The extreme periphery is the “telling is selling” model. This ensures the salesperson does most of the talking and tries to bludgeon the buyer into agreement. The client is subjected to a constant bombardment of features, until they either buy, die or retreat. The second model, the inner circle adjoining the bull’s-eye, is the solution model of providing outcomes that best serve the client, based on what the client has understood is their problem.
The latter is a much better tool and is in pristine condition because so few salespeople use it. The rapid fire of features at the client, rarely provides success because of the randomness of the proffering of alternatives. Welcome to the “toss enough mud at the wall and some is bound to stick” School of Sales. They want it in blue, but we keep talking, talking, talking about our wondrous pink. Why? Because we didn’t ask them what colour they want. There are better ways of doing it than this. Aligning the fix with the client need in the solution model is the mark of the semi-professional. There is nothing wrong with this model, but what are the rock star sales masters doing?
They are zipping up their wetsuits and diving into the icy water under the iceberg, inspecting things closely and really understanding the full scope of the situation. They are on a mission to try and find what nobody else is seeing. Their ability to deliver previously unseen, unconsidered insights is pure gold for clients.
Mentally picture our big red bull’s-eye at the center of a series of concentric circles. Stating the features of a product or service is the first level, the very outer circle. Our solutions constructed around what the client knows already is the next inner circle. The highest level is providing solutions for problems that the client isn’t even aware of yet.
A truly magical client statement would be: “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that or allowed for it!”. Think about your own experience. Anytime we have been a buyer and have uttered those words to ourselves, as a result of insight from the salesperson, we have experienced a major breakthrough in our world view. Now that is the bull’s-eye we want right there.
The salesperson who can provide that type of perspective, alerting clients to over-the-horizon issues, provides such value that they quickly become the client’s trusted business partner. Be it in archery or business, hitting the bull’s-eye is no easy matter. Insight can’t be plucked from the air at will. We can’t just make it up on the spot. Plumbing one’s experiences, sorting and sifting for corresponding relevancies and then diving deeply into the client’s world looking for alignment are the skills required.
In a way, ignorance is an advantage. Paraphrasing Peter Drucker, our success can come by asking a lot of “stupid” questions. A salesperson has an outside perspective, untainted and pure. There is no inner veil obscuring the view, no preconceived notions or ironclad assumptions clouding judgment.
Counter intuitively, the fact that we don’t know, what we don’t know, becomes our strength. Ignorance allows us to question orthodoxy in a way that insiders can’t because of inertia, groupthink, company culture or the internal politics of the organisation.
When salespeople serve numerous clients, be it in the same industry or across industries, they pick up vital strategic and tactical commercial intelligence. Researching various client’s problems, experiences, triumphs and disasters is valuable – but only if you know how to process the detail.
In all of our companies, we can only see clearly what we are doing ourselves. We all exemplify that Japanese saying: “the frog in the well does not know the ocean”. Everything is too familiar and so we don’t ever question everyday normality. We don’t have the opportunity to peak behind the curtain and look into what our competitors are doing.
It is also very rare for company personnel to do study tours of totally unrelated businesses. If we classified industries alphabetically, in a standard business setting, representatives from A and Z would rarely meet, let alone get to trade ideas and experiences. Salespeople however are floating around businesses and therefore able to know many wells and oceans. The ability to select and apply one particularly successful thing in a different context is a commercially valuable skill.
How can salespeople get that skill? Some ways salespeople can provide over-the-horizon value include being highly observant. Take what you have seen working elsewhere for one client, in a different company or industry and then apply it for your current client. Sounds rather easy doesn’t it. The reality is pressured salespeople miss much, record little, remember less and blag their way through most of their client meetings. No real listening is going on because the salesperson is focused on what they are saying. Let’s all slow down, listen, think, and then innovate. The answers are often right there under our nose, but we miss out because we are too busy talking and not looking for them.
Another way to get that skill is to do practical research. Based on what you already know, build up a point of view on an industry, check it against what your clients are telling you (or conduct company surveys). Delve into nascent potential problems, arrive at your hypothesis and be the first mover. The real time insight garnered from this type of activity, allows salespeople to become rockstars in the business world. They are providing “take it to the bank” added value for the buyer and this is how to become a trusted advisor.
We won’t always be able to conjure up a bull’s-eye. However, in trying to do so, our aspirations, general direction and thinking will be correct. Our kokorogamae (心構え) or true intention will be on track. By comparison, our competitors will lag well behind, still waffling on about features or playing detective interrogating clients. We have to move on to a higher dimension, where clients seek us out. They do so because they recognize the value of what we offer. In sales, the inner-most circle, the big red bull’s-eye, leads straight to the winner’s circle and that is where we must be. Let’s make “insight” our springboard to success.
Action Steps
We are starting the New Year and have we decided how we will start it? Are we going to just slide back into our old habits and pick up the threads of the deals we were working on before the break? Or are we going to do some fresh thinking about what we are doing and how we are doing it? As salespeople, we are all massively time poor. That sets off a series of decisions where we are constantly cutting corners to shave off some time. Unfortunately we also shave off some activities we shouldn’t be minimising. Deciding how we are going to work as a professional this year is a good discipline.
Selling has some very consistent requirements. There are the basics and they must be perfected. When we sit back and look at our activities and behavior, we are bound to find areas where we have deleted necessary activities or truncated them. As we get back to work we need to make a commitment to ourselves to become more professional this year, than the level we achieved last year.
That means studying the art of sales. We need to break it all down and minutely examine what we are doing at each stage of the sales cycle. We are reading what other sales leaders are doing, searching for ideas and new information. Business is in a constant flux and technology is a tremendous enabler of business. What have been the latest advances and how can we adopt these into the sale’s process?
Habits are both great and dangerous. Poor habits need to be eliminated and replaced with better habits. Changing a habit however needs a tremendous amount of lifting to get it done. The rationale has to be very strong, otherwise we won’t sustain the effort needed. Exactly what better or new habits do we want to introduce and what is our strategy to make them stick. Just wishing that habits improve is delusional, because nothing will change without some application of dynamite to blow up the bad habits. We need a plan that works.
Are we tracking our activities? Probably we did this when we started in sales, but as we become more comfortable with the sales process we stop bothering. This is a good time to do an audit of how we spend our time and where we are prioritizing our activities Some activities are nice to haves but are starving the must haves for our attention. We need to strip everything back to the basics and look at what we are actually doing as opposed to what we think we are doing.
We have a scary matrix we employ which is always shocking when we investigate the results. We all know it is better to expand the sales with an existing client because it so much cheaper and faster than finding a brand new client. However, do we actually do that or are we stuck in first gear with just the one solution being applied to this client? The matrix is a simple one. Along the top we write in the solution lineup we have. In our case it would be all of the key courses we can offer clients. Down the left side we write in the names of the different clients we serve. The cells are then marked to show the match of what we are selling to the client today. What we quickly realise is we have a lot more solutions this client needs, but we haven’t been promoting them enough.
We get into a habit with this client and they also pigeon hole us into the one slot as well and don’t see us as agile and able to serve them in more that just the current manner. Maybe when we raised the possibility of doing more for them, there wasn’t that need, but business constantly moves and things change. There is nothing more frustrating than discovering the client has gone elsewhere to seek a solution you could have provided them.
We can’t blame the client, because our job is sales and we weren’t able to escape the gravitational pull of our old habits and change the conversation to include more solutions from us for them.
Are we tracking the breakdown of where things went well or went badly? The sales cycle has a cadence and there are bottlenecks we must clear to advance the sale. Do we have a big enough pipeline? If we don't, how have our cold calling efforts fared? How well have we been able to network during Covid? How well have we designed our first interaction with buyer? How many of these initial touches with the client resulted in a sales conversation? Was it online or in person and what was the difference in terms of results? How good a job did we do on uncovering their needs and understanding their motivations and desires for the firm? Did we match up our solution with their need correctly.
What objections or hesitations did we get and why? Was it a mismatch because we didn’t fully understand their needs? Could we flush out the real objection or we were we stuck with the top of the iceberg and missing the real problem under the waterline? Could we close the sale and get the deal done? What were the ratios at each stage of the sales conversation? Could we then flag an area of particular weakness, so that we could work on that area more?
Basics are the foundation of success in sales but so often we forget this and carry on regardless. There is a cost to that philosophy and we will do much better if we focus on making sure the basics are sound and then build on to top of that solid platform.