A young couple paid a visit to Donald Wright’s music store looking for the right piano for their new home. Mr. Wright directed them to a particular piano. After he explained in great detail the sound box construction, stringing scale, pin blocks, etc., the couple seemed satisfied with the piano’s quality, but they were still undecided about its styling. As they were about to leave to look at more pianos elsewhere, Mr. Wright suggested that they take a couple of benches home to compare with the styling of their other home furniture. They did, and came back later that same day to buy the piano. Since then, Mr. Wright has used this particular technique numerous times and with great success.
We must always keep in mind that the ultimate goal of a sales professional is to sell products and services. The ultimate compliment of a good sales presentation is for the customer to buy the product. The closing stage is a natural step in the selling process. It is not a time in which the seller and buyer enter a power struggle like two mountain sheep locking horns. It is a time in which the buyer and seller benefit from each other. The closing moment of a sale should be planned for and expected. Sales managers train their sales professionals that to be successful in selling you must be able to ask for the order, or close the sale. Your success as a sales professional not only depends on your product and your ability to be persuasive, but also is totally dependent on your knowledge of closing techniques and how to use them. If you do not ask for the order, you are not a sales professional; you merely become a conversationalist who is providing the customer with information.
THE LAW OF AVERAGES
When you begin to develop some good closing techniques, you must consider the concept of the law of averages. The law of averages states that if you make a given number of sales presentations, you are going to make a given number of sales. This law governs the success of all individuals in selling. Selling experts point out that their sales are in direct proportion to the number of good contacts a sales professional makes. This law goes a step further with its relationship to the sales professional’s attempt to close the sale. If you sat down with any professional sales professional and had him or her analyze past sales presentations that resulted in sales, chances are good that his/her buyers were closely associated with the number of selling attempts it took to close the sale. In a recent survey of 100 professional sales professionals, each one averaging $100,000 or more in income, it was discovered that they make their sale on the average of the fifth closing attempt. If you do not use a variety of different closing techniques and fail to close often, and with every customer, you will be cheating yourself out of a higher standard of living.
The Law of Averages
If you make a given number of sales presentations, you are going to make a given number of sales.
A sales professional must keep asking for the order throughout the sales presentation. Consider the following statistics of those sales professionals who ask for the order:
*44 percent give up after one “NO.”
*22 percent give up after two “NOs.”
*14 percent give up after three “NOs.”
*12 percent give up after four “NOs.”
If you add up all the above percentages, you will get 92 percent of all sales professionals giving up without asking for the order the fifth time. This leaves only 8 percent who will ask for the order more than four times. Also, sixty percent of all customers say “no” four times before saying “yes.” Author and sales trainer Hank Trisler puts it this way:
“Here’s the real key to selling. You ask, you get. The more you ask, the more you get.
If you don’t ask you don’t get. You can go to all the seminars that come to your town, read all the books, listen to all the tapes. If you don’t learn to ask, you’re going to go broke.”
Let us put it this way: If your goal is to win the local country club golf tournament this year, it wouldn’t make sense to practice every week and then attempt to play the tournament with nothing but a driver and a putter. Yet, this is what many sales professionals do every day of their lives. The reason is that they do not spend the time learning and practicing a variety of effective closing techniques. This chapter will expose you to several basic closing techniques that are successfully applied in the selling industry. Before we discuss the closing techniques, it is important to become aware of some obstacles that prevent sales professionals from closing the sale.