The Lost Art of Closing: Winning the Ten Commitments That Drive Sales

The Lost Art of Closing: Winning the Ten Commitments That Drive Sales

by Anthony Iannarino
The Lost Art of Closing: Winning the Ten Commitments That Drive Sales

The Lost Art of Closing: Winning the Ten Commitments That Drive Sales

by Anthony Iannarino

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Overview

“Always be closing!” —Glengarry Glen Ross, 1992
“Never Be Closing!” —a sales book title, 2014
“?????” —salespeople everywhere, 2017

For decades, sales managers, coaches, and authors talked about closing as the most essential, most difficult phase of selling. They invented pushy tricks for the final ask, from the “take delivery” close to the “now or never” close.
 
But these tactics often alienated customers, leading to fads for the “soft” close or even abandoning the idea of closing altogether. It sounded great in theory, but the results were often mixed or poor. That left a generation of salespeople wondering how they should think about closing, and what strategies would lead to the best possible outcomes.
 
Anthony Iannarino has a different approach geared to the new technological and social realities of our time. In The Lost Art of Closing, he proves that the final commitment can actually be one of the easiest parts of the sales process—if you’ve set it up properly with other commitments that have to happen long before the close. The key is to lead customers through a series of necessary steps designed to prevent a purchase stall.
 
Iannarino addressed this in a chapter of The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need—which he thought would be his only book about selling. But he discovered so much hunger for guidance about closing that he’s back with a new book full of proven tactics and useful examples. The Lost Art of Closing will help you win customer commitment at ten essential points along the purchase journey. For instance, you’ll discover how to:

·  Compete on value, not price, by securing a Commitment to Invest early in the process.
 
·  Ask for a Commitment to Build Consensus within the client’s organization, ensuring that your solution has early buy-in from all stakeholders.
 
·  Prevent the possibility of the sale falling through at the last minute by proactively securing a Commitment to Resolve Concerns.

The Lost Art of Closing will forever change the way you think about closing, and your clients will appreciate your ability to help them achieve real change and real results.\

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780735211704
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date: 08/08/2017
Sold by: Penguin Group
Format: eBook
Pages: 240
Sales rank: 541,638
File size: 804 KB

About the Author

Anthony Iannarino is the bestselling author of The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need and the founder of The Sales Blog, which draws more than 50,000 readers every month. He leads a high-performing sales team, speaks to sales organizations nationwide, and teaches part time at the Capital University’s Capital School of Management and Leadership. He lives with his family in Westerville, Ohio.
 
www.thesalesblog.com

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

A New Philosophy of Commitment Gaining

To sell effectively, you need a philosophy. Not the academic kind of philosophy that they teach in universities. You need a practical philosophy, like the Greeks practiced. The Greeks didn't just argue about philosophy in theory. They practiced philosophy.

If you were an Epicurean, you ate and drank because that was what a good life was made up of: pleasure. If you were a Stoic (a very popular idea now, by the way), you endured the hardships of life without complaint. Philosophy was about living in a way that was in line with what you believed. A philosophy should guide how you sell too.

Here's my philosophy, and it is a major thread that runs throughout this book: Selling isn't something you do to someone. It is something you do for someone and with someone.

If you want to be a consultative salesperson and a trusted advisor, this is the starting point in earning that moniker.

Caveat Emptor

Caveat emptor is Latin for "let the buyer beware," a general philosophy of sales dating to the time that people first started trading. It emphasizes the buyer's responsibility to protect himself from the merchant (read: salesperson). If you struck a bad deal, then it was your fault. You should have known better. How could you have let yourself get duped when you knew that merchants were always trying to put one over on you? Caveat emptor was a necessary philosophy because, for most of human history, selling was something that one person did to another. To this day, we still use the expression "you sold them." You "sold them" on your ideas or your product. Taking advantage of the rubes, you "sold them a bill of goods," parting them from their money without delivering the promised value. The idea of caveat emptor made it clear that the seller was acting for his own gain or for his company's benefit, or both. There was little indication that any selling was done for the benefit of the buyer.

Fortunately, times have changed. Because your clients have so many choices available to them, and because word of mouth has been amplified by the Internet and social media, caveat venditor is a more apt philosophy today. Caveat venditor means "let the seller beware." This is a good change, as it has suppressed a lot of bad sales behaviors. Now if a seller takes advantage of you, you can share your unhappy experience with your friends, family, and countless strangers on social media and various review sites. For today's sellers, the potential penalty for being self-oriented, manipulative, unfair, or deceitful is too high. One sale isn't worth the loss of countless future sales-something good sales organizations and salespeople have always known.

In truth, most salespeople don't want to take advantage of other people. Most people don't want to perform work that makes them feel bad about themselves or would make them guilty of harming others. And they don't have to. Sales can be a very rewarding career because, properly done, it requires that you help people get results they couldn't have achieved without you. And by doing so, you can develop deep, lasting, valuable relationships. Thus, selling isn't something you do to someone. Instead, you work with your clients, using your resourcefulness and initiative to create opportunities or possibilities for better outcomes. At your very best, you and your clients become strategic partners. You become your client's trusted advisor, a title you must earn and re-earn by consistently offering sound advice, by knowing and communicating what needs to happen for your client to produce better results.

The Right Mindset

How do you learn to embrace caveat venditor? Not to do it simply because that's what's currently being done in sales, but to really take it to heart? You start by developing the right mindset. Indeed, your mindset is one of the major determining factors of your success. The right mindset makes commitment gaining easier because your underlying beliefs are healthy and empowering. The six key components of the right mindset are confidence, caring, persistence, speaking from the client's mind, embracing concerns, and realizing it's not about you.

Confidence

Confidence-in yourself as well as in what you're selling-allows you to act with your customer's best interests at heart. Confidence permits you to ask a prospective client for the commitment to take the next step. It comes from the belief that you can and will make a difference for that client, and you will be able to deliver the outcomes they need. If you don't embrace these beliefs, your lack of confidence will show and will prevent you from gaining commitments.

Naturally, you won't feel confident that you'll make a positive difference for your client unless you believe in your product, service, or solution. If you aren't 100 percent sure about what you sell, your prospective client will sense the incongruity between what you say and what she sees. You may come across as being inauthentic, or seem like you aren't telling the truth or aren't sure about what you're saying. In short, if you don't really believe that your product is so great that your prospects must commit to the next step in the process, neither will they.

Let's take a quick look at what causes you to lose confidence and how you maintain it. Confidence in your product, service, solution, and company doesn't come from believing that your clients will never have problems. Instead, it comes from your understanding that no company delivers exceptional results without being able to effectively deal with the day-to-day challenges of executing. Even more important to maintaining your confidence is your belief that you are going to make a difference for your clients, and that you will be there to make sure they are taken care of when they have the inevitable challenges that come with real change initiatives.

Caring

Caring is the root of trust, and trust is the foundation of all relationships-including commercial relationships. Caring is what makes you other-oriented instead of self-oriented. This isn't the soft stuff in business; it's the hard stuff. All things being equal, relationships win. All things being unequal, relationships still win. Your job in sales is to make all things unequal by creating relationships of value. That means more than liking your client or having a personal relationship, even though both of these are extremely helpful in creating a preference for you, your company, and your solution. "Relationships of value" means that you create value for your clients as someone who provides ideas and advice-and who also ensures that the outcomes they sell are delivered.

You make selling more difficult when you are focused on "making the sale." That outcome is about what you want and what you'll receive for having won the deal. That inward focus prevents you from being effective in selling.

When you care about helping other people generate the results that they can't generate without you, your outward focus is part of what creates a preference and makes you easier to buy from. When your focus is on helping your dream clients make the changes that they need to make, gaining the commitments necessary to move forward-and eventually the commitment to buy from you-becomes natural and easy.

This is a mindset shift for most salespeople. Too often, they focus on booking appointments with potential clients that they can report to the sales manager when asked. You could instead focus on sharing information and ideas that would help prospective clients understand why they need to change now. Too often, salespeople focus on "pushing" their product or service rather than engaging with the prospective client in producing better results through change. Too often, they focus on winning deals. But what if, instead, you focused on helping the client "win"? Truth be told, their win is your win-in that order.

Persistence

This is a book about commitment gaining in the complex sale. Sales is now all about helping people change, but change isn't easy. You are going to have to be persistent. I mean really, really persistent.

You are going to ask for commitments that your prospective clients will refuse to make. They are going to fear change-even when they know it is necessary. Your dream clients will refuse the commitments that move them closer to the results they need, even when doing so hurts their company. They'll also fail to keep commitments, even though they had every intention of honoring them. Look, if this were easy, you wouldn't need this book.

You are going to have to persist in asking for and gaining the commitments you will need to help your dream clients move from their current state to the better future state available to them. You're going to hear no, and know that you'll have to try again. You are also going to have meetings canceled, voice mails and e-mails unreturned, and prospects who drag their feet through the process. Do not be deterred. As Benjamin Franklin said, "Energy and persistence conquer all things."

Speaking from the Client's Mind

Great salespeople make great language choices. They have the right words for each situation, words that can work a kind of magic. That's why sales is more of an art than a science.

Many salespeople eagerly memorize the latest, greatest "selling words" and "selling phrases," convinced that having these on the tip of the tongue is the key to success. This means they're thinking of language as a tool to be mastered and used to hammer home sales, rather than as a means of developing great relationships with potential clients, of encouraging the flow of ideas as you build toward a better future.

It is certainly important to be well versed in the words and phrases used by potential clients when speaking of the technical aspects of their business. But it is just as important to keep your mind focused on the client's needs, challenges, and goals when communicating with him. Before speaking up, take a moment to think of the client's challenges and goals. Mentally make them your own, then speak. Now that you are speaking, in a sense, "from your client's mind," you will naturally communicate your desire to help him succeed. The actual words you use are less important than communicating this desire.

There's no set formula for selecting the right words, but here's a rule of thumb: If the language you use makes you feel bad about yourself, if it feels tricky or coercive in any way, you're not speaking from your client's mind. You're speaking from your own desire to win the sale. When you are self-oriented, your intentions and your words betray you.

I am not saying that working your way through the sales process won't sometimes make some of your prospective clients uncomfortable. No doubt they will sometimes have to face unpleasant facts. And you will likely have to present this unhappy data to get them to realize that it is time to make a major change. But when you fix your mind on helping your client before you speak, your words will be much more powerful.

You acquire good language choices in a couple of different ways. Sometimes you are lucky enough to work with a peer or manager who happens to have an excellent command of language, because he or she speaks from the client's mind. You can learn a lot by considering carefully what you hear and by practicing thinking in such a way that similar language flows easily from your lips. In fact, if people on your team make great language choices, ask to join them on sales calls so you can absorb not just the words they use, but the mindset they adopt to produce those words.

The nice thing about the dynamic human interaction that is a sales call is that, if you listen well, you can receive immediate feedback as to whether what you are doing is working. You can literally see the impact it is making, good or bad, in real time. You can use that real-time feedback to make adjustments as you strive to develop the right communication mindset.

Embracing Concerns

The very act of asking for commitments means that you are going to hear the word "no" more often than you would like. That's why "overcoming objections" is one of the major skills salespeople have long been taught. That language hasn't really kept up with the evolution of sales. A healthier and more accurate description of what successful salespeople do is "embrace and resolve concerns."

An objection is a disagreement; it's a negative thing we want to avoid. Just thinking of the word "objection" when a prospect expresses concerns can make you feel as if you have to "win" the conversation. When that happens, you might perceive your dream client's expression of a very real concern as a challenge, a battle of wills. By changing your perception, by seeing an "objection" as a real concern worth addressing, you can change your mindset and change your approach. You can be curious and work to understand the source of that objection.

As you will learn later in this book, your prospective clients often fear the wrong danger. If you don't, can't, or won't embrace and address their concerns and fears, they are justified in resisting moving forward. Why would you ever agree to something that you don't feel is in your best interest? Why, then, should you ever expect your clients to?

Helping your prospective clients deal with their fears, real or imagined, is how salespeople help their clients change. This change is what is always necessary for producing greater results. If your dream clients could get the results they need without doing something different, they'd already be producing those results.

Salespeople struggle when they don't know how to respond when their prospective client says no. Don't struggle: Embrace and resolve.

Realizing It's Not About You

The better you understand your prospective client's point of view, desires, and needs, the more effectively you can help them reach their goals and the more trust you can build in your relationship. Conversely, if you don't know what they're struggling to achieve, if you don't understand their point of view, how can you know what to offer them? And why should they believe anything you have to say, or even agree to a meeting in the first place? To be an effective salesperson, you need to look at the world through your client's eyes, to adopt their perspective.

Make no mistake about it: Being other-oriented is a powerful mindset, for we are naturally self-oriented beings. But this skill can be developed. You can learn to take the perspective of "other" and look at things through your dream client's eyes. Begin by asking yourself:

If you were your dream client, what might you be struggling to achieve?

Table of Contents

Foreword Brent Adamson Nicholas Toman ix

Prologue: A Sort of Apology to the Reader xiii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 A New Philosophy of Commitment Gaining 17

Chapter 2 Control the Commitments and Control the Process 27

Chapter 3 Trading Value 41

Chapter 4 The Commitment for Time 51

Chapter 5 The Commitment to Explore 65

Chapter 6 The Commitment to Change 81

Chapter 7 The Commitment to Collaborate 93

Chapter 8 The Commitment to Build Consensus 103

Chapter 9 The Commitment to Invest 115

Chapter 10 The Commitment to Review 129

Chapter 11 The Commitment to Resolve Concerns 139

Chapter 12 The Commitment to Decide 153

Chapter 13 The Commitment to Execute 165

Chapter 14 Guidelines for Closing 175

Chapter 15 Transformational Conversations and Fearing the Wrong Dangers 187

Chapter 16 Managing Commitments 197

Chapter 17 In closing 207

With Gratitude 215

Index 217

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