One question every salesperson should ask themselves is: when do you know a sale is going to close?
Too many salespeople who haven’t been trained correctly, will sit in front of a prospect and somehow convince themselves that the “sale is closing.” They really have no idea that it is closing, and in fact, are pretending that the sale is closing.
There’s certainly nothing wrong with being optimistic about the possibility of a sale closing—and as a salesperson, you should remain as optimistic as possible. But there is a distinct difference between being optimistic, and simply pretending a sale is closing when it isn’t.
Let’s get down to actual reasons. Why does someone pretend that a sale is closing? Well, it’s because they don’t know if it is truly closing or not!
An Example
This is unfortunately all too common. A salesperson, especially a newer salesperson, will come back from meeting with a client. They’ll say, “The meeting went awesome!”
Their sales manager will ask, “Did you get the check?”
The salesperson will get kind of a strange look, and repeat, “The meeting went awesome!”
The sales manager will kind of shake their head, and then ask, “Did you get a confirmed date when they’re going to buy?”
The salesperson will once again look back at the sales manager, and with a little less certainty, will say it again. “The meeting went awesome!”
That salesperson, unfortunately, is pretending.
How Do You Know?
What, then, would be the remedy? How can you know a sale is closing, and not have to pretend?
Well, let’s take something that everyone does every day: get dressed. You pick out the clothes you’re going to wear that day. You then put them on. You check yourself in the mirror. And voila, you’re dressed!
Now if someone were to come along and ask you, at any point while you were getting dressed if you knew you were going to be dressed at the end of this sequence of actions, you’d say, “Of course!” You’d probably look at them funny and wonder about their sanity. What a silly question!
The reason it’s a silly question is that you know all about getting dressed. You’ve known how to do it since you were a child. You could say you’re an expert at getting dressed. So of course, you know that, at the end of the actions that add up to getting dressed, you’ll be dressed.
Let’s now go back to sales. If our salesperson knew exactly how to sell to someone, without question, just as you know how to get dressed, then they would know that the prospect would be closed at the end of that sale, wouldn’t they?
The Sales Process
So, then, how does a salesperson know exactly how to sell someone? There are two broad answers to that question:
1. They need to learn about their sales process cold. At SELLability, years of research have resulted in the basic sales process that forms the foundation of any sales process for a company. A company is going to have its own series of steps that lead to a closed sale, but if it is complete, it will include all the steps of the SELLability sales process.
2. Just learning it is not enough, however. The sales process must be drilled, and drilled, and drilled so that the salesperson knows it cold. That’s the only way the salesperson will make sure to complete each step of the sales process. Each step leads to the next, and together they lead to the close.
So, stop pretending and start knowing when sales will close!
