Closing Vs Earning The Next Step

Cian McLoughlin is the CEO of Trinity Perspectives, and he’s the author of the book, Rebirth of the Salesman. He is also the world's leading expert on win/loss reviews and knows exactly how to pull insights from customers that dramatically improve the way sellers go-to-market to increase win rates. There are many myths when it comes to 'closing the sale' and this is a must watch video for anyone in B2B sales who wants the practical truth about working with a customer to progress naturally through to securing their commitment.

Here's the interview transcript...

Cian: The really interesting thing about selling is the best salespeople, they don’t actually sell at all; all they do is they earn the right to move to the next step, earn the right to move to the next step, until they run out of next steps, and then they’ve made the sale.

Tony: You’ve got six years of experience in doing win/loss reviews with customers. Why do you think it is that people don’t buy from a particular seller?

Cian: There’s three outcomes in any sale: they buy from us, they buy from someone else, or they do nothing. One of the biggest issues I think that we all face is when they do nothing, and one of the biggest reasons that that happens is misalignment between our selling process and their buying process. Effectively, we try and rush them through the steps, where we try and drag them, kicking and screaming, to the point that they’re ready to do something, and what that does is on a human level it just makes people feel uncomfortable, it makes them feel awkward. They aren’t ready to move forward, they feel that they’ve been put in a difficult position, and so they just go quiet.

There’s a couple of things that we can do to try and ensure we don’t get out of alignment. The first thing is we just have a conversation with our customers and say, “Look, these tend to be the steps of the process we go through with a lot of our customers. We’d be interested to understand how you buy things on your side, so we can make sure that we’re speaking the same language.” The other thing is looking for ways to add value through the sales process, rather than thinking “You buy my thing and then you’re going to get some value from it.” There’s lots of ways that we can add value all the way through the sales process. It creates reciprocity, it forces them to want to give you something back in return. Because, again, that’s just part of the human DNA – if you do something for me, I want to reciprocate – and how they reciprocate might just be to return your email or to respond to your phone call when they see it ringing.

So you go in, you have the heart of a teacher rather than the heart of a salesperson, if we want to use that analogy. It takes the pressure off you, it takes the pressure off them, and the likelihood of you losing to a “do nothing” decision drops significantly.

Tony: What about the sort of two-thirds to three-quarters of the time where they do select one supplier over another. What does it tell you about why people lose business?

Cian: It’s that kind of show up and throw up mentality. “Here I am, I’m ready to talk about my product, and I want to spend as much time as I can talking about my product.” The reality is no one cares about your product, until you help them understand why they should care. You need to understand them, you need to go in and be curious and do your research in advance, so that you can have an intelligent conversation with them, and then you join the dots, you help join the dots with your solution and your problem. If your product and your price are sufficiently good to get you a seat at the table, there’s a whole lot of other points of differentiation you need, and that’s where they start to look at the quality of the people, the quality of your purpose and vision as an organisation, and a whole lot of other things like that.

Lack of cultural fit is another one that we hear all the time as well. You’d be amazed at how important that is. Because business-to-business is a fallacy. Businesses don’t sell to businesses; people sell to people, or humans sell to humans. As an industry, we have a tendency to sell to people’s heads all the time, but actually what we need to do is sell to both, sell to their heart and to their head. If you can do that, if you can make that connection, your hit rate just goes up.

Tony: Selling is tough, it can be a tough profession; when you’re dealing with rejection, you need to stay highly motivated. So let’s talk about motivation.

Cian: Sales is a marathon, it isn’t a sprint. So you need to look after yourself, first and foremost, you need to look after your health and wellbeing. But then there’s something more intrinsic that’s really important, and I’ve certainly seen this in the best salespeople that I’ve met: they have a strong purpose, or, as Simon Sinek would say, a strong 'why', and that helps you out when the times get tough.

Over to you... how do you close the sale in a natural way that minimizes risk.

I discuss closing in my book, COMBO Prospecting, published by HarperCollins and The American Management Association (AMACOM) and you can purchase it here on Amazon. 

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Photo from a sales leadership interview series.