- Contrary to popular belief,
closing doesn't just happen at the end of a sales meeting. You're actually beginning your close the moment you meet someone
and shake their hand and you're closing throughout
the entire conversation until you eventually ask
for the business at the end. And to further illustrate this point, I'm gonna share with you
five extremely powerful closing tips that you can use from the beginning of a sales meeting all the way until the end,
so that you can start turning total strangers into paying customers. What's going on, everybody?
Patrick Dang here. Before we get started, make
sure to give this video a like, subscribe, turn on notifications, and let's go ahead and dive right in. Now, as I said before,
in any sales meeting you're actually closing throughout the entire sales conversation, right? So it's not just the very ending where you actually ask for the business. It's all the little things that you do from the beginning, middle and end so that when you actually
do ask for the business towards the end of the meeting, you actually have already
done all the heavy lifting. So once you make that ask for the customer to actually sign a contract
or something like that, it's very easy for them to say yes because you did all
the work ahead of time. So let's go ahead and dive into these tips so that you can start closing more deals. Now, the first tip that I have for you is you're gonna wanna
be perceived as better by being perceived as different. Now for example, if
you're selling, let's say, a commodity service that
every other person can do, for example, a lead generation agency, a Facebook marketing agency, these kind of things that anyone can learn online and offer services, well, when you're trying to
sell to potential prospects, they're gonna ask you what makes you different
from everybody else? And for a lot of people, they don't think too much about
what makes them different, what makes them unique, and why should a prospect go with them instead of going with their competitor. So how you want to think about this is to be perceived as better you wanna be perceived
first as different, right? So people naturally perceive
different as better. It may not always be true, right? Different doesn't mean you actually provide a better service,
but in the minds of people, people do believe that
someone who's different can be better, and so you got to start the conversation in that way. So you wanna think of ways
to differentiate yourself from other people. For example, do you offer
different case studies of people that you helped in the past, and you can increase the likelihood of getting success for your future client. Do you have better communication skills and are you easier to work
with compared to other people? Is your product and
service actually better? Is there a significant improvement like a two X, three X times better? Or are you 30% better, 50% better? Because depending on your industry and your margins and things like that, just being a little bit
better, that slight advantage can mean the difference
between closing a deal and not. Another example might be do
you educate your customers and consult them and help
them through their challenges versus just trying to sell them some product and service and walking away? So the selling experience is one way to differentiate yourself
from other people because obviously if someone
interacts with a sales person and that sales person
really shares insight and show that they care about the prospect even before signing a
deal, that's very valuable. Or it could be that
your product and service is actually just better,
and it's a no brainer for a prospect to go with
you versus anybody else. So no matter what it is you're selling, you have to sit down and
write down all the things that make you different
from everybody else, and then when you start
finding those differences and those things that make
you different and unique you can start incorporating that into the way you pitch
your product and services. And so once you start pitching that way, right from the get,
people are going to think you are better and different
from your competitors. So that if you're perceived as unique and you're perceived as better, better experience, better
product or service, whatever the case is, by the time you ask for
the deal at the end, they already think that you're
better than your competitors so it's a lot more easier to close deals. But like I said before,
all of this work is done from the beginning of the
middle of the sales meeting, not necessarily just at the very end. Now, the next closing tip I have for you is you wanna get your
clients to invest emotionally into your products and services. So in B2C, business to consumer,
selling everyday things, and even business to business where a business is selling
to another business, you got to understand people
are always buying emotionally. Some people might think
that because a business is selling to another
business, it's all logic and they're just looking at the numbers. That's not true at all actually. People make their decisions emotionally, even in B2B settings, and
they're going to justify that decision logically. So the numbers have to make sense, but people have to feel
invested in your solution and they have to really feel that you're gonna get them
the results, very important. So the biggest sales challenge that I see a lot of people starting in sales make is that they're positioning their product or service as a nice to have. So I'll give you an example. One of my students that I'm helping out, they are selling a software
in a specific industry, and what they are specifically doing is they're basically going after companies that have been around for a long time who are using old legacy software and what they're doing is
they're selling a software to replace that legacy software and move this customer into the cloud. It's very similar to what I was doing when I was working at
Oracle where I would sell to hospitals who are
using old legacy software and we would just move
them over to the cloud. Very natural transition. So for this person, they were positioning their product and service
as a nice to have. What does that mean? Well, if this person went to
pitch their ideal customer, they would say like our
software does this and that, here's our features,
here are the benefits, why you should switch
and blah, blah, blah. But nobody's really that interested in what they have to offer, and the reason as I started
to dive deeper into this was because it was a nice to have. The way my student was
pitching this software, well, people didn't really see the urgency to make that switch into the cloud. What was the point? Is it gonna save them time?
Is it gonna save them money? There wasn't a really
clear value proposition. And also, it seemed
like buying the software and putting in all that work wasn't really worth the reward at the end, so a lot of people just weren't responding to the cold outreach and it was difficult to generate any sales. So as I looked into it, I realized that the problem was not
necessarily the software because the software
itself does have value, saves them time, save them money, and I started to ask more
questions to this person. So one of the questions I asked was, if a company bought your software and they implemented it and
they move over to the cloud, how much time would that save versus doing it the old way
they're currently doing? And I was expecting my student to say, oh, maybe a couple of hours per week, but this person said if
they purchased my software, they're gonna literally
save months of time. So I was like, wait a minute, so you're telling me that if
this person buys your software, they're literally going to save months of their employee's time, so the employee doesn't have
to work on administrative tasks and they can actually do other things and let software do all the work? And then you calculate how much a company is paying their employees, we're talking tens of
thousands of dollars saved just from implementing this software. So clearly a nice value proposition when you look at it from
that perspective, right? You're saving the person time. If the company purchased your software, they're saving time, they're saving money, and their employees are a lot happier because they don't get stuck
doing administrative work and they can actually do the
job that they were hired to do, which is probably
something more important. So now we're positioning
their nice to have as something that they must
have and they must do right now because why wouldn't you, why are you just throwing
money and time out the window? And so how you get people
to invest emotionally is you get them to
understand the problems. What problems are people currently facing? In this case, the ideal customer would be wasting so much money,
wasting so much time and not really maximizing their employees. And by not maximizing their employees, they're not making as
much money as they could because they're not putting enough energy into generating more sales. Now there's a lot of
variables coming into play, but the main point is that change your positioning
from a nice to have to you absolutely must
have this right now, and how do we get this
done as soon as possible. So you wanna make that clear distinction from turning something from
nice to have to must have. Now, the next tip we have
is you're gonna want to get the prospect to invest logically. So like I said, emotion is very important, people have to emotionally feel the pain and understand why they
should buy right now. Logically, it needs to make sense, because you can't just get
someone to buy emotionally because either they're
gonna regret their decision and it's not gonna really
make sense for their business, or, number two, when they try to, let's say, you're selling
to a larger organization, it's not just one decision
maker who makes a decision. They're gonna go back to
their team and be like, hey, Patrick is telling
me about this software that can save us time and
money and blah, blah blah. Well, when the decision-making
board takes a look at what the software actually is, if it doesn't really make sense on paper, they're not going to buy. And the reason is just because you get one
person emotionally invested, it doesn't mean everybody
else is invested. And sometimes some decision makers don't even wanna show up to the meeting unless they look at it
from a logical perspective, and they say, okay, I can
see the value in this. Let me have a meeting with Patrick to make sure this is right for us. Now for all of that to actually happen, what you are selling has to
logically make sense on paper when people write it down
and they have meetings about what you're selling
without you actually being there, and that happens, right? A sales person is not always going to be in the room to persuade everyone. What you're offering has to hold up even if you're not in the room. So logically, when you're selling, let's say, a software, for example, it has to have some kind of value. So let's say a software
costs $10,000 per year for a subscription. Well, if something's gonna
cost $10,000 per year, it better be saving them more money than they're spending or it could be saving them a lot of time. If you save an employee's time, they can focus on other
parts of the business, so you're actually saving money in a way. Always gotta be helping them
make more money in some way. These are just some obvious examples of what software can do, but depending on what you're selling it could be something more
intangible like branding that you can't necessarily see an immediate ROI on, for example. So whatever it is that you're selling, logically it's gotta make sense on paper and people have to perceive
what you're selling as value. Ideally, your product and
service would wanna be valued higher than what you're asking for, so people would think
like it's a no brainer. We're giving him $1,
he's giving us 2 back. So that's pretty much
how you want to position your product and service logically to make sure it's sound on paper. The next tip I have for you is you want to handle objections early
on in the conversation. Now, a lot of salespeople out there, they typically don't
like to handle objections until the very end of the sales meeting or the very end of the sales cycle. And the problem with this is that if you do not handle the objections in the beginning or early
on, and you wait for the end, you're gonna go through
the entire sales process and at the end you might find that the prospect's not
even qualified to buy because you never went
through the objections because maybe some people
are a little too afraid to get that no and so
they do all this work hoping to get that yes. It's kind of like you do all this work and then the prospect just
feels like they should just buy just because they went
through the process. The reality is even if
people go through that work, if they don't feel like they should buy, they're not gonna buy. So if you know what the
common objections are in your industry for the product
and service you're selling, you're gonna want to bring them up towards the beginning or the
middle of the conversation, and you don't want to leave it always towards the very end of the sales cycle, because you need to understand
what these objections are and how you can overcome
them in the beginning. So if you know, for example, that a lot of the people
that you're talking to they just don't have the budget, right? Well, if you go through
the entire sales process, a presentation and all those things and you find out at the end the prospect doesn't even
have the budget to buy, what was the whole point of doing the entire sales process anyways? So in that case, you got to understand if the prospect has a
budget in the beginning to see if you should
even spend time with them to move them along the sales process. That's just one example, but
there's many different factors or many different objections
that you might experience in your sales cycle. And by handling those
objections in the beginning, you increase your odds of the
prospect closing at the end. Think about it like this. If you already know what all
the common objections are that people are going to have, if you talk about them throughout
the entire conversation and you handle them one by one and you're just knocking them down, by the end of the sales cycle when it's time for you to ask for the deal and it's time for the client to actually sign the
contract and send you money, you already handled all the objections so there's no objections
left, and it's gonna be much more easier when
you ask for the sale. If you leave all the
objections for the end, what's gonna happen is that
you're gonna have to go through all these hoops
before somebody actually buys. So you would rather go
through the objections in the beginning and be upfront
and transparent about that and make it easier for
yourself in the end. Again, heavy lifting in the beginning to make the end easier. And the next tip I have for you is you're gonna wanna understand how the prospect wants to be closed. Now, depending on what you're selling, you might be targeting different
ideal customer profiles, and so different type of customers, different type of clients
like to be closed differently. So if you are selling into enterprise, each enterprise has
their own different way of buying something. There might be different
approval processes. They might want to have certain type of meetings with demonstrations. The way they negotiate might be different. So there are similarities
between customers with an ideal customer profile. However, you got to understand you can't expect everyone to
close a deal in the same way. Some people like to go
fast and they just need a couple of meetings before
they make a decision. Other people like to take a very long time with lots of demonstrations
before you actually close. So by understanding that people
wanna be closed differently, you basically can tailor
the way you pitch and close for that specific person to
align with the way they close. So what I'm saying is
that if you understand that a large enterprise company
is not going to be closed in one phone call, don't try to close them
on that one phone call. That would be pretty awful. They would be like why are you trying to push so hard on the first call? We have all these approval processes that you're not respecting. Because if you try to
close on the first call when the person can't do that, like literally just cannot do that because there's so much
approval processes, then you kind of shoot
yourself in the foot. And let's say, for example, if somebody wants to be
closed on the first call and they don't want to spend so much time doing all these meetings, if you don't know that, and you're like now we're gonna schedule this
meeting and this meeting, but they just wanna close
the deal right there, then you're also gonna
shoot yourself in the foot because you're not understanding how the prospect wants to be closed. So the easiest way to understand this, especially if you're starting
out in sales and you're not really sure how people
wanna be closed quite yet, is you ask your prospects how
they would like to be closed. So towards the end of the
meeting, what you say is okay, it seems like everything
is going great so far, it seems like we're a good
fit to work with each other. Now, I'm just curious to understand, if we were to get this deal done what would it look like on your end? What would need to happen
internally at your company for us to move forward
with something like this? So you're not saying that you're gonna close them right there. You're not really saying anything. All you're doing is asking a question to understand how they
would like to be closed. Typically, what a company would do, especially if they're
a larger organization, is they would just tell you. They'll say, okay, first I
need to talk to this person, then we need to have a meeting about this, and then we got to have a
presentation about this, and then what's gonna happen is we have to go through procurement. And so they're gonna tell
you all the different steps that need to happen before
they close the deal. And as they are saying all these things, you're just writing it down taking notes. And so once you have their
entire buying cycle written down and you understand what it
takes to get a deal done at their company, you create a timeline. So this is one of the
advanced techniques for sales, it's that you have to understand how people wanna be closed first, and then you wanna put a time a timeline essentially to each one of these steps. So let's say, step number one they need to talk to their boss, whatever. So the first item might be okay, so you say you need
to talk to your boss. I'm just curious to know when that meeting is actually gonna happen. Then they're gonna say, oh,
probably sometime this week. And you can say, okay, so I can expect it to be done this Friday? Yeah, sure, Patrick, and you say okay, I'll go ahead
and make a note about that. And after you talk to your boss, you said that you need to
have another meeting with me and your boss and everyone
else involved, is that right? They say, yeah, that's
exactly right, Patrick. Okay, great, so when would
you like to have that meeting? When do you think? They'll be like sometime next week. Say, okay, for me next week, Wednesday 10:00 AM works pretty well. You mind if I go ahead and
schedule a meeting for that time and then we can further
discuss about that? They'll be like, okay, yeah, that's fine, I'll go ahead and invite my boss to that. Then you go to the next step and you say, okay, after that meeting, you'd
want a presentation, right? Obviously, that's gonna be
a little bit further out after we have our first
or second initial meeting, but just curious to know when exactly is that going to happen if you
were to give it a ballpark? Then they'll say, okay,
probably the week after that. So you say, okay, so two weeks from now we have a presentation, I'll
go ahead and write that down so we're both on the same page. And so you don't have
to get a specific date for every single item point
because you don't know if you're even gonna get there
because there's many steps, but you need to have some kind of timeline on when each thing is going to happen. And by doing that, if
anything is too far out or you're feeling the prospect
dragging on too much time when the sales cycle should be shorter, you could say things
like, oh, you're saying that you wanna do this
three weeks from now, but why would it need to be
done three weeks from now? Do you think we can get
it done within the week? This way we can save
some time for both of us. And so you start
shortening that sales cycle while you're on that call. So if you have their timeline and you know how someone
wants to be closed, when you actually close
them it's so much easier because you're both on the same page, you both wanna get all the steps done in an appropriate amount of time, you both agree on that time because they're the one
that's telling you everything, you're not forcing anything on them. And so you just walk step by step by step. Eventually, you're just
gonna close the deal because they told you how
they want to be closed. And so with that said, those are gonna be some of my best tips that you can use to make your close a lot easier
by doing the work upfront. If you enjoyed this video,
make sure to give it a like, subscribe, and
turn on notifications. And if you wanna take your
sales game to the next level, I got a free training
link in the description on how to sell anything to anyone, so make sure to check that out. With that said, my name is Patrick Dang and I'll see you guys in the next one.
