What Is A Modern Day Close

We no longer exist in a world where closing tips and tactics have much of an effect, at least not when it comes to B2B sales. This is due to information availability, information parity, and the proliferation of buying committees and procurement processes. In other words, sellers are not controlling and conveying information to singular decision makers any more. Buyers are making fewer decisions in the moment, which means that they are less influenced by emotion, and perhaps more importantly, they spend more time thinking about the internal political implications of their decisions, which will be scrutinized by many. Buyers are now responsible for telling the seller’s story internally if they want to bring their buying committee along with them. The goal for sellers has shifted from persuasion and agreement in the moment, to something that looks more like teaching a buyer to construct their own story that they feel ownership over.

In the new world of closing, sellers must train buyers to be convincing internally. They must learn how to allow the emotion of the sales conversation to be carried throughout the process by the buyer who feels bonded to the story that they have helped build. So what are the major components in this type of close?

Visualization & Urgency. It’s not so much that these two things will help drive deals to happen faster, it is that without them, deals won’t even happen. Don’t get me wrong, a seller can get lucky, and the client can have their own urgency, and the client can also do their own visualizing. But in those situations the seller just got lucky, and didn’t really have influence on the close. What I want to discuss here is how to develop these two concepts for a buyer.

Visualization:

1. Did I answer all of your questions?

2. Can you see the solutions we discussed benefiting your business? How do you imagine that it would look different compared to today?

3. Is there anything you were interested in going over that we didn’t cover?

4. Can you envision you and your team in this new reality? Are there efficiencies that you think will make people on your team excited?

There are four questions listed above and they are in a specific order for a specific reason. This line of questioning, asked at the right, time can trigger your client to start to think about what it would be like for their team to actually start using your solution. Visualization is a very powerful tool. As soon as your client starts to visualize, their brain will automatically start to work on justifications to help that visualization come to fruition.

This set of questions is meant to be asked at the very beginning of closing. Obviously there is no finite start to the closing phase, but it is important for a seller to understand when the problem has been fully defined, and when the client completely understands the outcomes, value, and solutions. Once that point arrives, and there are no more substantive objections; that is when closing begins.

There are two visualization questions in the set of four. The first asks the client to visualize what a world looks like in which the solution is being used. This is a tougher visualization because it is a state of reality more than a tangible situation, but it is still important. The second visualization question is more concrete and asks the leader to think about their team and how the solution will benefit their day-to-day. Before each of the questions, there are buy-in questions. You are making sure that the client tells you verbally that you two are on the same page. This gives you license to ask the more intrusive, and mentally burdensome question about visualization.

Urgency:

1. Given our discussion earlier, when would you ideally like to get started with an implementation of a solution?

2. I remember you saying …. before that the process is pretty simple, but there are some steps we need to cover off on to get you where you want to be. Here are the steps we need to take.

There is a question and a statement listed above and I have placed them in the order they are in for a reason. The first one is a bit more blunt and forceful and should be used at some point as you move into the closing phase of a deal. However, it can elicit a reaction that displays reluctance on the part of the buyer. Notice that I purposefully used the word “an” instead of “our” because I did not want to tell the buyer that I had decided for them that they were going with our solution. The question leaves their solution decision open, but it asks when they want to be able to get started with implementation.

If they show a heavy amount of reluctance, you may still have an objection hanging out there that you have not dealt with, so it is important to ask directly, and the way to do that is something like; “let me ask you this, if you decide against our solution, what is the likeliest reason you will make that choice?” If they give you a substantive reason, you can say: “great, that is exactly why I asked that question, I sensed that there was still something that we had not covered completely and now we get the chance to dive deeper into that and see if the solution fits all of your needs or not.” At this point you can launch back into your normal way of dealing with objections. If the reason is not substantive, you can address briefly and move on. You now have the second statement above in your back pocket for later in the conversation. If you did a good job of discovery throughout the process, you should have something that creates some sort of deadline or timeframe for them. You can note it and then move to the second statement.

The second statement is designed to let the client feel like they just have to dip a toe in the water. There is no problem with taking the first few steps, like getting the procurement process up and running, or having the implementation team meet the tech team on the buying side. These are small steps, but remind the client that if they may eventually want to move forward, it is important to set a timeline, and start with the first small steps in order to meet their time dependencies, even if they end up deciding against the deal later.

A huge part of both visualization and creating urgency is animating the enemy. In many cases, the enemy is the status quo, but it can also be an incumbent, a competitor, or “no solution”. If you are the one who helps clearly define the problem for the client, and helps them understand why the thing they are doing now is not working, you will have a major leg up when it comes to helping them pick a solution.

Sales managers and trainers spend a lot of time talking about making the buyer the hero, and the protagonist of the story, but good stories need a protagonist and an antagonist. Afterall, a protagonist with nothing to conquer makes for a pretty terrible story. Even if there are no deadlines or time constraints for the buyer, the simple existence of a well described antagonist can help them understand the need for quick change. If their answer to your question about timing is something like, “as quickly as possible”, that’s great, but it means nothing. Work with the client to help visualize the problems caused by the antagonist. The urgency developed by the existence of that antagonist can lead to conversations about a goal date so that you can work backwards and set a calendar that you can both work from.

Without an enemy, It’s just not a fair fight. They are evaluating your solution vs. nothing. Something is scary, but nothing is never scary, because it doesn’t exist. Sure, it might be bad, but bad doesn’t inspire emotions, scary does. In order to compete with the status quo, you need to create, describe, animate, and help your client visualize it as the enemy.

Be aware that while your individual stakeholders need to understand the risk of the status quo, your C-Level executives need to understand the lack of risk associated with what is new, relative to the risk associated with the antagonist of the story. The visualization work is what helps to define the differences between the antagonist and the solutions, and the clients contributions to those conversations are what help drive conversations around urgency.