Getting sales appointments is one thing, but knowing how to effectively close a deal with a qualified prospect is another beast. Luckily, we have all the industry-leading sales closing technique insight to help you secure more revenue and hit your sales quotas.
Here is a list of the best sales closing techniques to follow:
- Learn How to Perfect Your Tone
- Don’t Shy Away From Discussing Pricing Options
- Master the Takeaway Close
- Always Add a Second Voice
- If You Get a Lot of Objection, Use a Sharp Angle Close
- Emphasize What They Could Lose Without Your Solution
- Consider Offering a Free or Discounted Incentive
- Highlight the Time and Effort Your Company’s Put into Perfecting the Offering
Learn How to Perfect Your Tone
The role of the sales executive is to not only secure sales but also to make the prospect feel like they’re having a casual conversation with a friend or colleague. Even if you ask the best discovery questions in the world, if you come across as a salesperson who’s just looking to get money, you’ll lose every time.
If you want to close more business, you must sound relaxed, natural, and excited (if excitability happens to be your style). Alternatively, you can mirror the other person’s tone to make them feel comfortable and earn their trust. If either approach succeeds, the prospect will relate more with you, improving the chances of them signing a contract.
Looking for more B2B sales strategy tips? Read our blog here to explore the different strategies our sales teams use to connect and engage with potential buyers.
Don’t Shy Away From Pricing Talk
Our sales data analysis suggests that only 20% of salespeople discuss product or service pricing on the first sales call, while nearly 60% of buyers want to talk numbers during this initial discussion.
Many sales executives make the mistake of shying away from sharing this information during the first call. This can fail to convert opportunities into customers. Even if you can’t give them an exact price, it’s important that you at least give them a range so they have something to build their decision on. Additionally, this helps build complete transparency into the potential company-consumer relationship. If you’re open and willing to give them information from the first sales discussion, they’re more likely to trust you with their everyday business operations.
Prospects can get almost all the information they need to know about your product or service themselves However, they can rarely learn pricing without talking to an already existing customer, or finding it on communication forums if they’re lucky. While you may not want to initiate the conversation with pricing details, it’s important that you bring it up about three quarters into the sales pitch of the initial phone call. No matter what, don’t get off the first sales call without giving them a ballpark.
Master the Takeaway Close
Many prospects no-show second phone calls (unfortunately). More often than not, it’s because sales execs haven’t mastered the “takeaway close” during the initial conversation.
A takeaway close is a sales closing technique where executives make a statement that “takes away” the deal from the prospect. While this may have been used in a sleazy way in the past, it’s important to be cautious of the approach you take. When armed with this sales closing technique, you can cut through the prospect’s facade and learn if they’re genuinely interested in the products or services presented to them.
By using and mastering the takeaway close, you have the opportunity to:
- Get more prospects to show up for a second sales meeting
- Increase sales forecast accuracy
- Know which sales meetings they should focus on
- Boost sales conversion rates
Here’s an example Abstrakt’s sales execs have used in the past:
“Maybe I am off here, but I am getting the sense that you’re not that interested in this, or perhaps it wasn’t what you were expecting. If I’m wrong, let me know, but if not, let’s table this for 12 to 18 months and circle back to see where you’re at.”
After you make the takeaway close, it’s essential that you don’t respond until the prospect does. If the feedback is positive, then great! You have a genuinely interested buyer.
However, if they’re still hesitant and respond negatively, you should respond, “Can you tell me why?” This allows you to learn more about the prospect and what they may be looking for regarding a product or service provider.
Always Add a Second Voice
Research suggests that businesses can increase win rates by over 250% by adding a second voice to sales calls. But what does that mean?
The sales closing technique of adding a second voice to a sales call incorporates more people into the conversation. An additional perspective can offer many benefits, including:
- Another set of eyes
- Another conversational style
- Questions that the other person didn’t think to ask
The “second voice” position is often fulfilled by the sales leaders from your organization—VPs, revenue officers, and other C-level execs. This is because the prospect will be more likely to trust them and their insights because of their title and expertise in the product, service, and industry.
At Abstrakt Marketing Group, we sell $6M worth of ARR each month, and we firmly believe this is because our sales leaders (including our CRO) are on every sales meeting with prospects. By adding a second voice, you have the opportunity to further engage in conversations with prospects
If You Get a Lot of Objection, Use a Sharp Angle Close
Objections are just a part of the sales industry and there’s no way to avoid it overall. However, using a sharp angle sales closing technique empowers you to shift the conversation and turn that objection into a closing opportunity.
The sharp angle close is a powerful sales closing technique that involves pivoting or changing the direction of a sales conversation to address a potential objection or concern raised by the prospect. This technique allows sales executives to maintain control of the conversation and guide it toward closed business.
Objections are more common than not in the sales industry; therefore, it’s important to know how to handle them. Check out our blog here to explore the most common sales objections reps encounter (and how to handle them).
Emphasize What They Could Lose Without Your Solution
As a product or service provider, your offering presents many benefits to potential buyers. And when a prospect doesn’t choose your solution, they risk missing out on significant opportunities that may be able to fill the gaps of their everyday business operations. Therefore, you must emphasize their losses by not signing on with your business. This is a sales closing technique often referred to as the opportunity cost close.
The opportunity cost close is a persuasive sales technique that leverages the concept of opportunity cost to encourage prospects to make a decision in favor of your product or service. It emphasizes that by not taking action or choosing an alternative solution, the prospect is potentially missing out on valuable opportunities or benefits.
For example, let’s suggest that you’re a sales rep for a software business. Most software solutions are built on the concept of making everyday business functions seamless and streamlined, and often boosting overall company productivity and throughput. Therefore, as a software sales executive, this sales closing technique is essential because it gives you the opportunity to highlight the benefits your software has to offer and how going on without these benefits wastes time, money, and increases the risk of important operations falling apart.
Consider Offering a Free or Discounted Incentive
If you want to close more deals with sales leads who are on the fence about investing in your product or service because of cost concerns, it may be worth offering a free or discounted incentive to help them cross that finish line. This is a sales closing technique called the something for nothing close.
The something for nothing close is impactful for securing more sales because it can be the driver that convinces a decision-maker to buy. While the initial offering may not have seemed appealing to them for the price point, the additional product or service add-on may encourage them to feel like they’re getting two products or services for the price of one.
As you consider your free or discounted incentive, it’s important to select an offering within reason so you don’t fall into a negative ROI and end up losing money. For example, if you’re a commercial cleaning company and you’re pitching a prospect who’s interested in floor cleaning, it may be worth your while to offer an additional one-time window cleaning service. However, you should NOT incentivize a free or discounted ongoing cleaning service because it would negatively impact your bottom line.
Highlight the Time and Effort Your Company’s Put into Perfecting the Offering
The artisan close is a sales closing technique that emphasizes the amount of time, skill, and work invested in the product. It focuses more on the behind-the-scenes aspects of the product rather than its benefits.
This technique works best with prospects who appreciate the process, not just the product. For example, you might explain that a kitchen mixer has been designed by skilled engineers and designers who have thousands of hours of study behind them.
The artisan close is also known as the quality close approach. It can be highly lucrative to a business when selling additional products or services at a later date. However, there is a thin line with this method so make sure you’re using it wisely and with the right people.
Key Takeaways
While there are many crucial closing techniques that sales execs should follow, these tips have provided us with the most impact on accelerating our close rates. By implementing each of our strategies, you have the opportunity to generate more interest and keep the prospects engaged through every phone call.
Our sales executives follow these best practices, along with so many other industry-leading techniques. However, we couldn’t secure these sales meetings with qualified prospects without a team of highly qualified sales development reps who have the expertise to find and nurture relationships with verified decision-makers.
If you need a team of SDRs to set you up with high-quality sales opportunities for your sales executives to pitch, contact the lead generation experts at Abstrakt!
