Closing In The Modern World
- Dan Greenberg
- 6 days ago
- 7 min read
The modern business landscape has changed significantly over the past decade, and I have written extensively on that in other articles. For now, suffice it to say that there are two main reasons, which both come down to social dynamics and affect the balance between buyers and sellers in the same way, namely; buyers don’t need sellers for the same things they used to. They don’t need them for the obvious things, so only sellers who can work with buyers on the less obvious needs will be successful persuaders. The two major changes are as follows:
Information availability: It may seem like this is an old story, after all, the internet has been in heavy use for 30 years, but a new generation of decision makers has only somewhat recently fully integrated digital information usage into the core of how business is done and decisions are made. This means that buyers no longer need sellers for the information they have and often know more than a seller can convey in an email, a one sheet, or slides long before the selling organization even knows they are a prospect. This makes buyers less needy, and less amenable to the sellers timeline and needs.
Lower switching costs: The proliferation of pay-to-play models, easy integrations, modularized packaging, specialized and niche solutions, and the generally lower tolerance for long term risk has created a world where buyers seek out the skinniest and lowest cost version of most solutions. This means that they don’t want to develop long term relationships with vendors because they want to feel free to switch at any time. They don’t want to treat sellers as consultants because they don’t value the development of that long term relationship, and they actively seek out alternatives at all times making their needs less obvious and less urgent. This makes buyers less cooperative, and more deliberate choosing long term partners.
All of this means that selling is fundamentally different and therefore closing is fundamentally different. Actually, the two major components that need to be focused on in order to close have not changed, it is just that the way we go about them has changed.
Closing is no longer a discrete stage in a sales process, in fact there are no more discrete stages like discovery, and negotiation, and closing. All stages happen at once, so the skills that it takes to sell are much more evenly distributed throughout the process. You are closing from day one, just like you are negotiating, discovering, and objection handling from day one. So, all of this said, what are the components that drive the close itself?
There are two major concepts that I want to talk about when it comes to closing, visualization and urgency. It’s not so much that these two things will help drive deals to happen faster, it is that without them, the deal won’t even happen. Don’t get me wrong, a seller can get lucky, and the client can actually have urgency that they are very aware of, 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:
Did I answer all of your questions?
Can you see the tools in the platform benefiting your business, how do you imagine that would look different compared to today?
Is there anything you were interested in going over that we didn’t cover?
Can you envision you and your team using the tool? Are there efficiencies that you think will make people on your team excited to use it?
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 the team to actually start using your solution. Visualization is a very powerful tool, and 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 point in time where there are no more obvious, real objections coming from the client, and after you feel that you and the client are in complete agreement on their problem, their need to solve the problem, and the value that solve will provide. Not just agreement some of those things; agreement on all of them. As mentioned above, there is no finite start to the closing phase, but it is important for a seller to understand when the problem has been fully fleshed out, and when the client completely understands the outcomes, value, and solutions. Once that point arrives, and there are no more substantive objections, then closing becomes the objective.
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 manager 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.
Obviously, the wording in these questions needs to be changed based on each individual situation and relationship. It will also be easier to ask visualization questions if you sell a physical product, like a machine part, but there is always a user, and and always a business benefit to ask about, regardless of the type of solution, otherwise your company would not be in business.
Urgency:
Given our discussion earlier, when would you ideally like to get started with an implementation of a solution?
I remember you saying …. before that the process is pretty straightforward, 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.
Urgency cannot be created out of thin air. But you can build urgency if there’s a need, and if you have been working to develop it throughout the process. If you try to push urgency at the end it will come off as a sales tactic, but if you had been developing an understanding of lost value with the given status quo, or loss being directly caused by the status quo from the beginning, you can use that spark to light the urgency fire when it is needed.
There are two questions 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 toward a close. However, it can elicit a reaction that displays reluctance on the part of the buyer. Notice that I purposefully used the word “a” 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 does leave their decision as to choice 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 questions, 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. You now have the second question above in your back pocket for later in the conversation. If you did a good job at discovery throughout the process, you should have something that creates some sort of deadline or timeframe for them. You can note it and then ask about the early stages of the process in a much lighter weight way than before.
The second question 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.
The questions above are bullet pointed, not numbered because they are not a sequence. Both need to be asked at the right time. If you have been developing an understanding of the urgency all throughout the sales process, these questions will build on what you already know and have talked about. They are designed to get the buyer to state their own urgency so that you can reinforce it. If you clumsily and obviously lead them their, you become a biased shill and not a trusted advisor.
Throughout the sales cycle you need to work to peel back the onion, understand the real problems behind the problems, and who they affect. Then, you need to be developing a value based assessment of the pain and the value of the future state outcome to the business. Once you and the client agree on all of the above and you can both state it in a succinct way, then the urgency conversation transitions to understanding who is affected, and who needs to be in the room to come to a consensus.
Sales and closing have become harder because buyers know more, are more guarded, and expect more from sellers. But long known concepts used to build relationships and drive decisions still work, they just have to be executed differently for the world we now live in.
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