7 Killer Sales Fears Part 7
Posted by: Cheryl Clausen in sales coaching, tags: fear of selling, sales fearsUntil you overcome this fear as Zig Ziglar would put it, you’re nothing more than a professional visitor. For some entrepreneurs, business owners, and sales professionals this fear is a painful costly fear. It causes a great deal of stress and duress. This fear is…
The Fear of Closing
You do a great deal of work to get to this point and then you throw it all away because, in the end, you can’t ask for the business. Or at least that’s what others would have you believe.
This is a combination of a fear of rejection and a fear of being wrong. You don’t want to ask for the business and get a “no” aka rejection. Plus you don’t want to anticipate a “yes” based on your conversation only to discover you were wrong about what the other person was thinking and their buyer readiness.
Setting Yourself Up for “No”
In spite of what you’ve been told you can’t close a potential buyer who isn’t ready to buy. And when you try to force a potential buyer who isn’t ready to buy to a close it gets real ugly. Unfortunately, you do things that set yourself up for a “no”. Things like…
- You try to sell someone who never even agreed to a sales conversation with you.
- You fail to make a good connection with the other person so you’re constantly battling resistance.
- You bore the other person by talking about things they don’t care about.
- You confuse the potential buyer with too many choices and options.
- You offer the wrong solution because you didn’t understand what the potential buyer wants.
- You fail to help the potential buyer discover what they need to know to make a buying decision.
- You don’t help the potential buyer identify a reason to buy now.
Plus sometimes you lack confidence in your stuff. You aren’t sure your stuff can make good on the promises you make. Sometimes you even lack confidence in your own ability to do what you say you’ll do.
What You Must do to Get “Yes”
When you fail to close the people who really need your stuff you’re cheating yourself out of income and, more importantly, you’re cheating those people out of getting what they want. Closing shouldn’t be a shift in gears. Closing should be a natural conclusion to the sales conversation. Here’s how you make that happen:
- Only hold sales conversations with people who have expressed a need for what your stuff can do for them.
- Help the prospect tell you what the best solution for them would be like.
- Help the prospect tell you the real value of that solution for them.
- Help the prospect uncover their motivating reason for buying now.
- Find out if they were to make a decision about something like this who else, if anyone, they would want to confer with.
When you make a good connection with a potential buyer and you’re having a good conversation there’s one more thing you can do to make closing a natural event. That one thing is to actively engage the other person. You engage buyers when you invite them to:
- write things down
- prioritize concerns
- make small choices
photo credit: fauxto_digit
When you do all these things there’s no guessing. You know when the other person is ready to buy. Your new buyer only needs to decide when they want to start and how they want to pay.
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