Stop Closing

November 1, 2009

alec-baldwin-glengarry-glen-rossLook, I like Glenngary Glen Ross as much as anyone.  And Alec Baldwin’s famous scene where he explains that the ABCs of selling are A – Always, B – Be, C – Closing is one of my favorite scenes in any movie.

But, please, PLEASE, can we retire the myth that to succeed in sales you must learn to close early and close often?  Can we drop the statistical mumbo-jumbo that you must ask for the sale at least five times before you have a chance to get it?  (Neil Rackham destroyed this myth with research in his seminal book SPIN Selling. Remarkably, a couple of days ago I came across a sales consultancy’s website that claims it’s now NINE times.)

Now, I understand just how difficult it is to get people to make decisions.  This is true in good times, and it’s especially true in difficult economic times.  When I do sales training, I share the fact that decision and homicide have the same Latin root – they both mean to kill or to eliminate.  Simply put, people hate to make decisions.

It is the job of professional salespeople to facilitate decision-making.  The goal should be to facilitate a mutually beneficial, long-term decision – not to “close the sale.”  The problem with the whole idea of “closing” and the idiotic idea that you’re supposed to “go for the close as early as you can and as often as you can” is that it naturally creates an adversarial relationship, and even worse, causes salespeople to miss or speed through critical steps that can both shorten the sales cycle considerably and create much larger opportunities.  Four years ago, I wrote an article about the myth that objections are good.  The focus on closing only increases the likelihood that you’ll trigger objections that diminish the selling organization.

You don’t facilitate decisions by closing.  You do it by diagnosing, by understanding your buyers, and their critical results – better than your buyers do.  You do it by being useful and creating deep, results-oriented relationships.  You don’t do it by trying to artificially shorten the sales process through the variety of manipulative techniques taught under the banner of “closing” or by celebrating the myth of “the closer.”

So, are you with me?

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Comments

4 Responses to “Stop Closing”

  1. Gini Dietrich says:
    November 4, 2009 at 9:58 am

    One of the things you said to me a few weeks ago that really resonated is that people want to know what you can do for them, not how they fit into your process. That is the perfect example to what you’re talking about here. If you go to a meeting, even if it’s the first meeting, and you’ve done your research and you already know how you can help solve their pain, you likely will walk out of that meeting with a sale. It’s about relationships. It’s about making people feel like they’re special. And it’s about listening. If you can do those three things, you won’t have to always be closing.

    Reply
    • Doug Davidoff says:
      November 5, 2009 at 10:11 am

      Gini,

      Absolutely. Today the strongest sales skill one can have is the ability to provoke awareness. This happens when you match a powerful understanding of your customer – and their problems – with the knowledge of the solution. There’s nothing wrong with going into a meeting and saying, “My research indicates you have a problem that could be materially impacting your critical results. Let’s investigate.” When you do that, you and the buyer become collaborators, competition becomes moot and “closing” becomes unnecessary.

      Reply
  2. Nate Chenenko says:
    November 5, 2009 at 10:30 am

    I agree with this posting, and I agree with Gini. I often hear salespeople saying “you’d be a good match for our X service,” when it might be a better idea to tell the prospect “what if we were to offer you X service? would that help you accomplish the goal you just mentioned?” It’s the same end – the prospect understands that you can do the work they need you to do – but it shows an understanding of the client’s concerns and an ability to listen and collaborate.

    Doug, I’m a new reader so you may have already written about this, but do you have any suggestions about how to keep that collaboration going through the sales process, through the proposal, and into the engagement?

    Reply

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