The Marketer's Handbook: Reassessing Marketing Techniques for Modern Business



CLOSING TECHNIQUES

Application: Sales Effectiveness

The Concept

In all exchanges between sellers and buyers, there comes a moment when buyers need to make up their minds. Very often, success can be improved if that moment occurs with the seller present. So, sales people have evolved tools to help focus on this moment and to understand relative sales effectiveness, marketers ought to be familiar with them. Called “closing techniques”, they include:

• Asking for the business. It is obvious, and therefore often forgotten, simply to ask buyers if they want to go ahead. A surprising number of sophisticated and experienced professionals do not do this.
• Overcoming objections. This is based on asking buyers whether there are any reasons why they can’t proceed and then handling each and every objection as it arises.
• Open-ended questions. This is an extension of “overcoming objections”. A series of questions are asked to get further and further into the buyer’s needs and to match the offer closely to those needs.
• Exaggeration to the absurd. Here, the seller may take one of the objections buyers present and exaggerate it to the point of the ridiculous in order to overcome it as a barrier to purchase.
• The “trial close”. A method to test the buyer’s reaction, often responding to positive signals during a sales conversation. It can take the form of assumed actions and lead to ...