Are Your Closing Questions Built to Serve or Slay Your Customer?
Go to YouTube and type “sales closing.” You will find tens of thousands of videos on the subject of closing questions. Movie clips, seminars, product pitches, and a slew of “educational” material. If you watch enough of these clips, you’ll see something interesting: the message doesn’t change.
When we think of the caricature of a salesperson, a host of cheesy sales lines also come to mind. These are the same old tired closing questions, reheated and served up again and again.
You know what I’m talking about…
– The Assumptive Closing Question
– The Alternate of Choice Closing Question
– The Ben Franklin Closing Question
– The Either/Or Closing Question
– The Repeat the Question Closing Question
– The Puppy Dog Closing Question
To be clear, there are times in the sales conversation when some of these closing questions might work. The issue is not technique, but intent.
Take the Assumptive Closing Question, a mainstay in almost every sales training course ever presented (but certainly not in mine!). The instructions state that you assume the sale, begin writing the contract or agreement without asking, shut up, and confidently hand the customer your pen for a signature. The close usually comes with this admonition: “The first person to talk…” You know the rest.
In my opinion, the most damaging aspect of these closing questions centers around one word: manipulation.
In some way, shape or form, a salesperson must deceive their customer if they want to land a deal using these closing questions. It can be brutally manipulative or subtly sophisticated, but any technique that makes the customer the victim is abhorrent.
Check your motives, please.
The first question is not how you ask your closing question, but rather why you ask your closing question. Do you do this for yourself, for your quota, or for your boss? Or do you do it because it is a valuable part of the service you provide?
Get your motives right – everything else will follow. And that’s when you really start changing people’s world.
