Sales Closing: How to Build Consistency
Is the purchase decision just one decision?
I would contend that it very much is not. Let’s talk about sales closing, and how to build closing consistency.
The decision to purchase is actually a series of considerations on behalf of your customer and those decisions begin even before the sales conversation ensues. Consider marketing and online discovery, this plays a role in aiding the decision-making process as well. The problem is that oftentimes in sales, we think that the decision to purchase is just one big decision at the very end, and that’s a big mistake.
If we want to make it easy for our customers to purchase then we want to sell the way that the customer wants to buy. It’s much easier for our customers to buy using a series of small decisions. It dramatically reduces the cognitive strain if they’re buying a little bit at a time.
Robert Cialdini in his landmark book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion talks about the principle of commitment and consistency. The very short explanation or interpretation of that principle is this. People don’t argue with themselves. If people are making decisions all throughout the process, and if these decisions are shown as a series of agreements, the decision process becomes very logical.
Why? Because customers will not argue with themselves.
Let me put it this way. If they continually say yes throughout the entire process, they will continue to say yes when it comes to the big question at the very end. We would be well-served to take our presentation and break it down first into the major components that our customer has to decide upon.
Suppose you’re selling a home. What are the major things that a customer is looking to address? They want to know that this is the right location. They want to know that the price worked for them. They want to know that this floor plan meets their needs. They want to know that the timing works for their life. They want to know that this is a community that they would be comfortable living in.
Use each of these major components and make sure that each component has its own separate closing moment. That is, that there’s a moment where a customer can agree, consciously, that, yes, this works for me.
If you don’t do this, then any decision that your customer is making, they’re making only on a subconscious level and that makes it very hard to make that final decision in the end. But if they already said yes out loud to the location, to the homesite, to the floor plan, to the price of the timing, if all those things were already to their liking and they already agreed consciously that it was going to work, then it would be illogical for them to say no to the purchase decision as a whole.
So the question that I would ask you is how easy are you making it for your customer to purchase a little bit at a time? Are you putting this all on your final closing question and hoping that it is powerful enough to persuade your buyer to make a purchase decision?
Our job is to make it easy for the customer to buy. We do this most effectively by breaking down the sales process into the key and core components that your customer wants to decide upon. When your customer consistently says yes, they will continue to say yes even right up to the decision to purchase.
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