The Characteristics Of a Master Sales Closer

1. Shows no fear: Never ‘pushy’ and does not resolve to hard sell. No signs of weakness and vulnerability to rejection. The master sales closer is confident and relaxed, and lets the conversation take its own course and move at its own pace. He wants the prospect to buy but understands the pace that needs to be at.

2. Not selling just for the commission: Profound genuine belief in the value of what he is selling. Matching the right people to the right product/service.

3. Never gets down on herself/himself: Knows how to control his inner critic. May use errors to improve but never as a stick to beat himself with.

4. Very Organised and straightforward in asking for action: “Here’s how we will get started”

5. Understands the prospect has doubts, fears and the temptation to avoid confrontation too: A master sales closer understands their job is to close sales more than anything else. Knows the prospect wants him to be firm, convinced, and reassuring to help the prospect act rather than avoid/postpone a decision.

6. Immune to rejection: Never taking questions, objections or refusal personally.

7. Avoid all negative influences and distractions: Committed and focused on the objective

8. Master closers are competitive yet remarkably stress free: A master sales closer competes with himself and his goals, records but rarely competes against others.

9. They celebrate success: Without guilt!

Read More

12 Commandments for Closing a Sale

Like any game there are rules to selling, especially when it comes to closing a sale. To ensure sales success in your business, whether you're a startup or an established entrepreneur, here are a dozen of my best commandments for sealing the deal.

1. Remain seated. The saying goes, present the product, service or idea on your feet, but always negotiate from your seat. Even if your prospect stands up, remain seated. Going from a seating position to standing up suggests something has changed and allows your prospect to exit and end the negotiations.

2. Always present a proposal in writing. People do not believe what they hear, they believe what they see. Always have a contract available and a writing pad. Anything offered or points of value that are included should be written down to show buyers what they get when they make a decision with you.

3. Communicate clearly. No one will trust a person who cannot communicate clearly and confidently. I practiced using recorders and video for years and then played them back to ensure my communication was coming across the way I intended.

4. Make eye contact. This is a discipline instilled only through practice, and you can perfect it by recording yourself. If you want to be believed, it is vital to make eye contact with your prospect. It suggests interest in them and confidence in yourself, your products, your services, and in what you are proposing.

5. Always carry a pen. I remember once I was closing a deal, and I reached for my pen in my jacket but it was gone. The prospect took this as sign that he shouldn't sign—and didn't. I was devastated, and now I refuse to go anywhere without my sword in hand. All agreements require signatures and that requires ink. Keep a pen available at all times. In fact, always have a back-up pen, too.

6. Use humor. Any humor that can make people feel good, inspired or hopeful is always appropriate during the close. Everyone loves a good story, and people are more likely to make decisions when they are less serious. You will close more deals if you can get your client to lighten up and laugh.

7. Ask one more time. Figuring out another way to circle back and reposition negotiations after being told "no" ultimately will make you a great closer. It is not rude to persist; it is the sign of success and prosperity. Because I continue to ask in another way for a "yes" after being told "no" does not mean I did not listen. It only means I am more sold on my view than I am the other's view.

8. Stay with the buyer. Each time you leave the customer to check on something, it creates doubt and uncertainty in their mind. It can create undue antagonism in the negotiations, lower perceived value, and extend the closing time. But keep in mind, this does not mean there is not an appropriate time to leave a buyer and use an authority for a close, as this can be very powerful as long as it is not overused

9. Always treat prospects like buyers. Regardless of the circumstances: no money, no budget, not the decision maker -- always treat the buyer like he is a buyer. I always survey the prospect for signs that demonstrate they have bought in the past. The watch, the shirt, the suit, the necklace, the car they drove, the house they live in, the credit card they use, and others. All are evidence that this prospect has actually demonstrated the ability and history of closing. I always tell myself, "Every buyer is a buyer. Treat them as a buyer and they will turn into a buyer."

10. Stay confident. I always maintain that we can come to an agreement, no matter what I am told by the buyer or those around me. The saying goes: "Where there is a will, there is a way." This mindset of knowing you will reach an agreement requires you to eliminate all negativity from your environment as though it were a disease that kills, and be assured, it does.

11. Be positive. No matter how the buyer responds, keep it light and maintain a can-do attitude throughout the negotiations. When you go negative due to the buyer being negative there is only one outcome and it's not good. Negativity always succumbs to positivity.

12. Always smile. This is not just about your attitude, but also your physical manifestation. For the next week, practice smiling with everyone in every situation you encounter. Do this until you are able to argue with a smile, disagree with a smile, negotiate, overcome objections and close with a smile. Have you ever noticed that very successful people are smiling all the time? It is not because they are successful that they are smiling, it's how they got successful. This is a million dollar tip: Smile.

Adapted excerpt from The Closer's Survival Guide by Grant Cardone (Cardone Enterprises, 2011).

Read More

How to Close a Deal Like Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett might be catching a lot of flack these days, but I think if you want to know about closing big deals, he's still the guy to watch. Why? The man knows how to talk about money when he's dealmaking.

Buffett is famous for doing ginormous deals with as little information as a few pages of business plans and the standard financials a company would submit to a bank to qualify for a loan. What he has when he goes into any conversation is an encyclopedic knowledge of how businesses work financially. He knows "their money," "their wallet," and how investments and outcomes should work. Follow his lead and you will close more business.

Here are seven things I've learned as I've watched Buffett from afar:

1. Know the other guy's money - How they make it, how they count it, how they spend it. This is obviously much easier to do for publicly traded companies. For privately held companies, the numbers are fairly easy to estimate, at least the cost of goods sold and probably the cost of sale. These numbers are critical to discussing the possibilities of working together. Too often the discussion stops at budget. When you don't know, ask. Not the trade secrets, but at least the industry averages. This provides a basic framework for the discussion.

2. Know the other guy's wallet - How does this sale impact any of these critical numbers? The terms of the deal should be looked at from their side of the table first, then yours.

3. Start discussing the money early - You know you are going to discuss the money later. Early in the conversation, you do not have enough information for precision. Instead, you have an understanding of the economics of the prospect's industry, so you have enough to determine if a deal makes any sense at all. Use that economic information and industry knowledge to frame a shared understanding of the reality of the money for this opportunity.

4. Use ranges to qualify and disqualify - Understand early (and throughout the discussion) whether you and your prospect are in the same arena. By using ranges of prices, cost structures, yields, and performance you can both be sure that you are dealing in a shared reality rather than getting to the end and finding yourselves so far apart that there is permanent damage done to the relationship.

5. Speak the language of investment and outcomes - Every large sale is an investment on both parts in an outcome. When you move the conversation from price to investment and cost to outcomes you are focusing on the business impact rather than budget impact. This is the language of large sales.

6. Don't discount early - I regularly hear fearful "deal makers" use language like, "Let's not let money get in the way of working together." There's a word for this that is not used in polite company. This is the language of discounting before the scope has been clearly defined. The sales person believes that he is being clever by taking money off the table. What he has really done is to take margin off the table, his and his company's margin. If qualifying investment and impact has been made up front, then this point does not need to be made again.

7. Don't negotiate until it's time - Work on the deal points one at a time. Work through the investment and outcome ideas clearly, then negotiate. True, all of these points require negotiation. However, too often the conversation turns to negotiations too early before real scope and deliverables have been defined. Which means that the whole is reduced to the little parts before the shared picture of the whole has been established.

Side Note: I watched a deal unravel recently because the players did not observe these guidelines. The sale involved the installation of a point-of-sale system into a retail chain. The details are complicated as many large deals are, but the numbers were simple:

If you calculated the investment necessary for the system, the transaction cost was going to be >5% of the transaction revenue value. That's more than the cost of the charge card processing fee! Never going to work regardless of the reporting bells and whistles, speed to data consolidation and so on.

This violates rules 1-5. The selling team did not understand the fundamental money issues of their prospect. They had not asked, done their research or even estimated. They were focused on the features of their system and what they had heard the IT people say would be the selection criteria without working through the money issues. That always leads to disaster.

as written by Tom Searchy @ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505183_162-46440283-10391735/how-to-close-a-deal-like-warren-buffett/?tag=bnetdomain

Read More

Hustlers vs Entrepreneurs : Which one are you?

Hustlers vs Entrepreneurs.  The two are pretty much the same thing, right? Wrong!  While I would say that it is pretty safe to assume that most entrepreneurs are natural hustlers, I would also say that most hustlers will never become entrepreneurs.  You see, hustlers are missing a few things that entrepreneurs seem to have discovered.

First of all, hustlers lack any real long term vision.  A car salesman is a hustler, the car dealership owner is an entrepreneur.  A person who flips real estate is a hustler, the person who owns apartments and collects cashflow is an entrepreneur. Capital Gains versus Appreciation and cashflow. The guy who sells you stocks is a hustler, the guy whose stock he’s selling because he just had an IPO is an entrepreneur. A consultant and the guy who owns the consulting company. Highest tax bracket versus lowest tax bracket (or even no tax bracket), you get the idea.  A hustler must continue hustling or his income will suffer.  An entrepreneur can pick and choose when to hustle and when to strategize for the future.  Both are after the same thing, financial freedom and wealth, but unfortunately only one will actually accomplish that.  1099 vs Schedule K-1, all you entrepreneurs already know what that means.

Hustling should be a means to an end, not the end itself.  Like I said before, most entrepreneurs were (and actually still are) hustlers, they just evolved and converted their hustle into a system that can attract other hustlers to work in for them.  Making the next sale is what is important to a hustler, building a company and leading his team is what the entrepreneur is focused on.  The entrepreneur builds the system that the hustler works in. Being a hustler is not bad, but for a hustler to not evolve into an entrepreneur is a sad shame.  Sometimes entrepreneurs fall back into the hustler mentality.  Maybe the company had a rough quarter and long term aspirations must be sacrificed in order to make payroll and pay the bills.  Sometimes the entrepreneur may feel that shortcuts need to be made in order to meet short term goals.  I am an entrepreneur that occasionally falls back into “hustler mode”.  If this happens to you too, don’t worry about it too much, just recognize it for what it is, deal with your immediate issues, and then become an entrepreneur again by focusing on long term vision.  Build a better system for that particular issue so that you don’t fall back into this short-sighted thinking (at least for that particular issue) again.  When an entrepreneur is building a startup, he must hustle, but he knows that he must hustle on building his system so he can hire other hustlers to work in the system.  This is why the first year of running a business is critical, you will either develop the system and evolve to becoming an entrepreneur, or you will forever be a hustler.  Mom and Pop store versus Corporation.

At the root of the hustler-entrepreneur dilemma is that one focuses on himself while the other focuses on others.  Being an entrepreneur requires massive humility.  To him, brand equity matters more than a quick buck or commission.  This is where customer service comes into play.  Take, for example, Zappos and a hustler-owned online (or offline) shoe merchant.  Both may carry the same shoes, however, only one has the brand equity required to get away with charging more than the other.  Brand equity, word of mouth, creating a culture of happiness, these are all long term, entrepreneurial assets that Zappos carries over their hustler competitors.  When Zappos screws up an order, they are known to send flowers, gift certificates, or even hand deliver their shoes themselves!  When a hustler screws up an order he moves on to the next customer, leaving the previous one with a bad experience.  You see, the hustler put the almighty dollar ahead of his customer. Having humility, building a system that creates brand equity , these are strange concepts for a hustler who has bills to pay TODAY.  Short term satisfaction is chosen over long term brand building.

The difference between the two examples is “me” versus “my customers”.  Zappos probably loses money on that customer that they just tried to keep happy, but they don’t care because they know it will pay off in the future. Certainly a hustler can make a good (even great) living, but an entrepreneur can achieve financial independence and separate his time from his money-making ability.  A hustler remains prisoner to his own system, and once he stops hustling, he stops earning.  An entrepreneur, once he has built his own system, is able to walk away from it, come back many months later, and find it doing better than before he left.  It is not difficult to see who will reach financial freedom under this model.

I am an entrepreneur with many hustler tendencies who occasionally loses sight of his long-term vision, but always recognizes that and is able to readjust his vision.  I am on a mission to constantly evolve as an entrepreneur, build sustainable business systems, and hire the best hustlers to work for me.  If you are a great hustler, feel free to email me your resume.

http://under30ceo.com/hustlers-vs-entrepreneurs-which-one-are-you/

Read More

The Enemy Within

A man was in a bar with his group, when an old friend entered. He had lived his life trying to go down the right path, but to no avail. “I should give him some money”, he thought to himself.

But the friend was now rich, and came to the bar that night just to pay all the debts he had incurred over the years. In addition to repaying the loans given to him, he ordered a round of drinks for everyone.

When asked how he had become so successful, he replied, that until days ago he was living as the “Other”.

“What is the Other?” asked Pilar.

“The Other believes that the obligation of man is to spend a lifetime thinking about how to have security so not to die of hunger when getting old. Therefore, living as the Other you fail to discover that Life also has plans, and they may be different.”

“But there is danger. And there is suffering”, the people said in the bar, who had begun to listen.

“No one escapes the suffering. So it is better to lose a few battles in order to fight for your dreams, then to be defeated without even knowing what you are fighting for. When I discovered this, I woke up determined to be what I always really wanted to be. 

The Other stood there in my room watching.

Although it sought to scare me sometimes, I did not allow it to return. From the moment I pushed the Other out of my life, the divine energy worked its miracles.”

an excerpt from "By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept" written by Paolo Coelho 

Read More