What do you think of when you hear the phrase “close the sale”? For many of us, it means getting a contract signed; getting money on a job to be fulfilled; or exchanging money for a product. For others it simply means you have to ask for the sale – after you’ve done the work to identify the customer’s need and then show how you can fulfill it.

Sometimes, however, when you ask for the sale you don’t get a clean ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Instead, if the prospect isn’t ready to buy, they typically put forth some type of question or delay tactic. These can include asking for more information, saying they want to talk it over with someone else, or suggesting that they want to think about it and you should get back to them later.

This in turn starts the dance of trying to convince someone that they should buy from you — a task that can cause both parties discomfort.

Closing the sale should not be the beginning of the ‘convincing dance’, because no one can convince anyone else of anything. We human beings have to convince ourselves. What convinces someone to buy is not what we know, or even how well we present, but how well the salesperson can help the prospect discover for themselves how the product and service offered can really help them, and in turn how that makes the prospect feel.

A traditional sales process teaches you that the goal of the sales call is to “make the sale”, through these steps:

1. Bond with your customer through small talk ( find “common ground”).
2. Create a need (tell someone how much your product can help them).
3. Present how you can fill that need (dog and pony show).
4. Close (ask for the sale).
5. Overcome objections (tell the customer why they’d be crazy not to buy from you).

This process is so overused that we all spot it a mile away, whether we are the seller or the buyer.

We can feel the manipulation encircling us, and that causes our defenses go up — in turn preventing the development of a trusting relationship. In other words, the sales process itself is often preventing the sale from closing smoothly.

How do we overcome this inherent obstacle?

The first step is to establish a sales dynamic/way of selling that creates an environment of trust, where the needs and wants of the prospect are put first, and the salesperson is looking for a true win-win situation. Anything less is not good for someone, and will damage sales in either the short term, the long term, or both.

The best close is accomplished by starting the sales process right.

Though I’d love to “make the sale,” my goal is not to do that, but rather to help both of us figure out if it is going to make sense to do business together or not. Though I may think that “Making the sale” is in my best interest, if it isn’t in the prospect’s best interest, then ultimately it will not be beneficial to me, either. I have to take the appropriate actions to orchestrate a dialogue, with questions and answers, that allow us both to figure out if there will be mutual benefit from doing business together, or not.

And if we decide not, we still preserve the relationship and keep the door open to doing business in the future, if/when circumstances change. Actually opening the door with the prospect so that they have permission to say ‘no’ is often the first step toward securing a more confident and frequent ‘yes’.

How, then, does this alternate approach look? Here is a different set of steps that you can take to empower your customer to close the sale:

1. Build trust by showing the prospect that you put their needs and wants first.

2. Ask questions to determine whether the prospect qualifies as a good candidate for your product/service: Do they have a problem you can fix? Are they willing to allocate the resources to take care of the problem? Can they make a decision to move forward and “buy”?

3. If the answers to all three of these categories is “yes,” then asking for the sale is as simple as asking what the prospect would like you to do next, based upon what they themselves have come to understand.

4. There will be no “objections” in the traditional sense of the word because you’ve had all the necessary dialogue already, and have decided together that it makes sense to move forward and “buy” – or not. If not, there is no need to do the ‘convincing dance’. There is mutual respect and a handshake agreeing it is best not to work together at the current time, or under the current circumstances.

One skill that is essential to this approach is sharp qualifying skills. The reason salespeople find themselves doing the ‘convincing dance’ too often is because they pull prospects through the entire sales process without effectively qualifying them. The stronger your qualifying skills, and the more confident your willingness to work with the prospect through that process, the more clear your outcomes will be — either a firm ‘yes’ or a logical and mutually understood ‘no’, with mutual respect achieved either way.

Which type of experience would you rather have at the end of your sales cycles? The confusion of the Convincing Dance or the confidence of Mutual Respect?