Need Help Closing The Sale?

Closing the sale is the most misunderstood of all the selling skills. It’s also probably the most over-rated. But there’s no mystery involved. Just make the goal of every sales call to leave a happy customer behind. If you concentrate on sound communication and long-term relationships, you’ll find it easy to ask for the order.

Approach closing opportunities with the idea that every sales call should give the customer yet another reason to do business with you—again. It’s a pro-active, pro-customer way to look at your job. When it comes time to ask for the order, it’s easy!

“Fear Of Closing” takes the mystery out of the process and puts closing the sale into the context of improving your customer relationships.

“Buying Signals” explains how to recognize buyer behavior that says they’re ready to make a commitment. That’s the time to ask for the order.

“Closing Techniques” explores some of the standard approaches to making the sale happen—as well as some you might not expect.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Selling Hours

If you take the time to consider the break down of your work day, you’ll quickly see that you do not have many selling hours. In reality, you don’t even have the standard eight working hours to devote entirely to your sales. I estimate that most salespeople only have about five and a half hours to make sales every daily. This is because you can only make face-to-face presentations when your prospects and customers are available. Even working an extra hour in the morning and one at night won’t mean getting more face time with prospects.

Occasionally, of course, you’ll have breakfast and lunch meetings with customers, squeeze in one last call at 4:45 PM, etc. But for the most part, you’ll find it difficult to consistently make appointments with anyone before 9:30 AM because your prospects are busy organizing their own day (which does not revolve around you). Much the same holds true for lunch, which seldom starts at noon or lasts exactly an hour for most decision makers and influencers.

Here’s what a typical sales day looks like:
8 – 9:30 AM Arrive at office, attend meetings, organize day, leave for first call
9:30 AM – 12 PM Prime Sales time
12 – 1:30 PM Lunch, return phone calls, paperwork, leave for calls
1:30 – 4:30 PM Prime Sales time
4:30 – 6 PM Return to office, return phone calls, attend meetings, paperwork

As you can see, you have five hours and 30 minutes of prime selling time in the day. How do you maximize it? Using the priority system you’ve set up, you have to plan your activities.

“Plan your work and work your plan” is yet another “golden oldie” sales adage. And it’s a good one because it describes the essence of sound time management. It’s not enough to lay out a plan, you have to execute it to get any benefit from it. In fact, if you don’t “work your plan,” you’ve wasted the time it took to draw it up.

You can spend a lot of time planning. You can also invest hundreds of dollars in account management software and cross-indexed leather-bound time management systems. Or you can make up a “to do” list on a napkin at the coffee shop where you start your day. These are all planning systems that can work. I suggest trying something in between.

You need both long-term and short-term plans. Or call them strategic and tactical plans, if you have a military frame of mind. Which one is more important? Neither. They serve two distinct but equally important purposes.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Congo Explained

If you want to understand the tragedy that is the Democratic Republic of Congo, put aside the mythology and read Dancing In The Glory of Monsters. Jason Stearns has untangled the snarling mess that is the history of this sad nation.

As someone who's researched and written about the Congo myself, I found new insights into the interminable conflicts that have wracked the country for it's entire modern history. Stearns clearly delineates the players, putting them into context and showing how they interacted to make the Congo what it is today. He carefully explains the role of Rwanda's Paul Kagame and other outsiders in the turmoil, but also delineates the power hunger and short-comings of the Congo's own leaders, including current President Joseph Kabila.

Most importantly, Stearns shows how there is no one single cause of the Congo's troubles. He calmly shows how tribal rivalries fuel the strife just as much as the struggle to control the country's mineral wealth. He explains how the internal politics of Zimbabwe, Uganda, Angola, and other countries in addition to Rwanda led to their deep involvement in the DRC's wars. While he rightfully deplores the epidemic of rape in the Congo, he puts it in context and doesn't dwell on it--not because it's not important, but because there's much more to the story.

I found it refreshing that Stearns resists the impulse to blame rapacious multinational corporations for much of anything except trying to find a way to do business in the Congo. He doesn't ignore the many shortcomings of most of the deals to exploit the Congo's riches, but correctly points out that most of them were struck by Congolese leaders eager to fund their own ambitions. He leaves the conspiracy theories to other, less informed writers.

Dancing In The Glory Of Monsters is an objective, clear-eyed look at one of the greatest ongoing tragedies in modern history.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Amateur Golf's Last Hurrah

Could two amateur golfers beat two of the world's greatest professionals? Once upon a time, they might. Mark Frost tells the story of just such a contest in his account of The Match: The Day The Game Of Golf Changed Forever. But this isn't a fairy tale. It is instead a can't-put-it-down true account of a high-stakes game played in 1956 on one of golf's most spectacular courses by four of the game's legendary competitors.

Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson are the pros. They have fourteen major championships between them. Coming from the same caddie yard, the once-close competitors haven't spoken in years--but they teamed up to face the two leading amateurs of the day, Harvie Ward and Ken Venturi. Both of these young men competed at the highest levels of the game in the hallowed tradition of Bobby Jones. As a match-play team, they had never been defeated. The venue for the match? Storied Cypress Point, whose fairways follow craggy cliffs and rocky promontories swept by the winds of the Pacific while the ocean crashes below.

Frost lays out the play stroke by stroke, pacing the narrative with revealing histories of the players and other notables inolved in the day. He puts the game into context, pointing out that this day marked the end of the amateur era and the ascendance of the professional. While the match itself is compelling, the after-stories make fascinating reading, too, especially for those of us interested in the history of our great game.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Selling Is Fun: Benefits of a Career in Sales

The most attractive part of a career in sales is the freedom that it provides. I was able to decide when I was in the office and when I was in meetings or on the road. I could work on the projects that I was most interested in. I could set my own goals and create my own methods for reaching those goals. I did have to follow my company’s policies, but that wasn’t very difficult since we wanted the same things: more sales, more customers, and more income. I learned quickly that if I could produce those things, both of us would be pleased.

But the personal freedom of sales turned out to be just a side benefit to the job. The real source of gratification turned out to be the senior partner of freedom, which is personal responsibility. Selling makes you free to set and pursue your own goals, but holds you responsible to yourself for doing so. When salespeople accept that responsibility, they have taken the first step on the path to satisfaction and success.

Another constant in selling is the need for salespeople to communicate with prospects on a human level. Advancing technology may make some transactional sales functions obsolete, but as long as people make the decisions about what to buy or not to buy, there will be an important place for salespeople in our economy.

And selling will always be a fun thing to do. It combines many of the positive stimulating forces in life: learning new things, facing different challenges, and meeting a wide variety of people. You get to make a pretty good (or even a very good) living and you can take most of the credit for your own success. Above all, you get to take some interesting risks, which adds plenty of spice to your life.

Creativity is a risk-taking enterprise. To endeavor to make something new is to take risks on several levels. Risk might be defined as the ability to fail. You may spend hours, days, even weeks on the project but fail to conceive an idea that’s workable. Even if you do create one, you may fail to complete it satisfactorily and have to abandon it. Even if your idea comes to fruition, you may fail to find a market for it. Even if you sell it, your idea may not produce the results your customer expected. Every one of these potential failures wounds your ego and your pocketbook. With all these ways to fail, why try?

Because not every idea fails and the ones that succeed reward you tremendously. The risk/reward ratio is actually stacked in your favor. What’s even better, you will improve the odds of success as your professional capabilities grow.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Face-to-Face Sales Calls

For salespeople, the correlation between calls made and sales made should be very clear: the more calls you make, the more sales you make. Setting aside time to contact prospects and clients is very important. Consider the words of Woody Allen. He said that “80 percent of success is being there.” As a salesperson, you’re more “there” when you make more calls.

Let’s define a term. A “call” is a face-to-face meeting where you ask a prospect to buy something. It’s not a telephone call to get an appointment or a service call on a current customer, although those activities are certainly important. But when I talk about making more calls in the context of business-to-business sales, I’m talking about asking for orders in person more frequently.

The technological advances of our society are wonderful. You have email, smart phones, instant messaging, video conferencing, and all kinds of other ways to communicate with your prospects. These high-tech wonders can make you more efficient. But they can’t take the place of the face-to-face call. The salesperson who tries to substitute electronic “virtual selling” for personal contact is going to be about as successful as the quarterback who tries to run a play from the bench. The rest of the team may run the play, but it won’t be the same without him there to handle the ball.

There is no substitute for meeting with the client in person. When you’re there face-to-face, you build trust. It’s really hard to believe in what someone’s saying if you can’t look into their eyes while they’re saying it. If you’ve done any telephone sales, you know how hard it is to create a trusting relationship with a prospect who can’t see you.

You also demonstrate your professionalism and transmit your enthusiasm much better in person. “Seeing is believing” is more than just a truism when it’s applied to a sales call. When the prospect can see your animation, can see how prepared you are, can see the masterful way you control your presentation, you gain tremendous credibility. When you’re there face-to-face, you find yourself much more focused on the client, too, which in turn will make your presentation just that much more persuasive.

Personal calls also show the prospect you care. They say you’re so concerned about the success of his or her business that you are willing to invest some of your valuable time in working on it with them. Use all the modern technology you want, but use it to get more face time with more prospects and current customers. That’s where its real value lies.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Making an Annual Plan

Planning ahead is very important in sales. I suggest making an annual plan—one that is centered around activities with your Target, Must Have, and Priority accounts since those are important enough to justify spending a lot of time on. To ensure that these long-term campaigns with the greatest revenue potential don’t get pushed aside in the hustle to complete short-term tasks, you need to set blocks of time aside for them and schedule all less important activities around those blocks.

I like to use one of those great big wall calendars that I can write on with a dry-erase marker and where I can see all 365 days at once. You may prefer a computerized system or a day-timer. At the beginning of each year, I note the times I expect to make presentations to my Must Have, Priority, and Target Accounts. There may be one such presentation each month for each account. If so, I’m going to mark that twelve times for each one on the calendar.

I then note the predictable sales events and sales support activities that I know will happen during the year. These include trade shows and conventions, promotion campaigns, special seasonal offers, sales meetings, report due dates, and anything else of that nature that I have even approximate dates for.

After that, I plug in my vacation (yes—it’s important, too) and important personal dates like the kids’ school programs, wedding anniversaries, and others that I don’t want to forget in the rush of business. These may be non-sales activities, but they’re valuable, too, so they deserve a place in the plan. If you have laid out the first two categories of activities ahead of these, you won’t have to worry about accidentally being on a fishing trip in Manitoba when your top account’s contract comes up for renewal.

Here’s what goes on your annual plan:

1. Must Have Account Presentations

2. Target Account Presentations

3. Priority Account Presentations

4. Predictable Sales Events

5. Trade Shows

6. Seasonal Offers and Promotions

7. Report Due Dates

8.Vacation

9. Personal Dates



Advantages of Long-Term Planning

Having a long-term plan like this allows me to further schedule the time to prepare for each event. If I’m planning on making a presentation to a Target Account during the first week of May, I know I need to do the research the first week of April, write the proposal the second week, call the prospect for an appointment the third week, and rehearse the presentation the fourth week of April. And if there are other people in the company who will play a part in this pitch, they have a timetable to refer to as well.

Long-term plans get changed. That’s to be expected. In fact, I suggest that you informally review your annual plan every month to see just what adjustments need to be made. A year is a long time and lots of things can happen which may change some of your priorities. So change the plan to reflect those changes.

One of the often overlooked advantages of long-term planning (and even short-term) is that planning reduces stress. Few things cause your blood pressure to shoot up worse than “discovering” that a report is due tomorrow—and you need some information from a co-worker who left on vacation yesterday. I don’t know about you, but my life is full of surprises. Some of them are pleasant, but many of them aren’t. The bad thing about all of them, though, is that every surprise reminds me that I’m not in full control of my life—a major cause of stress. Planning at least gives me the illusion that I am somewhat the captain of my own ship. This lowers my general stress level and enables me to more calmly cope with the surprises of each day.


Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Negotiation Preparation

When it comes to negotiation, knowledge is power. That goes for all types of negotiation, win/win included. When both parties have information about each other, the entire negotiation process runs much more smoothly. The research you need to conduct for negotiation is much like the research you need to develop a proposal for a prospect—and it is just as important.

Remember that they will want to know the same kinds of things about you and your position, so be prepared to offer some of that information under the right circumstances. Conventional wisdom says that you should play your cards close to the vest but conventional wisdom is often wrong. Sometimes the exchange of information can be a transaction within a transaction that takes the edge off the larger negotiation.

Here’s a partial list of common types of information you should have before you enter your negotiations:
-What are the prospect’s apparent needs?
-Do any underlying needs exist?
-What are the alternatives to your proposal?
-What are the advantages/disadvantages of the alternatives?
-How do your competitors fit into the alternatives?
-What is the prospect’s financial position?
-How big a factor is the price?
-How strongly are they committed to the proposed idea?
-Are there other decision-influencers?
-What deadlines are they facing?
-Are they negotiating to win/win or win/lose?

You have many sources of information at your disposal. The prospect himself is the best one, of course, and if you’ve been listening to him as well as talking to him, you’ll have picked up the answers to many of these questions already. Don’t overlook your company’s files, either. A given prospect may be new to you but not to your company, since the salesperson who preceded you in the territory may well have had some contact with the prospect.

I’ve also always found it useful to get to know as many of my customers’ employees as I could. You certainly want to know Mr. Big’s secretary or assistant as well as the receptionist and telephone operator (if there is one). But don’t overlook his salespeople, clerks, shipping manager, buyers, purchasing manager, bookkeeper, etc. You never know when they’re going to reveal an interesting tidbit of information that you’ll find useful during negotiation.

Mr. Big’s competitors and other vendors are also important sources of information. A caution in this area, though: Always consider the source when judging the truthfulness of any bit of information. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, especially when it’s exaggerated by a partially-informed employee or a competitor with their own agenda. Just as information can be helpful in negotiation, disinformation can be disastrous. Anyone who has tried to make money in the stock market by trading based on “tips” can attest to that danger. Another word of caution: You don’t want to become known as a carrier of tales or rumors. Such a reputation can have very unpleasant far-reaching consequences. Your strict policy should be to have open ears and a closed mouth at all times.

Honesty in negotiation is important in another sense. Be honest with yourself about your own position. You tend to underestimate your own strengths and weaknesses because you are more aware of them than you are of the buyer’s. Remember, the buyer probably doesn’t know that you’re just one sale away from winning that trip to the Bahamas. If you reveal that little fact, you’ll probably pay for it by suffering through a more demanding negotiation.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Selling with an Open Mind

Everyone makes assumptions—whether they admit it or not—and salespeople are no different. Many times you’ll brush off a prospect based on suppositions without actually doing any research on them. And if a prospect doesn’t already use products like those that you and your competitors sell, you assume that there is a reason for it and you don’t try to sell them. Sometimes they do have a reason, but too often the situation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: since no one tries to sell them, they don’t buy. And since they don’t buy, you don’t make an effort to sell them. Oftentimes you make assumptions based on wrong information. You might judge the prospect based on their building or neighborhood and think that they don’t have much potential. But you never know what’s inside of that building’s walls until you walk through the door.

I used to travel a two-lane highway every Tuesday, driving between two good customers of mine who were located in towns about thirty miles apart. I sold television advertising at the time. Located about midway between my two customers on the side of that highway was a small farm house with a good-sized metal machine shed behind it. It looked like a dozen other farm houses with sheds just like it on that highway except that this house had a little sign out front that said “Energy Savers” on it. I probably drove by that house and its sign for six months.

Finally, my curiosity got the best of me and I was ahead of schedule, so I stopped to see just what “Energy Savers” was all about. I knocked on the front door of the house and got no answer. I walked around to the back and heard somebody whistling in the machine shed. When I went inside, I found a big beefy guy in overalls laying under a trailer working to get a piece of baling wire unwound from one of the axles. He didn’t look much like the “normal” television advertiser.

But it turned out he not only became a television advertiser, he became one of my largest accounts! Like many farmers, he had another business on the side. “Energy Savers” turned out to be an early provider of blown insulation, which offered an inexpensive, non-intrusive way to insulate the side walls and ceilings of existing homes. It was a perfect product to advertise on television and, because it carried such a high profit margin, this guy in the overalls and seed corn cap could afford to buy a lot of TV advertising from me.

If I had continued to judge the potential by the appearance of the prospect, I never would have made that first call on him. Remember, you can’t deposit assumptions in your bank account—only commissions.

Prospecting and qualifying shouldn’t be a chore to be avoided. It should be the beginning of the creative selling process where you open your mind to the possibilities and then try to make them happen. It’s one more adventure in selling.



Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Made To Stick Is Made For Business

As a writer and speaker, I love stories. I love to tell them, to write them, and I love to read them. I also like to read about stories, what makes them work, how they excite our imagination, how we use them to enrich our communications. Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive And Others Die is about all that and more.

Good salespeople, advertisers, marketers, PR professionals, even managers wanting to motivate their employees and entrepreneurs needing to excite their investors can make good use of the techniques described in this book. The authors achieved their goal, "...to help you make your ideas...understood and remembered, and have a lasting impact...." In other words, they help you make your ideas "stick."

As the author of several books about persuasion in business, I took away several great points:

"Belief counts for a lot, but belief isn't enough. For people to take action, they have to care."

"We appeal to their self-interest, but we also appeal to their identities--not only to the people they are right now but also to the people they would like to be."

"One of the worst things about knowing a lot, or having access to a lot of information, is that we're tempted to share it all."

Chip and Dan Heath dissect everything from urban legends to ad campaigns to explain what makes a message resonate in the audience's mind. In the process, they not only show the reader how to use successful strategies, they do it in an entertaining fashion that makes the book a pleasure to read.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.