What’s On My Mind
I generally hate the idea of closing.
“Closing” brings about bad feelings to me.
Images of rainy scenes promising Cadillac Eldorados and steak knives.
Being disingenuous.
Cheesy.
But we all feel the need to close sometimes.
It can hit you in many ways.
I need this one to make my year.
I need this one to make my goals.
I need this one to get promoted.
These feelings hit hard in early December with annual bonuses, payouts and promotions looming. There is a lot of pressure!
There’s a better way to think about closing.
Don’t think, “I need to close this.”
That’ll drive you to be a nuisance, feeling like you need to check in on the decision-makers too often.
You’ll run the risk of sacrificing long-term relationships for short-term financials.
It’s not worth it.
(Believe me: they know how to reach you.)
Instead of…
I need to close this
Think…
I need to be super helpful.
I’ll cover four ways to do this below…
What We Just Created
Speaking of being super helpful…
Did you catch Maria Kelly’s interviews over at the podcast this week?
She ROCKED!
Maria is a former senior leader in Sotheby’s art business and one of my favorite clients ever.
She’s got an incredible leadership style, and I just loved the insights she provided on the show.
There are five short interviews. Check out this one to get started, and feel free to binge-watch or listen.
What’s Worth Lingering On
Back to closing.
So many of our clients ask, “How do you close?”
They might say “Jim surfaces lots of opportunities, but needs help closing them. Can you help him?”
Generally speaking, closing is done incrementally when you’re building the approach with the client.
You know we call this Building Everything Together in our GrowBIG Training and in The Snowball System.
Get these four incremental yes’s:
- Agreement on the goals.
- Agreement on the process and timing.
- Agreement on the team.
- Agreement on the finances.
Get a yes on each four and your client with close for you.
They can’t wait to get started!
But, it doesn’t always work this way.
Maybe your work goes through a third party like a broker or consultant, or a particular process is very formal.
In those cases, you can sometimes influence the final decision in one of those four areas above.
The focus?
Not nudging or being a nuisance.
Just helpfulness.
To do this, work with your team and develop a way to sweeten the deal. Make some changes or improvements.
Make things even better.
Ask yourself these questions:
- What can we do to enhance the client’s chance to reach their goals at the same cost? Or to more tightly align with their strategy? Or to add something innovative on our dime?
- How can we shorten the time to results, like adding more resources?
- What can we do to improve our team, like maybe offering to bring in even better resources? Or to enhance the benefits to their team or stakeholders?
- What can we do to improve our expected ROI? Or to include some valuable add ons if they sign by a certain date?
You can get the attention of decision-makers when you make a great offer greater.
When you make changes that help them.
That’s just being helpful.
I can’t say it enough—these tactics should be rare. When you follow our systems, you usually won’t need them.
But if you’re feeling the pressure to close, flip the script.
Instead…
Feel the pressure to be helpful.
Mo