Help! I Can’t Close the Sale! – What To Do When You Can’t Close The Sale

One of my all time favorite sales quotes from the brilliant Zig Zigler is “People don’t buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons”.

He’s right! Most people make purchases based on emotions or feelings.

Have you ever gone car shopping? It’s often how you feel in a car (or how you think you look in it) that trumps the logical reasoning of making a purchase based on cost.

It’s the same for your potential customers. They’re going to buy from you based on emotional responses and feelings. So it’s critical that as a sales person you understand their emotional triggers and feelings.

Let me tell you about Jane, a client of mine who has an amazing niche and is getting a lot of referrals. She was only closing 1 out of every 11 sales conversations and was getting extremely frustrated. Something was clearly wrong and she couldn’t understand why she couldn’t sign more clients.

In our first session I asked her to explain what she was doing for marketing. Was she in fact attracting the right types of people? We discovered that she wasn’t completely on target there and she needed to be a little clearer in her marketing and messaging. After a few tweaks to her marketing I then moved on to her sales conversations. When she revealed what she was doing I quickly determined where she was going wrong and discovered that her issue was specifically in closing the sale.

There’s a fine line between closing and losing a sale but the sooner you become better at understanding ideal client’s buying and emotional triggers the easier it gets.

Let’s take for example Jane’s overwhelmed and exhausted clients who simply wanted someone to help them take more work off their plate. They’re obviously stressed and want peace of mind that what they need to get done will get done and they don’t want to be the one to do it.

By Jane explaining the process of what she’s going to do and then creating a long and complicated proposal to review it requires more thinking and decisions making, hence more stress.

The key was simply to uncover what Jane’s ideal client really wanted and to easily explain that they could provide the solution in the simplest and fastest way possible.

As soon as Jane made the shift in not selling her process or complicated proposal to simply selling a solution that would alleviate the emotions and worries the ideal client was having the sales conversations started to close.

If you’re struggling with closing potential sales with clients then for your next sales conversation I want you to get very clear about uncovering the emotions behind what it is they want you to solve. As soon as you can speak heart to heart, and to their feelings you will be able to close more sales.

Do you struggle closing the sale? What have you found that’s worked for you when you do close a new client?