Should you try to close the deal by all means? Or simply take more time to understand the customer’s needs?
Experienced salespeople might tell you to focus on closing, but several recent surveys have indicated that a hybrid approach to sales (quantitative and qualitative) can help you to not only close the deal, but also cement a loyal, long-term customer.
Here are our four top secrets for closing deals in the modern era; according to industry leading academic researchers, corporate decision-makers, marketing professionals and psychologists.
1. Understand Your Client’s Needs
Gain knowledge about your client’s business and needs as well as the operational requirements that underlie such needs, recommend experts in a recent New York Times article. You want to know what the customer wants and why he or she wants it. For example, if you sell life insurance, you would want to determine whether a prospective client needs term life or annuity, how either product benefits his or her family, and which life experiences make him or her desire such products.
2. Know What Competitors Are Offering
Burrow into industry data as much as possible, and have a clear idea of your rivals are offering. The last thing you want is make an offer that is off the mark, nowhere near what your competitors are giving. To close sales quickly, do your homework, read industry reports, understand consumer trends and adapt your pitch to those trends and needs.
3. Identify What the Market Wants
The Wall Street Journal suggests you identify top market trends to understand whether the product or service you’re selling is in line with that prospective customers want. For example, if you sell sports gear to Millennials – people born after 1980 – make sure you provide essential add-on items such as social networking, smart phone app and data sharing, all of which tie to what this generational group likes and how they see life, work and entertainment.
4. Seek Insider Information
Competitive intelligence can help you close sales faster in the modern era. Get inside information on your prospective customer, and understand, for example, whether he or she is working under pressure. Say you are selling enterprise resource planning software, and you learn that your customer’s IT department wants to buy and deploy a new ERP system in two weeks maximum. Knowing that kind of information, you can tailor your offering to the client’s needs and emphasize the fact that your ERP is cost-effective, user-friendly and quickly deployable.
