Closing A Sale: Last Step Of The Selling Process
closing a sale

Closing A Sale: Definition, Importance, and Techniques

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What is Closing A Sale?

Closing a sale is the last step of the selling process, where the terms of the deal, delivery, conditions of payment, and billing are made and a real purchase is made by the buyer. Though it is the last step, it is also one of the important, due to certain mistakes of the seller, the buyer might cancel his buying.

Every salesperson’s sales goal is to close as many sales as possible, because the more sales he closes, the more benefits he will get. To make such a wish possible previous steps are to act as a foundation – effectively qualifying prospects, making an attractive sales presentation, handling customer objections effectively.

When a seller is able to convince customers of their objections, he is in a better position to close a sale. It makes him confident during sales close that they will not interfere with products quality, price, design, and so forth. In fact, the more effective performance of the seller in his previous selling steps brings him near to close the more sales.

In addition, offering free gifts and discounts even is a great measure in order to make close a sale faster at the same time convincing and satisfying customers.

Importance of Closing a Sale

When a sale is closed, there is no need of carrying out various, activities like evaluating prospects, making sales presentations, overcoming objections, etc. All these activities are carried out by the salesperson only to maximize sales, but they need to be considered unless a sale is closed/settled.

In fact, sale closing activities start from the very stage of the sales presentation, because closing depends upon the skill of the salesperson to motivate and persuade a customer to close a sale. In other words, a salesperson tries to earn maximum by maximizing sales. For this purpose, the salesperson tries to apply the maximum of his selling skills in closing a sale.

Hence, the importance of closing a sale can be divided into two categories – testing selling ability and finding out the relationship of sales to the salesperson’s income.

Testing Selling Ability

Sales closing helps in evaluating the true selling ability of a salesperson. This ability is used effectively in getting orders. A salesperson, in the course of getting orders, may use his/her ability in qualifying prospects by spending a long time working with them, he may work long hours, he may know the product thoroughly, he may speak eloquently to persuade customer, he may know the customers and their dominant attitudes. Despite this, if he fails to get orders, his selling career crashes.

Closing a sale also helps the company in making a comparison between the sales orders received through salespeople and the sales quota decided for a day, a week, a month, and so forth. In addition, the company may become able to compare between the present orders received and the orders met last week or last month or last year. These comparisons indicate the true skills of the salespeople.

Closing a sale is challenging to the salespeople. It is the climax of the sales presentation because a skillful and experienced salesperson builds the value of the product in the minds of the buyers and ultimately succeeds in closing the sale.

Finding Out Relationship of Sales to Salesperson

It is evident that the salespeople survive by the income they make from selling. And it is also obvious that the higher the sales turnover the higher will be the income of the salespeople. Although some firms pay a basic salary plus a commission to their salespeople or other firms simply pay them only on a straight commission basis. Besides enjoying compensations, if the salesperson succeeds in increasing the sales turnover, he can certainly increase the amount of straight commission receivable and, ultimately, he will be raising his living standard.

Tips For Closing A Sale

Closing a sale can be a challenging task for salespeople because every customer may come up with hard and different questions and objections.

Here, we discuss some of the most used techniques in closing sales.

Gifts Close

Sales close depends upon how a seller persuades and convinces his buyers to buy his offerings. When customers are offered gifts along with products they buy they are likely to purchase the product. In addition, even influenced by a gift they may further ask for other products having gifts offer.

Discount Close

It is obvious that when a discount is provided on products we are more likely to buy such products than products that do not offer discounts.

Discounts stimulate customers to buy products since it provides monetary gain to them. They perceive such discounts as money-saving on products as they are getting the same product at a low cost. The higher discounts also let them perceive a higher level of saving on buying products.

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Now or Never Close

This is one of the most widely used techniques for closing a sale faster. Even as its name suggests creates urgency in the mind of customers and promotes immediate sales close.

By this technique, the urgency in customers can be created such as by saying “This is the last item you are searching for”, “You have got 50% discount as you are the 1111 customer to purchase our product”.

This technique best works when the buyer has a real desire to buy a product and at the same time when the seller wakes up the prompt desire to the buyer.

Summary Close

In this technique, the seller quickly summarizes the products to the customer before closing a deal. Here, the seller gives a quick reminder to the customer about the product’s benefits and uses and the terms they agreed upon just earlier.

The objective behind the summary close is to make the customer believe he is getting the impressive package and getting most of it as the seller had mentioned.

Sharp Angle Close

It is obvious that, during buying, most of the customers ask to reduce the price. And the sharp angle close comes to play here, it is responding positively to the request of the customer. When the seller accepts the customer’s request it is sure that he close a deal.

Question Close

It is a technique asking relevant questions to the customer to proceed with sales closing. The questions are asked aiming to get positive responses. Such as “Does our product really help you to solve your problem?” if the customer says Yes, it is time to close the sale.

Soft Close

Above we discussed now or never close, summary close, a sharp angle close, question close all are aimed to make a higher impact on the buyer. But this technique, soft close, is different here the seller shows the prospects the benefits of products then go for low impact question to know their interest in his product.

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