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11 Leading Tips to Close Deals Faster & Build a Revenue-Engine
Shortening the sales cycle and continuous revaluation of sales strategies & processes lead to explosive revenue growth. Let's talk about how to close deals faster.
INSIGHTS
Shortening the sales cycle and continuous revaluation of sales strategies & processes lead to explosive revenue growth. Let’s talk about how to close deals faster.
Consumers purchasing decisions are constantly changing and extrinsically linked to economic, social, and phycological factors.Â
The most effective way to ensure your closing deals faster is to continually reevaluate your sales strategy, sales closing techniques, and sales pitch. In the sales world, selling any product or service is about intentionality and control, pushing the deal in the right direction and guarding against situations and objections that deter it from that trajectory.Â
As a sales leader, you need careful planning, but fortunately, a solid strategy and proven techniques ensure your company stays consistent and closes more deals.
Here’s how to close deals faster:Â
- Connect with the key decision maker
- Understand the prospect’s pain pointsÂ
- Shape your audience’s beliefsÂ
- Communicate clearly and conciselyÂ
- Provide belief-affirming proof & data
- Creating intentional next steps
- Don’t accept circle-back conversationÂ
- Overcome potential objections
- Provide quick responses
- Choose the right closing techniqueÂ
- Ask for the sale
Below, I go into more detail with each technique and strategy to help you close more deals faster.Â
Connect with the Key Decision-Maker
I can’t emphasize this enough: know your client, especially your decision-maker(s) in the organization. Not only do you need to know the decision maker(s), but you need to know if they are in your meeting.
More often than not, the buying group is the second meeting. If you’re meeting with one cofounder but not the other, the decision will not be made in your meeting.
So, ask yourself:
- Will the decision be made at your meeting?
- Will the decision be made immediately after your meeting?
- Will the decision be delayed by hours, days, or weeks?
- Will it be made at the office or remotely?
- Who are you meeting with? What is their role?
- Will you meet with one or both cofounders?
The way you pitch directly to a decision-maker versus other roles is different.
Understand the Prospect's Pain Points
Many salespeople focus on the product’s features rather than the business needs. It sounds ridiculous, as any “sales expert” will discern that understanding the potential customer’s pain points is a make-or-break moment. The problem is many sales professionals need to be more active. It takes work to understand your customer’s pain points, and even harder to provide a solution.
Remember, a pain point is a specific problem that potential customers of your business are experiencing; keyword experiencing. They experience this problem daily, indicating a more significant underlying challenge.
Your sales pitch needs to solve their pain points with appropriate solutions instead of a generic sales presentation, resulting in a better conversion rate, genuine relationship, and customer loyalty.
Sales Accelerator Process
We evaluate your compensation structure, prospects, tech stack, sales playbooks, processes, strategy, tools, hiring, and onboarding to ignite revenue growth and performance.
Shape your Audience's Beliefs
Any sales pitch must focus on shaping the decision maker’s belief with a straightforward, ideas-driven narrative.
To create an ideas-driven narrative, you must answer these three questions:
- What do I want my potential customer to do?
- What does my potential customer need to believe?
- What does my potential customer need to understand to believe that?
Shaping your audience’s beliefs means you’re providing a solution to the customer’s pain point, but more specifically, you’re crafting a granular narrative that supports what you need them to believe. And importantly, you need evidence that supports the belief.
Remember: it’s the meeting you don’t get an invitation to where the decision-maker will make the purchase decision.
In shaping your first audience’s beliefs, you make the ideas stick, and that conduit will carry the message more accurately and effectively into the next meeting. It is that conduit that will close sales.
However, the problem is that your sales process relies on that conduit to execute. So, salespeople need to be more calculated, and you create your sales pitch to tell them the story they need to retell to close the deal; control the trajectory to the deal’s close.
Remember: it's the meeting you don't get an invitation to where the decision-maker will make the purchase decision.
Communicate Clearly & Concisely
When crafting your narrative, keep your solution simple: your product cannot seem more advanced and unique.
Consider the MAYA principle; you need your potential client to feel like your product or service is an acceptable, familiar, yet innovative solution.
Here are some ways you can do this:
- Avoid using big words or acronyms your consumer might not understand
- Avoid lengthy explanations or instructions; it’s lost on a potential client.
- Focus on providing solutions, but avoid creating new problems or challenges.
Provide Belief-Affirming Proof & Data
An essential sales tactic is arming your conduit with the proof and data that affirms the decision you want them to make.
This may look like any of the following resources:
- Sales collateral
- Survey audit
- Briefs
- Projections
It isn’t the sales presentation itself. If you think leaving your presentation with them will guide them to the dotted line, you’re kidding yourself.
Be more calculated and shoot straight. Or, you’ll never close more deals.
Create intentional next steps
The most effective sales strategy is control over the entire deal trajectory. Controlling the course of the buyer’s journey includes creating intentional next steps.
You must get clear commitments of what your prospects will do next and establish accountability measures, typically booking a meeting on the calendar.
Here’s your talk track:
“Take it back to your team. Evaluate it, and by Monday, I need you to respond with X, Y, and Z.”
But that is not enough.
You need to start preemptively guarding that timeline.
Ask your prospects directly:
- How much of a priority is this for you right now?
- How do we ensure that this meeting doesn’t get bumped?
- Is your director or decision body ready to have the conversation?
These questions’ direct and intentional nature informs prospects of your commitment to a definitive answer. It affirms your seriousness and tells you about their internality; are they serious about solving their problem?
These conversations guard against them delaying their decision. It creates a sense of urgency without seeming off-putting.
Sales Accelerator Process
We evaluate your compensation structure, prospects, tech stack, sales playbooks, processes, strategy, tools, hiring, and onboarding to ignite revenue growth and performance.
Don't Accept Circle Back Conversations
Most prospects will say, “let’s circle back next week.” Do not accept those conversations.
Most of these decisions are made after a two-minute conversation. A two-minute deliberation. And a two-minute evaluation. But many salespeople give our decision-makers a week.
Get the upper hand on these conversations and incorporate them into your sales process.
Here’s the talk track with decision-makers on the call:
- Let’s reevaluate by the end of the day.
- I know you all have much to discuss. Take five minutes to talk about it. Let’s talk again at 3:30.
- We got 30 minutes booked for this meeting. And we’ve only taken 20. I will give you 10 minutes back right now, but let’s get on a call later today.
It’s not an unreasonable request, and most people can afford to do that.
The worst thing that they can say is no.
Know 90% of the deals in your sales funnel may say no. But 10% say yes. It’s just that simple.
Overcome Other Potential Objections
The sales closing path is paved under challenging questions, feature objections, pricing pushback, and other sales objections.
Here are some of the most common objections you’ll face:
- I don’t have the money
- Your product is too expensive
- I don’t have the time
- You don’t offer discounts
- We are just a small business
- We don’t need all the other features of this product
- Please email me more information
- We don’t need this at the moment
- […and other various industry-specific challenges/questions]
Pre-empt these objections with solid answers before getting on the sales call.
Anticipating and dealing with objections is a natural part of any sales strategy. It requires adequate preparation and training beforehand—otherwise, you lose control of the deals.
Anticipating current sales challenges and objections must be incorporated into the sales leaders’ coaching and stand-up meetings. It gives your salespeople a clear foundation and improves the quality of your sales team’s answers. In stand-ups, I recommend role play so that the sales team can test-drive answers and actively warm themselves up to the conversations they will likely have with prospects. Bringing purpose and intensity to these meetings are
However, it is more than just the sales leader’s job to guard against objections to closing a sale. Salespeople start by building a list of all the most common objections you’re facing down to the most granular industry-specific complaints. Prepare concise answers to them, and get feedback from your team or sales manager. Rehearse and role-play until you know them by heart.
In addition, actively listen to objections prospects give you where you were unprepared for and workshop them with yourself and your team. They will likely come up again; using positive thinking and a growth mindset will prepare you for all future sales closing.
Provide Quick Responses
Many sales experts refer to the speed to lead, replying to incoming leads quickly.
But it’s more than a quick reply to an incoming lead. It’s about who can promptly respond at all times.
You cannot wait to reply to a prospective customer. You must respond as soon as they email you unless you’re on a call with another prospect.
If you must track down more information, then of course, but if they ask you a straightforward question, you must answer. There’s no excuse to reply in two or three hours.
The quicker you reply, the more momentum it builds.
Consider when you’re having a conversation with someone who speaks quickly. You will naturally start to match their pace. Then, they start talking even quicker, naturally forcing you to speed up. And then, before you know it, the conversation is flying fast.
That’s what you have to do in a sales process. The quicker you reply, the quicker it forces them to a decision. And that’s how you shorten the sales cycle.
Choose the Right Closing Technique
There are numerous closing techniques you can use to close a sale.
Some of the most common techniques include the summary close, assumptive close, choice close, takeaway close, and urgency close. Here’s a quick reminder of each:
- The summary close is lazy; it summarizes features and benefits.
- The assumptive close assumes that the prospect is ready to purchase and asks for the sale directly.
- The choice close offers the prospect a choice between two options involving making a purchase.
- The urgency close emphasizes a sense of urgency.
My problem with these closing techniques is that these techniques are irrelevant if you don’t do the groundwork and set the intentionality. Many thought leaders in this space over-emphasize the importance of sales closing techniques.
Yes. How you close sales are essential, and yes, assumptive, choice, and urgency closes are important, but you need to collect the correct information and pitch it to the right person for them to be effective.
Ask for the Sale
One top reason deal closes linger is salespeople are afraid to ask it. Generally, they are afraid of “no.” Instead, they tip-toe around, dragging the process along, hoping for a resounding “yes.” However, top performers are not dissuaded by “no’s.” Underperformers use it as an excuse to mask poor sales activity and performance.
If you’ve done your job correctly, ask for the sale: “Let’s sign the contract today!”
I see even the most seasoned salespeople selling and waiting too long to ask for the sale. Consequently, you miss out on opportunities to close more deals every day.
Sales Accelerator Process
We evaluate your compensation structure, prospects, tech stack, sales playbooks, processes, strategy, tools, hiring, and onboarding to ignite revenue growth and performance.
Can your Sales Team Close Deals?
Is your sales team struggling to get your prospects to buy in? Yes.
Do you know how to find creative solutions to these issues preventing progress in your sales teams? Yes.
Does your seek to reevaluate sales strategies continuously?
Let me be clear; if you were going to find the solution to your sales problems, you would have seen and solved them by now.
You likely need support and help to solve them.
Rose Garden is solutions-focused, so if you want me and my team to ignite your revenue growth, we will do so with our Sales Accelerator Process and Team Assessment.
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About the author:
Ali Mirza is the Founder & CEO of Rose Garden, a national sales consulting organization, and featured in Forbes, Inc, Business Insider, The Huffington Post, Business Rockstars, and The Wall Street Journal.
Ali is a highly sought-after public speaker presenting at multiple national conferences on innovative ways to accomplish transformational growth on your sales team.
Rose Garden provides unparalleled support and guidance to growth-minded founders via sales strategy differentiation, world-class sales culture creation, and exclusive playbooks, processes, and scripts to position them for limitless growth.
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