Most Gurus lump sales and closing together as a single act and I’m here to tell you that they could not be more wrong. There comes a point in every sale where the only thing left to do is secure the business. These actions and behaviors necessary to close a deal require a different mindset. A mindset of persistence, tenacity, and courage.
Think of sales as a dance. Coercively maneuvering, teasing out information from your dance partner, and laying down your moves. But once you determine that you have the right solution and that the buyer agrees that you indeed have reached the same conclusion, it’s time to pin that partner to the mat with jujitsu.
Jujitsu uses the opponent’s weight to your advantage. When you adeptly pulled the best information from your prospect, you are now armed with everything you need to go for the close.
Closing is about negotiation, bargaining, haggling, and reassuring. It’s a give and take to find the spot in the buyer’s perceptual reality that allows them to succumb of their own free will. A skilled closer is exceptionally adept at recognizing this moment and leveraging his or her opportunity to finish the sale.
Your entire business heavily relies on the strength of your closing sale strategies.
Think about it.
Have you ever had an otherwise competent salesperson who gave up too early? Struggled to get the deal? Had a lower than average closing ratio? I’ve met thousands, and the missing component was always the obsession to close the deal when the right solution was found.
Sufficit to say, knowing how to close a sale is more than having an irresistible sales proposition. A good sales closer can still manage to close the deal even with a higher-priced offer. This means that whatever closing sale strategy your salespeople use will shift the odds of the sale in their favor. The more closing strategies they have, the higher their closing percentage.
If you’ve been striking out on sales calls, you might have noticed your salespeople lack the closing techniques to close at a higher conversion. Left unchecked, this will spell doom for your residential home service business revenue. We can’t let that happen.
If Sales is the dance floor, Closing is the arena. Mastering Closing ARCs are the techniques and tools that will win the match. ARC stands for Agree, Rebuttal, Close — these are the things you need to maximize your conversions on sales calls. And isn’t every job a sales call?
Here, we’ll uncover what the closing ARC means and how you can use it to your advantage.
But First, How Do You Close a Sale?
I love rookies. So often I have watched them work so hard at closing the sale, since they have no real understanding of the solutions yet. They see objections for what they really are, and spend most of their time overcoming the objections, rather than building deeper value. With charm and hutzpa, they often see an initial spike in closing ratio, because they know that’s what they are supposed to do.
Then about 3 months in they get cocky. They’ve learned more about the product, and in their naive exuberance, they start spouting off about the product, leaving what really matters back in the dust.
Have you seen this before?
They get discouraged. You get discouraged. Then they’re gone. Just to start all over again. High hopes for the next victim.
Closers, I mean real sales closers, understand that buyers are doing exactly what buyers do to protect themselves and ensure they have the best solution. They lay down complaints, lies, objections, stalls, excuses, and flat-out rejection. 80% of this is posturing, with 20% coming from poor salesmanship because the seller didn’t listen (or bother to ask).
Closers recognize this posturing and are persistent through resistance.
Albert Einstein says, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” When you ask for the sale the same way every time, you look and sound crazy. It’s not about being pesky and pushy. It’s about having an arsenal of tools and techniques that allow you to overcome natural resistance from a variety of different angles.
Have you ever read the book, Art of War?
The prerequisite of a good closing sale strategy is persistence. Even with an abundance of Closing ARCs in your toolkit, your bottom line won’t grow if resistance fazes your salespeople.
On the other hand, even salespeople that manage to address objections can still fail to close the deal. The reason is that without a refined closing sale strategy like Closing ARCs, securing the sale is incidental at best.
Here is some of the most common bullshit we’ve been fed about closing:
- The ABC rule (Always Be Closing) — Asking for business too early in the process is terrible advice. It makes you look like a creepy idiot. Do you remember what they used to teach in physics class? The harder you push, the more resistance you get. Reciprocity and micro-commitments are fair game, premature closing is weaksauce.
- Arbitrary discounting closes deals — You can’t twist your prospect’s arm to get them to abide by your timetable. Offering sudden price drops if they commit only makes you look desperate to close the deal. Lowering your price should be strategic and for a valid cause that all your competitors wouldn’t immediately overuse as well.
- Sales and closing are the same thing — There’s always a build-up in every sale, and it falls on you to read between the lines to notice. Once you get a prospect to agree that you have arrived at the right solution, it’s time to flip a mental switch. This should happen just after you have presented your price and payment options. This is when you take all that you’ve learned in the sales process and use their weight to pin them to the closing mat. While more aggressive than the dance of sales, jujitsu can be quite elegant in its own right.
These are only three, but in reality, if you keep striking out, it’s a good practice to review your closing sale strategy to pluck out the errors. Wizard of Sales® can help you master how to close a sale with modern sales methods and age-old communication principles. It begins by booking a free call.
Closing ARCs for Your Everyday Sales
Closing ARCs for Your Everyday SalesHere’s the thing. Sales teams with limited ways to handle complaints, lies, objections, stalls, excuses, and rejection will fail more than they succeed.
Why?
Because customers are shrewd. Our brains are hardwired to protect ourselves and our resources. They’re looking for the best solution from the range of options, including you and your competition. Their job is to fend off the inevitable for as long as necessary. It is your job to show them that your solution is the best choice in a Sea of Sameness. When you’ve identified the right solution, it is your duty to close the sale, not just leave it at a friendly conversation.
Without effective closing techniques to manage this, you’ll find your business running out of closing runway before the plane takes off. The best closing sale strategy is the Closing ARC.
The Closing ARC is a collection of micro scripts developed to help you persuade and close prospects when they raise their complaints, lies, objections, stalls, excuses, and straight-out rejection. This technique is implemented after you’ve sold them the right solution. You have presented the payment options and negotiated the terms.
The Closing ARCs are your final attempts to get your prospects to sign on the line that is dotted. Closing ARCs are comprised of three fundamental elements and should be delivered calmly with a smile and confident eye contact:
Agree
Every client is different. Their buying decisions are governed by the interweaving of their temperaments and buyer classifications. The approach to closing the sale varies from one buyer to another.
The sale takes place only when an alignment of values and beliefs occurs between you and the prospect. In the same way, you can’t influence a behavior (commitment to sale) unless you persuade their deep-seated beliefs.
The first step to eliciting the desired behavior is to AGREE with your prospect.
Agreeing with people is more than just acknowledging the concerns they may have regarding your solution. It’s about giving your prospects a sense of belongingness by agreeing to their deep-seated beliefs. Reading between the lines in the course of your conversation will enable you to determine what customers truly care about.
Nobody ever closed a sale by outright rejecting a buyer’s beliefs or concerns.
For example, transactional shoppers are focused first on the overall upfront price. Relational buyers are looking for ways to minimize the burden on their time with the best overall solution.
Recognizing where a person is coming from, then effectively doubling down on their underlying felt needs will make prospects feel like they’ve found the business that understands them. They will feel like a part of your tribe. This will make them act in a manner that is socially modeled to the tribe.
Rebuttal
There will always be objections, and surprise surprise, the customer is NOT always right. One way or another, your prospects will find ways to break your closing sale strategy apart, though. This is why you must be prepared with a rebuttal for every roadblock that could come up.
The best possible way to respond to concerns is to have an inventory of canned responses. You will sound like a silly little robot at first, but the more you practice, the more natural you’ll be. This means reciting rehearsed lines countless times beforehand so you sound confident.
Without a solid understanding and conviction that your solution is the best, coming up with rebuttals can be difficult. Your team must be committed, willing and able to quickly address customer concerns. This means talking about your most common complaints, lies, objections, stalls, excuses, and rejections and building tight closing ARCs to use in the field.
Take advantage of rebuttals to transition your prospect from whatever it is you agreed upon to taking the plunge. Use rebuttals to introduce new, interesting, different ideas that help the logical left side of the brain justify, and excite the emotional right. Done well, it becomes easier for your prospect to imagine and justify the value in you’re offering.
This is where logic hooks come into play.
Here’s the rub: Many of the logic hooks that seem logical at first are actually the furthest things from logic. Because logic doesn’t sell diddly squat. Every buying decision is controlled by the part of the brain with no faculty for logic or words. It’s the feelings and emotions that get prospects buying.
Logic hooks are tools used to justify the positive emotional responses coming from the right brain. When emotionally charged, justifications make the sale close.
“You see, the goal at this point is to cause a spark. Create a chemical reaction in the prospect’s brain to ACT! Your team needs to know just how much friction to apply to get ignition.” — Ryan Chute
Close
When you’ve handled all of their complaints, lies, objections, stalls, excuses, and rejections, there’s only one more thing to do. Close the sale.
The final element of this closing sale strategy is to actually close the sale. You can do this in a number of ways, but the most important thing is to be clear and direct. You’ve come this far, so don’t hesitate or leave any room for interpretation. Be confident and persistent, and let them know that you want their business. Especially when you are one hundred percent confident that your solutions are their resolutions.
If you’ve used the closing ARC technique correctly, then the sale will be a done deal. There are times when the conversation goes in circles, make sure to always steer it back to the Closing ARC. If you find yourself getting stuck, go back to the previous steps and try again from a different angle.
Increase the Closing Ratio and Profitability
The closing ARC is the tool that business owners could use to increase sales and bring them closer to profitability. By using this technique, you can close more sales and make more money.
The key here is having a variety of creative ways to approach their root issues from different angles. You don’t want to club prospects over the head with information they already know. A good closer harbors unique, interesting, and different ways to pacify a prospect’s objections.
“To close more deals today, build a Playbook of micro scripts that follow the Closing ARC.” -Ryan Chute
Why You Need To Avoid Capitulating and Discounting
If you capitulate to every roadblock a prospect creates, you’re not selling, you’re pandering. You want to be in the business of closing, not conversations. When a prospect says they don’t have the budget, don’t just take their word for it and move on.
There could be areas in their budget they can cut back on. Perhaps they hadn’t considered your solution as being part of the equation until you brought it up. It’s important to understand where their priorities lie and what kind of problem your solution is solving for them. Is it a pain point? Is it a pleasure point? Are you really addressing their underlying felt needs?
The closing ARC strategy is all about getting to the root of their objection so you can address it head-on. Only then can you move on to the next step and close the sale.
Conclusion
Having a powerful closing sale strategy in place is the best way to work around objections and secure sales effectively. The most timeless strategy out there is the Closing ARC. Training your salespeople to adopt micro scripts that abide by this closing technique leverages your solutions in a sale.
It allows you to focus on your customer’s objections and address them with rebuttals tailored to their specific needs. The closing ARC strategy has stood the test of time for a reason – it works. Implementing it into your closing sale process could be the key to the success your business has been searching for.
Do you want to learn more about how the Closing ARC strategy works? Wizard of Sales® can teach you everything there is to know about it. Book a call.