Being involved in sales is all about building a relationship. After all you want a customer for life not just a one off sale. It is therefore important that you use your time and energy efficiently and effectively in sales.

You don’t want to be wasting your time or more importantly the time of your prospect when both can be better applied to other prospects or clients.

Follow these steps to ensure that you are focussed with your efforts and that you move to a definite response; preferably yes but in some instances it may be a no.

1. Accurately qualify your prospects

Much of the real work in closing a sale is actually done in preliminary research and early conversations where you qualify your prospect, and determine whether or not they stand to benefit from your solution. 

If your prospect doesn’t fit your ideal customer profile, then you shouldn’t waste your time picking up the phone or queueing up further email outreach campaigns.

Before following up with a potential prospect, make sure you start by answering crucial qualifying questions: 

• How well do they match your ideal customer profile?
• How big is their company?
• Which industry are they in?
• Where is this company located?
• What’s the ideal use case?
• Which tools have they used in the past?
• What kind of ecosystem are they playing in?

If the answers to these questions support what you know about your ideal customer profile, then they’re a qualified lead that could likely benefit from using your solution. 

Most prospects that will waste your time are actually easy to spot.

That’s internal qualification—the steps you personally take to research the prospect and make your best guess about whether or not they’re an ideal customer. 

Once you've done this then begin to connect with the decision maker

2. Identify the decision-maker

Qualifying a lead is about asking the right questions and giving your prospect confidence and assurance that you can solve their problem. 

The quality of information you get from your prospect is extremely important in helping them make the decision to buy (or not to buy).

To effectively gather that right information, you need to be speaking with the right person—a decision-maker. 

No matter what industry you are in, knowing the decision maker is crucial to a quick close.

Many times the decision makers will send someone else into the fire to learn all of the information they can about your company. If this is the case, then you need to have a way to get around this and meet directly with the decision maker.

You need to ask if the person you are talking to is the actual person who will sign the cheques or purchase order and not the person who is just shuffling paper.

If you are serious about building a relationship with a prospect then you will need to research the company or business to be certain that you are dealing with the decision maker.

Once you’ve confirmed the right email address for your decision-maker, it’s time to write a very short, straight to the point, cold email that has one very clear call-to-action in it: usually booking a call to discuss your solution in more depth.

Always be providing value with everything that you send to a prospect. Put yourself in your prospects shows and ask “How does this help me?”

Most sales people will stop reaching out to a prospect after 4 attempts and then they move on.

My question is if you want to do business with this prospect and you feel the products and services you provide will benefit and improve the life of your prospect why would you stop reaching out, especially if you are always providing value.

Always remember to include a call to action in everything that you send to your prospect so that they can contact you, schedule a meeting or phone call.

3. Create a Targeted Offer

Your offer should be targeted to solve your clients needs and wants.

Your offer is more than just your price it includes a time frame, how it is to be delivered, guarantee, customer service, warranty.

You may want to include a time-sensitive bonus or gift that might incentivize them to commit to you sooner rather than later. 

Never allow your service or product to be judged just on price as this will result in you being treated as a commodity. Always bundle your offer up so that it is hard for your prospect to compare it directly to other competitive alternatives.

You are about building a long term relationship and if you know your Customer Lifetime Value and understand it, then you will know how to give away different things up front because you are making it up on the back end.

4. Pitch your solution

Great salespeople transcend their understanding of the product by intimately comprehending all the ways it will have a positive impact on both their prospect’s business, and in their daily lives.

When you’re trying to sell your prospect on the basis of features, you’re telling (not selling) and you’re most certainly not speaking their language—your product can't sell itself!

Your best method of attack should be all about educating your clients. Providing data, statistics and information on how they can improve the operation or performance of their business. 

The overall strategy should be to position your company as an authority and expert, that by providing education about their industry or market trends your product or service is the solution to their problem.

This is all communicated by a disciplined and focussed strategy of educational marketing. This form of marketing will help you salespeople get in front of more decision makers than any other process. 

Your prospects care about real tangible results, and how your product will create a solution to a problem their business has. 

Solving your prospect’s most pressing problems (as related to your product) requires a partnership that goes far beyond just a transactional conversation.

5. Overcome their objections

Along the path to closing any sale, you’re going to field difficult questions, objections to certain features, push back on pricing, and any number of other sales objections.

Here are some of the most common objections you’ll face:

• I don’t have the time
• I don’t have the money
• Your product is too expensive
• Please just email me more information
• We don’t need this at the moment
• [...and a number of industry-specific challenges/questions]

You need solid answers to these objections before getting on a sales call.

Anticipating and dealing with these objections is a natural part of the process to closing a sale, but it requires adequate preparation ahead of time—otherwise you’re leaving your deal up to chance. 

When you improvise and try to answer your prospect’s objections on-the-spot without a clear foundation, the quality of your answer will depend heavily upon your mental state in the moment. Plus, you run the risk of appearing like you don’t know what you’re talking about—not a good situation to be in as a salesperson. 

If you’re on a sales call with a prospect, and they’re clearly expressing interest in your product, but when you get to pricing, they tell you it’s too expensive, you could respond with any of these answers: 

• “I understand. You know what, I actually had two other customers like you recently who were unsure about the price at first. But what they found was… ”
• "Oh really? If you don’t mind me asking, how are you coming to the conclusion that the product is too expensive?"
• "Is the price point a cash flow issue, or a budget issue?"
• “Let’s explore some creative strategies for fitting this into your budget.”
• "Ok, I understand. Is there a part of the product you don't need?"

All of these answers to the general pricing objection will probe at different underlying reasons for that objection bubbling up to the surface.

To prepare yourself for every major sales objection in your space, start by building a list of all the most common objections you’re facing. Write down the answers to them, get feedback from others on your team until they feel strong enough to walk into any conversation with them, and rehearse the responses until you know them by heart.

In addition, note down objections that your prospects present you with that you weren't prepared for, and work on responses to them for future prospects. 

If one person brought them up to you, chances are another person will in the future as well.

6. Ask for the sale

Perfecting how (and when) you ask the question, “are you ready to buy?” is at the core of how to close a deal in sales, and yes, you’ll need to get comfortable asking it. 

The biggest mistake salespeople and founders can make, is not asking for the sale. 

If you’re not a naturally gifted salesperson—and haven’t been through the right sales training to equip yourself for success in this field, it’s easy to think your prospects will come knocking your door down to hand over their credit cards after seeing all the benefits and features you have to offer. 

But this is a common misconception of sales, and to those who’ve ever closed a sale, you know this is rarely the case (if ever). 

Even salespeople who’ve been actively selling often wait too long to ask for the sale, and for that reason, they miss out on opportunities to close more sales every day. 

How much do you love rejection? 

It’s tempting to want to avoid the possibility of rejection, because we’re hard-wired to fear rejection. Even in a selling context, sales rejection is hard to deal with, and this often translates into waiting until we feel there’s a guaranteed yes, before we propose the question of whether they’re ready to buy. 

Instead, the default for many people is to provide more information and reasons to buy, assuming that they’re eventually going to close themselves. So, when is the right time to ask for the sale? The answer: before you think they’re ready.

If you’ve done your job qualifying your prospect, delivering your pitch, and still believe they’d be a good fit for using your product, ask for the sale.

Expect an initial no from most prospects, but build this into your selling process. You’ll often catch a prospect off guard, and they won’t immediately have a clear reason not to buy when you’re both on the same page about the value they’re getting. 

Immediately follow up their no with the question, “What’s the process we need to go through in order to get you ready to buy?” This shows your prospect that you don’t fear rejection, it exudes confidence, and illustrates that you have a willingness to work with them to get to a place where saying yes makes sense. Remember, closing a sale is always a two-way conversation. 

In addition, any objections they were harboring will immediately come to the surface, giving you leeway to toss out your carefully prepared counters to their objections. 

If you still can't close, there may be a few more questions you can throw out there to get the sale.

A client can sense if you are being genuine during the sales process. In other words, it's important to convey to the client that you care about their business and not just the deal. 

Analyse Your Leads/Deals and Choose Which Can Be Closed at the Earliest

To close particular amount of deals in a month, you need to check your contact base and list of open deals.

This planning has to be done at least a month in advance. Why?

Because deals don’t get closed right when you want them to get closed. For this, check your open deals and try to get in touch with each and every deal at regular intervals.

How long to wait before contact is really a matter of how your sales funnel is set up and how long the buying cycle tends to be. If you haven’t figured these things out, take a look at calculating your sales velocity.

A CRM will help you with managing this pipeline as it will help you visualise which leads can be closed at the earliest.