During rapport building, you become your prospect’s friend.
During qualifying and pitching, you start to act more as a trusted professional.
But when it comes to asking for the sale, you clearly become a salesperson.
And the mood on the call will change. Even if your prospect liked and trusted you before, they may become skeptical (even stand-offish) when you ask them to make a buying decision.
At this point, it becomes far more difficult to keep your prospect on the phone, especially if they’ve made up their mind that they don’t want to buy.
So you need to make sure of a few things before you ask for the sale:
- You’ve shown all your product’s value (and the prospect understands)
- You’re prepared with all your qualifying ammo (to battle objections)
- You’ve already handled any anticipated objections
It will be much more difficult to backtrack and do these things after you’ve already asked for the sale.
Your prospect will be less open-minded about seeing value (because they are now more focused on thinking of and defending their objections).
They will be more shy and protective of their qualifying info (because it’s obvious now that you are going to try and use it against them to close the sale).
And they will now use all of their objections against you (even if you anticipated them), if you don’t verbally address them and put them to bed before asking for the sale.
If you’ve done all this before asking for the sale, then there should only be two possibilities when you ask for the sale: either the client gives you their credit card, or they give you an unanticipated objection.
Even if you get an unanticipated objection, you’ll still be able to handle it with the value you’ve shown (#1) and the qualifying info you’ve gathered (#2).
Also, because you already handled all their anticipated objections earlier in the call, the prospect will have enough patience to go through two or three objection handling “loops” (whereas it’s much harder to handle all the anticipated AND unanticipated objections at the very end of the call).
So remember, before you ask for the sale, make sure you’ve (1) shown value, (2) qualified, and (3) handled any anticipated objections. Doing these three things will dramatically increase your chances of closing the deal on the call.