As a salesperson, your time is valuable. If you’re spending time on a deal that’s NOT going to close, this is costing you time that you could otherwise spend on a deal that WILL close.
A longer sales cycle exacerbates this problem. Because the amount of time at risk of loss grows in proportion to the amount of time invested into a longer sales cycle.
Assuming you have a large market of prospect’s to pick from, you should start with the prospects that have the highest chances of closing, in order to get the greatest return on investment for your sales time and effort.
“Mini-closing” is a strategy that can be used at any point in the sales cycle (short or long cycle) to help you achieve this higher ROI by weeding out prospect’s who have lower potential to become customers.
It’s similar to Sandler’s “up-front contact” in that its purpose is to “avoid surprises.” But while Sandler’s UFC is primarily used to get on the same page with a prospect in terms of expectations before a meeting, a mini-close can be used at any time to make sure that your prospect is still moving in the direction of the sale.
A mini-close is defined as “any question, before the final ask for the sale, by which a salesperson aims to determine if their prospect is still planning to become a customer.”
In other words, asking your prospect if they’re still planning to buy, at any point before you actually ask them to buy.
What does a mini-close sound like?
The most direct and brutally honest form of a mini-close sounds like this:
“Are you still planning to buy my product?”
But that’s too rough, and will likely cause an end to the sales encounter. So we need to add a little filler and fluff on the front-end. Something like this:
“I want to take a second to check in here, Bob, just to make sure we’re being respectful of each other’s time, are you still planning to buy my product?”
But still, the question itself is too direct. And the topic of being “respectful of each other’s time” can be emotionally-charged and misinterpreted.
My preferred language sounds like this:
“I want to take a second to check in here, Bob, just to make sure we’re on the same page, if I can offer you a product that fits all your requirements, would you be comfortable moving forward today?”
It’s polite; it has filler and fluff so that you can save face from the true question.
It’s specific, because the question asks about moving forward “today.”
And there is also a little trickery woven in with the line “fits all your requirements.”
Because if a product fits ALL your requirements, then of course you would be willing to buy. In this way, the question is designed to encourage a “yes” answer.
It also sets the salesperson up for a perfect rebuttal if the prospect answers “no” to this question.
You can rephrase your question to make it sounds like your prospect is saying they’re no longer interested in that which they already told you that they were interested in, earlier, during qualifying.
You could say, “You mean to tell me, Bob, that if I found you a product for half of what you’re paying currently that does twice as much as the product you already have, AND you didn’t have to even lift a finger to get it started, that’s not something you would be interested in?”
This is a good trick to save yourself if you’ve mini-closed too early and need to buy yourself some more time to show your prospect some more value. The idea is to keep getting yes’s as you move along in your pitch, leading up to a “yes” in response to your final ask for the sale.
When is the best time to use a mini-close?
As a salesperson, you are responsible for bringing value to the encounter. This is what entices your prospect to stay engaged.
But you don’t want to give away this value for free.
In the same way that you wouldn’t give away your product for free when you ask for the final sale, you also want to ask a price for the perceived value of your product throughout the pitch—and that price is buying expectation from your prospect.
This is the high-level principle that underlies mini-closing: trading buying expectation for value.
As a salesperson, you are asking for buying expectation and offering value. While a prospect asks for value and offers buying expectation.
By “buying expectation,” we mean the expectation that the prospect will buy your product. And by “value,” of course, we mean the value of your product.
Throughout the pitch, if you’re doing it right, the perceived value of your product should increase in the eyes of your prospect. This allows you, in turn, to ask for more buying expectation. The prospect is willing to oblige, because they fear ending the encounter and missing out on the value that you have to offer. In other words, they have F.O.M.O.
The formality and directness of your mini-close depends on the stage of the sales process. In the earlier stages, your mini-closes should be informal and less direct. In the later stages, your mini-closes should be formal and direct.
This is in accordance with the graph below. A salesperson should ask for less buying expectation while they have still yet to show their product’s full value.
But in the later stages of the sales encounter, as the salesperson is almost finished showing all the value that they have to offer in their product, then it is time to start asking for maximal buying expectation.
Notice that the red line above is both straight and has a slope equal to one.
The line is straight because we want the sales encounter to be a smooth ride for our prospect. We don’t want to ask for very little buying expectation throughout the encounter, and then all of a sudden ask our prospect for the final sale, as if by surprise.
This is bad for the customer, because it may be jarring and unexpected. And this is bad for the salesperson, because they won’t have a sense of whether or not their prospect will say “yes,” and have thus lost control of the sale.
The line has a slope equal to one because a line more shallow than this would mean that the salesperson is offering too much value without asking for enough buying expectation in return. If the line were more steep, then this would mean the salesperson is asking for too much buying expectation without offering enough value.
The mini-close is our GPS which allows us to determine if we are still on-line.
If we ask for a mini-close, and our prospect responds in the negative, then we know we need to show some more value before asking another mini-close to check again to see if our prospect is back on-line.
If we ask for a mini-close, and our prospect responds in the positive, then we know we can keep some value in our back pockets in the meantime, until later in the pitch when we might need to recover from a negative response to a mini-close.
Here’s an example:
This is a particularly useful strategy if you’ve predicted an objection early on and want to see if it can be handled before you spend the time and effort to go through your entire pitch.
For example, let’s say you’re selling HR software.
You’re qualifying at the beginning of the call, and you ask about your prospect’s timeline.
Your prospect says, “We won’t be able to get anything started until January next year. That’s when our contract with [other HR software company] renews and we want to get everything started on the first of the new year.”
Uh-oh. That’s a non-starter.
Because you’re having this conversation in June and January is six months away. It’s your company’s policy that you can’t sign any contracts with a start date more than a month in the future.
So you ask for a mini-close:
“Susan, if I showed you an HR software that was a dream-come-true for your organization and could relieve a lot of your pain points, would you be willing to get something like that started sooner than January?”
If Susan says “yes,” then you can proceed with your pitch, but you want to continue mini-closing throughout to make sure Susan continues to see that your product really is a ‘dream-come-true’ that they would be willing to start before January.
If Susan says “no,” then you have a decision to make.
You can either (1) dig deeper on the mini-close and possibly decide that the prospect isn’t worth pitching any further because their probability of closing is low, or (2) show a little more value in an effort to show Susan that your product really is a ‘dream-come-true’ and then ask the mini-close question again to see if she’s changed her mind about getting started before January. If Susan still hasn’t changed her mind, then it might be time to move on to the next prospect.
After all, this is the purpose of mini-closing: to conserve your time and energy once you’ve determined a prospect is not a buyer, so that you can then spend that time and energy on a higher-conversion prospect.