How To Effectively Close Sales And Grow Your Business
Closing a sale is an art form.
There is a specific cadence and approach one must take in order to best position the offer before making the ultimate proposal to a prospective customer. Close the deal too early, and the customer is scared off. Close the deal too late, and you push away customers, perhaps losing the opportunity to present yourself to them again. Learning how to effectively close a sale doesn’t have to be an arduous or complex task. You just have to know which methods to use at the right time.
Now, you might be thinking, “I’ve been making sales and so far, I don’t see anything wrong with my strategy.” Trust me when I say, I couldn’t be happier to hear that. However, what I’m sharing with you today will only enhance your current strategy and allow you to increase your sales even more.
While there are many methods to help you close a sale, it’s important to keep your approach current and refresh antiquated strategies to adapt to an evolving landscape. However, this is not to say that your strategy should gloss over the steps of building rapport and earning the trust of your customer. Regardless of how you court your prospective customer, keep in mind to always think holistically in your strategy and ensure you’re investing the necessary time into your pitch before making the ask.
One viable method to captivate, and persuade, your audience is through engaging content. This can take many forms, but before we dive into these methods, let’s first take a look at traditional tactics that successfully work to close a sale.
Traditional Tactics to Close Sales
When employing traditional tactics, it’s important to understand the context in which they were first utilized. Sales were largely first made in person, at brick and mortar locations. Over time, and as technology began to advance, these tactics began to migrate to the various interfaces we now use to interact with prospective customers. However, at the core of these strategies, are tried-and-true messages that speak to the customer’s psyche.
- Now or Never: Positioning a deal, with a sense of urgency, can prompt your audience to take action. For example, highlighting a low supply of a product, or limited seating at an event, will provoke your audience to quickly decide if they wish to proceed or not. If you’ve laid enough foundation to peak their interest, there’s a greater chance they’ll respond positively to your request.
- Assumptive: While having assumptions tends to get a bad rap when it comes to closing a sale, it can be quite profitable. This tactic is beneficial with the assumption that you’ve provided your audience with all the knowledge, benefits, and insight into your product or service. Once you’ve established your pitch, you’re ready to propose, converting your audience into customers. Furthermore, by tracking the interests and activities of the audience as they navigate the customer journey, you’ll begin to anticipate where and when the customer will be ready to seal the deal.
- Summary: Reiterate the relevance and significance of your product or service before making the official offer to your customer. Provide them with a summarized overview to help them understand the necessity behind the investment they’re about to make.
- Sharp Angle: A large part of successfully closing a sale comes from anticipating what your customer might say when presented with an offer. Identifying certain points where they may ask for discounts or add-ons, can help you better position an offer and get into the mindset of the customer. As an example, you can fairly agree to their request for a discount or added benefits, provided that they purchase the product or service immediately.
- The Question Close: This tactic serves as both a way to discover the customer’s inquiries and to share more about the features and benefits behind your service or product. Employing a question, as the method to close a sale, provides a transparent approach to understanding where the customer is on their journey. Gaining these insights will not only serve as a profitable method to make a sale but will also allow you to know we’re more or less information is needed.
Using Content to Close Sales
As you may already know, content is king. By creating relevant and useful content, this is an opportunity to share with your audience the many ways your product or service can be best utilized to help solve their problems and alleviate pain points. When I say content I mean producing materials that feature your products or services and engage your audience. Whether that’s through blog articles, landing pages, infographics, or webinars, there are many ways to engage and provide information to your audience.
With any of the tactics listed above, you can create content that designs a holistic customer journey that builds rapport and interest with your prospective customers. Your ultimate objective should be to close a sale in a manner that makes the audience comfortable and at ease with your request. As well as, respectfully, making an offer they can’t refuse. Here are some ways you can use content to close sales.
- Content Marketing Strategy: Develop a content strategy that gives your audience a closer and in-depth look at the features, benefits, and insights relating to your services. Find out what your audience is looking for and find a way to connect their interest with your product in a meaningful way. An effective content marketing strategy will allow you to become a trusted source of information in your industry and creatively demonstrate how your product is the answer to their inquiries.
- Webinars: Closing sales can be done in many ways and taking it one step further, using webinars can give you ample options to turn your content into sales. From live to automated webinars, you can easily convert your email list into buyers. Create and target your webinars to speak directly to your segmented audience, allowing you to automate and refine your content to run on its own.
- Free Resources: Incentivize customers by giving away free resources that the audience can use. Providing freebies builds loyalty and rapport with your audience that prepares them in advance before they are prompted with the opportunity to purchase your service or product.
- Collaborate With Industry Experts: To further certify and establish credibility, it’s advantageous to connect and collaborate with others in your field. This can manifest in guest-blogging, developing free resources, and bundling deals with industry partners.
With countless ways to creatively close sales, the most important factor to think about is the customer. There are many incredible and useful tools that can assist us in closing the deal, but what continues to remain the same is the process in which we must earn the know, like, and trust of our prospective customers. There has never been a lower tolerance for gimmicky sales pitches than there is now. Which means that just because you can get directly in front of your customer, does not mean they have to buy your product because you have their attention.
Create a content strategy that pairs the best of what you offer to what your audience is looking for. When you begin to align both objectives, that is when you’ll begin to see your business making exponential sales.
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