Exposing Sales Myths #1 – Always be closing

Grant Leboff: I really like your book because you blow away a lot of the myths that I also think are rubbish and people always repeat. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it, but there is a film called Glengarry Glen Ross where there’s that famous scene where the guy says ‘ABC – Always Be Closing’ – which I’ve always thought was junk – and it’s one of your myths of selling. So, please explain a little bit more to our audience, why it’s so much rubbish.

Mark Blackmore: Well it upsets quite a lot of people when I claim it is a myth, and I think it’s because it’s that macho world of sales isn’t it? My first ever sales job was selling double glazing and we were trained very much there; don’t ask too many questions, tell them lots about the product, and once you’ve told them that, we would be sent on closing skills courses to learn to actually close. The reality is, in the world of sales, if that was a triangle (indicates a triangle with the base down) and that was the amount of time you spent, it’s now been flipped round. We should spend more time asking questions about the customer. We can demonstrate what’s more relevant to them, and actually the close – they should be asking us ‘what are the next steps?’ So we shouldn’t always be closing, they should be closing us, in reality.

Grant Leboff: I always found it funny you went into bookshops in the old days – although people don’t go into bookshops any more – but in the old days you would go into bookshops and there are these books like ‘99 ways to close a sale’, and there’s only one, just say ‘shall we go ahead or not?’

So what’s the most important aspect of a sale if it isn’t just always be closing?

Mark Blackmore: The reality is that nobody likes to be sold to. How many people, in sales, have you seen with ‘sales person’ as their job title? It’s an account executive, its development manager, we don’t like to be sold to. We like to buy, I was in Oxford Street this lunchtime. Everyone is buying but, we don’t like to be sold to. So the reality is, we should be understanding the customers’ transition. What does the customer want when they are buying something? The single sales principle is; do they have a compelling need, is that being met by your credible solution and does it offer perceived value? So providing, in sales, you are meeting those three key elements, then they should be buying from you. Not the other way round, of you trying to force them into a product that they don’t want.

There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order to facilitate the readability of the written English