Are you having trouble selling yourself and getting prospects to see the value you can provide for them? In this episode, James Muir joins Jason to talk about closing more sales and his book, The Perfect Close. James shares the process leading up to it, 4 high leverage areas in sales, how to prepare messaging that works to get a high close rate, and the two questions that can improve your closing percentage without ever sounding pushy or manipulative.

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4 High Leverage Areas in Sales

The truth is there’s no messaging that will suddenly overwhelm people with persuasion and approval. You have to do your research and make your that you’re delivering the right message to the right audience and using the correct medium. James breaks down this process into four high leverage areas in sales that will you to improve your closing rate:

Market. The single best thing you can do to improve sales is sell only to ideal clients. Targeting the right customer will be pivotal because everything else falls below that in your funnel. If you get that wrong, everything you’re doing in sales will fall on deaf ears.
Message. Now that you figured out who you want to target, what is the message you want to send? It’s a very narrow window to get your message across once you have their attention, so you have to make sure that you’re delivering a high-impact message.
Medium. Now that you know who you’re talking to and what you’re going to say ask yourself where do these people hang out? Remember to meet the customer where they are (social media, trade shows, etc).
Motivation. This is about personal motivation, what gets you out of bed in the morning? Getting all these elements just right will require a lot of work and the right motivation will help you get through it.

Are You Talking to the Right Prospects?

For his part, Jason recommends thinking of N.B.A.T. before engaging in any new project conversation. These steps will help you save time and energy on the wrong prospects.

N – Need:

Ask what the specific needs are and what specific end results they’re expecting. Ask how this project fits in with the overall company vision. If they need to pull in another person to answer that question, hold onto that nugget of information.

B – Budget:

Ask for the budget. More often than not, you won’t get an actual number so act like a reverse auctioneer… Start with a ridiculously high number saying, “Is your budget $500,000, or $400,000, maybe $300,000…?” They either give you a more realistic range or the name of someone who knows. Hold onto that nugget of information, too!

A – Authority:

Were they able to answer the questions about need and budget? If not, and they gave you another name or two, then you know who you really need to be talking to.

T – Timing:

Only you know what you can do and how long it takes. You might really want or even need this project but, if the timing has unrealistic parameters you are setting yourself up for failure.

Messaging to Increase Your Agency's Close Rate

There’s really great research available on how to create effective messaging and identifying the different elements you should consider when crafting a sales pitch. Some of these elements include determining the Issues or problems the customer has, as well as the goal they’re trying to achieve.

Then there’s the Trigger event, which are occurrences that lead to a sales opportunity and will indicate the best time to sell your product or service.

The most challenging part will be the Insight or unconsidered needs, where you get your prospect to see a compelling enough reason to buy by tapping into their unconsidered needs, which are shortcomings, challenges, or missed opportunities that they haven’t considered yet. This will help you create a value proposal of how you can produce some results for them.

The natural outcome of this will be Skepticism, which is the perfect moment for you to reveal your mechanism of action, the thing you do for the customer that produces the desired results.

For this, you will need Proof. There are many types of proof you can present, but you can get the best results with third-party validation because it is the hardest to fake.

You don’t necessarily have to follow this order, but this is the mechanism that will get buyers to make a decision now and not wait.

2 Questions To Improve Your Closing Percentage

Before you go into any meeting, you should have an idea of what you want the outcome of this meeting to be. You should have an idea advance and a couple of alternate advances. If you have that prepared, then you’re ready for the two questions, which are designed to be non-confrontational or pushy:

Does it make sense for us to X? (where X is your sales advance).
What do you think is a good next step?

It’s all about really considering the possible results before you walk into the meeting. Think about, what’s the best thing that could happen for the client? And what other things you can do keep the ball rolling?

By doing this, you’re pacing the sale at exactly the rate that the client is ready to move. It’s when you try to move a customer faster than they’re comfortable with when it can feel pushy or manipulative.

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