7 Steps to Close Sales Fast

Want to close sales fast? Here is your recipe!

1. Get there early: Creating and winning opportunities means getting there early. If you want to win, the earlier you enter the client’s buying cycle the better. Being in front of a deal brings speed.
2. Wire the relationships: Creating new opportunities and winning them means already having the building wired before hand. Once you have the relationships, you will know about potential opportunities. You’ll also know who is involved in those opportunities. And more importantly, they will know you.
3. Develop a deep understanding: You need a deep understanding of your dream client’s needs. One of the reasons relationships are so important is that they provide you access to individuals and information. This access provides you with a deep understanding of what your client’s need and how best to deliver it.
4. Collaborate: You can go in with a disruptive idea and create dissatisfaction. That works. Sometimes. But much of the time your client has some ideas about what the right solution would look like for them. When they look at you they need to see that solution reflected in your recommendation. Closing business requires that you collaborate on that solution so that it exactly fits your clients needs.
5. Build consensus. If you want to win opportunities, there has to be agreement within your client organization that your solution is right and that they will benefit from it. You need to help them develop consensus around those solutions so that when it comes time to pull the trigger, everyone is already on board.
6. Resolve concerns. No matter how well you do in meeting your buyers needs, at the end they’re going to have concerns. You might think that they’re giving you objections, but what they’re really telling you is that they need more information to be confident. They need proof. You make it easy to say yes when you resolve those concerns as the process moves forward instead of leaving them unresolved. If you want them to say yes when you ask for their business you resolve the concerns ahead of time.
7. Ask. I don’t believe the answer to winning new business can be found in a yellow dummies closing book. I think buyers are too sophisticated for all that. Instead I think you need to ask directly for the business.

Now that you’ve read this list you know there’s no possible way that you can close the business in five minutes. In complex B2B sales, you will have likely invested months working through this process. But having gone through this process, wrapping up the sale is easier and faster because you’ve done all the hard work that leads to the easy yes.

The truth of the matter is you can close in 30 seconds. You can say, “I feel like we’ve done what we needed to in order to successfully execute on this project. Can we begin working on it or is there something else you need to see first?”

Fast is slow. Slow is fast.