Being a Sales "Closer" Isn't Real

Good Morning! Twitter just got slapped with a $600K fine for firing an employee who didn't respond to Elon’s infamous email asking employees to commit to a ‘hardcore’ culture or quit. The employee argued that he didn’t open it because he thought it was malware - a valid excuse in our books. We might have to try this out on our sales manager this week. ‘Sorry boss man, haven’t opened any of your emails because I thought they were malware.’ 😄 

In today’s Follow Up:

• No such thing as a ‘closer’ 🤔 

• A follow up strategy 👀 

• Tech sales vs medical sales 💰️ 

• Sales jobs, LinkedIn & a meme 😂

Sponsor The Follow Up | Subscribe

Why Being a “Closer” Isn’t Real

When I hear the term “closer” I picture the ‘final boss’ that a prospect meets with before they’re manipulated into signing a contract.

The type of person who knows all the right words to say to get the deal closed.

Traditionally, closing is thought of as the final trick you use to get a customer to buy or some magical skill that pushes a customer to make the purchase. 

But the truth is… 99% of sales cycles don’t work like that.

As Keenan says, good salespeople “are closing the deal, little-by-little throughout the entire sales process so when the buyer is ready, they simply say; "Where do I sign?"

So, how do you ‘close’ a prospect during the sales process?

Let’s take a look. 👇️ 

The magic’s in the discovery…

Discovery is all about digging into your prospect’s problem, so you can sell them your product help them solve it. 

And it turns out that closing your client has a lot more to do with your discovery call than you might think. 

Gong looked at 10’s of thousands of discovery & closing calls, and found something interesting… When it comes to closing calls, the talk-to-listen ratio of successful vs unsuccessful calls looks almost identical. 

But the discovery calls that led to a closed deal looked a lot different than calls that resulted in no deal.

As you can see, discovery calls that led to a closed won deal had a 46/54 talk-to-listen ratio.

Meanwhile, discovery calls that lead to a closed lost deal were overloaded with the sales rep talking roughly 72% of the time.

Moral of the story: Don’t hog the mic. Listen more than you talk (or at least around the same amount), and learn everything you can about your prospect.  

Language matters…

In another study, Gong analyzed over 170K sales calls and found that using the term “approved pricing” instead of ‘typical pricing’ or ‘usual pricing’ led to the best results for sales reps. Using the term ‘list price’ 3X’d the amount of time spent on discussing pricing. 

Be aware of the language you’re using on your calls.

Prospects pick up on slight differences.

And slight differences can have a bigger impact on your ability to close than you’d think.

Follow through.

Imagine posting 1,000 YouTube videos, and when your 1,001st video goes viral, everyone refers to you as an overnight success who got lucky… They completely ignore the 1,000 videos you posted, that made you good enough to make the viral video.

This is sorta like attributing a sale to how skilled at ‘closing’ you are. The ‘closing’ happens in the work put into research, discovery, demoing, and pitching.

Focus on following through on all of the work that goes into the sales process, and the closing will take care of itself.

But don’t forget to ask for the sale.

2478 everyday investors shared $1,123,615 net profit on a Monet

Now you might be thinking: “what the heck are you talking about?” But keep reading, because this investment platform's users are already smiling all the way to the bank. Thanks to Masterworks, the award winning platform for investing in blue-chip art.

Every single one of Masterworks’ 16 sales has returned a profit to investors, for a 100% positive net return track record. With 3 recent sales, Masterworks investors realized net annualized returns of 17.6%, 21.5% and 35%.

How does it work? Simple, Masterworks does all of the heavy lifting like finding the painting, buying it, storing it, and eventually selling it. It files each offering with the SEC so that nearly anyone can invest in highly coveted artworks for just a fraction of the price of the entire piece.

Shares of every offering are limited, but The Follow Up readers can skip the waitlist to join with this exclusive link.

Sales Around The Web 🗞️

📩 How to land jobs at top companies with cold outreach to the hiring managers.

💰️ How Intel plans to reach $1 billion in software sales by 2027 (or sooner).

👀 Repvue compares the tech sales industry vs the medical sales industry.

🤑 A sales rep joined a startup that gave him no training or onboarding, but his base salary is six figures with a $220K OTE.

Checking In On LinkedIn

Always one step ahead... 😂 

Sales Meme of the Day

Past performance is not indicative of future returns, investing involves risk. See disclosures masterworks.com/cd