When I started out in sales and marketing, it was all about closing the sale.

In fact, good salespeople were often referred to as good closers.

Decades later, I still see sales recruiters asking for candidates who have a proven record of closing.

Here’s why we need to be extremely careful before adopting the closing mindset, or any of the countless closing tricks and techniques.

Closing for business?

The challenge with the closing mindset, is that it positions the prospective customer as little more than a barrier. A hurdle between you and the sale. An obstacle to be overcome. Little wonder so many closing techniques are based on psychological tricks.

The use of long, uncomfortable silences at key points in the sales process, for example, is used to put pressure on the prospective client. So is refusing to accept a “no” from them, by asking what they need additional clarity on, each time they clearly just want out.

In a nutshell, the focus is on outmanoeuvring your opponent. It’s them against you. A confrontation.

Here’s a very different approach, along with why I strongly recommend you use it.

Opening relationships

I built my reputation in sales by adopting the polar opposite approach. Instead of focusing on closing, I focused on opening.

Opening relationships, to be exact.

I found (and still find) the idea of closing to be self-defeating. I discovered that you can achieve a great deal more, by opening relationships with people. This means taking time to listen to them. And then learning about their challenges and what they want / need. If our marketing is targeted correctly, we’re automatically only speaking with people who are our ideal profile of client.

When handled correctly, and preceded with effective marketing, this means there’s no need to close anything (or close on anyone).

The whole process becomes a naturally-flowing conversation, where we seek to help people overcome a challenge, with the products or services we provide.

It’s a beautiful, fulfilling way to do business.

It also means refusing to sell anything to anyone, if we believe it’s not what they need.

Too passive?

This approach may sound passive, but consider your friends. Consider the people you like. The people you trust. The people you love to have around you. Are they aggressive towards you? Confrontational? No! That’s because we prefer those who respect us and are open and honest with us.

We like people who are open and honest.

We buy from people who are open and honest.

We trust people who are open and honest.

We recommend people who are open and honest.

In short, the more open we are, the more opportunities we’re open to. And yes, the more sales we make, the more deals we make and the more referrals we get.

Image: Linkedin sales solutions.

Image: Harnoor Dhaliwal

It’s impossible to completely eliminate risk from your business. But you can have the best of both worlds, with low risk and maximum potential.

Let’s start by looking at risk and why you can’t (and shouldn’t) totally eliminate it from your business.

Think about it: Even if your results are fine right now, and you decide to just carry on with whatever you’re doing, you’re at enormous risk.

Really?

Yes, really!

You risk losing clients (or customers) to your agile competitors, who continuously seek to improve and target your client base with compelling offers. Sure, small and medium sized business are the most vulnerable, but even massive brands can be wiped out by the just carry on attitude. Remember; Blockbuster Video, Toys R Us, My Space, Palm Inc?

The question is, how do we get the best of both worlds; less risk and massively more potential?

I’m glad you asked.

Mastering the risk / potential balance

In seeking to eliminate risk, you also block yourself from every great opportunity. That’s because every genuine opportunity for your business comes with an element of risk.

So, no risk = no progress.

Therefore, rather than regard risk as something to avoid, consider the potential pluses as well as the potential minuses. Research the positives as well as the negatives.

And challenge your beliefs!

Challenging your beliefs is critically important, as one of the biggest barriers to your success are your inaccurate preconceptions. This is a perfect example. And I see equally damaging thinking with business owners all the time.

A well-balanced approach to risk and opportunity is behind every successful business. It reduces your exposure to risk, whilst simultaneously allowing you to fully benefit from the genuine opportunities your business must have, in order to grow.

I hope you found this useful. More importantly, I hope you do something with it.

The secret is simply this: “In business, the winners get moving”.

Here’s why.

• Every business owner has ideas and occasionally great ideas.
• Every business owner is presented with opportunities to succeed.
• Every business owner can choose to be a leader.
• Every business owner can instigate, rather than wait for someone else to move.
• Every business owner has potential to be better today than they were yesterday.
• And every business owner has the same 24-hours available to them every day.

It’s what we DO that counts.

• Not our intentions.
• Not our network of business contacts.
• Not our cutting edge technology.
• Not our plans.
• Not our targets.
• Not our qualifications.
• Not our potential.
• Not our competitive edge.
• Not our ingenuity.
• Not our skills.

Action always, always, always precedes success.

That’s why in business, the winners get moving.

Every single one of your prospective clients or customers has one thing in common. Can you guess what it is? You probably won’t be expecting my answer.

Here it is:

They can all, easily afford your products or services! All of them. Every. Single. One.

Here’s what really stops people buying from you.

1. You’re attracting enquiries from the wrong people.
2. You haven’t given them a powerful enough reason to buy from you or hire you.
3. They don’t trust you enough, so they don’t believe your message.

Let’s look at these 3 challenges in a little more detail. Plus, how to overcome them and make massively more sales.

Let’s go!

1. You’re attracting enquiries from the wrong people

No matter how amazing your products are. No matter how outstanding your services are. You’ll never achieve the results you want, if you’re talking to the wrong people.

Allow me to explain.

Let’s say you provide a premium quality service, which rightly has a premium price tag. If so, you’re wasting your time marketing to the bargain hunters crowd.

Yes, very occasionally you may be able to change someone’s world view. However, you’re far more likely to sell your premium services, if you market to those who already value premium service.

The key phrase here is: Market to the dissatisfied, NOT the disinterested.

In other words, using the above example you’d market your premium service to those who are unhappy with their current situation… and who value a premium service.

It’s never (ever) about the money. It’s always true that your prospective customers can afford your products or services.

And here’s why.

If someone genuinely can’t afford what you offer, they were never a prospective customer in the first place! Think about it. For someone to be a prospective customer, they need to have the ability to pay you.

So, identify who your ideal prospective customer is. Then, make that select group of great people the sole focus of all your marketing. The alternative is to do what most failing business owners do, and try to be all things to all people. That approach can’t work. It will drive you nuts and lose you a fortune.

2. You haven’t given them a powerful enough reason to take action

This one is huge. No. It’s bigger than that!

We need to start here by looking at motivation. The word motivation comes from a fusion of the words: motive and action.

When the motive (or reason) is powerful enough, we take action. By contrast, most small business marketing is weak. It’s generic. It’s predictable. It’s needy. And as you’d expect, it lacks the motivational power that’s essential, to inspire people to make purchasing decisions.

So, why do so many businesses rely on weak marketing that fails to generate the results they need? Having transformed the marketing results of business owners since 1995, here’s what I’ve found. And it’s something I see examples of pretty-much every working day of my life.

It’s the business owner’s attitude to marketing. They’ll happily pay an expert to style their hair, but they’ll willingly risk their financial future with lousy, DIY marketing.

They honestly believe that dabbling with their future is safer, than hiring an expert to do things correctly. They tend not to admit it publicly, because in many cases they don’t admit it to themselves. In conversation, you find that this happens when the business owner still operates and makes decisions, from an employee mindset. They see risk in all the wrong places. Unaware that the riskiest thing a business owner can do, is avoid expert help when it’s clearly needed.

Tip: Read this – I just received a very angry email. And I have to share it with you.

However, this is great news if you want your business to thrive.

Really, Jim? Why?

I’m glad you asked!

It’s because you can massively outperform all (or the vast majority) of your competitors, simply by being professional enough to invest in expert help. It’s the easiest win in business. And your competitors haven’t figured it out (yet).

3. They don’t trust you, so they don’t believe your message

Here’s the thing: For your marketing messages to work, people need to believe them. They need to trust you enough, to accept that what you’re telling them is true.

Sadly, many sales are lost this way, even though the marketing message is completely true and honest. The provider really is as good as they say. Maybe even better then they say in their marketing.

So, why does this happen… and more importantly my friend, what can you do about it?

Trust is lost when there’s a disconnect between.

• What the marketing message says.
• And how the prospective client feels.

Here are just 2 very common examples, to explain the point.

• Promising an expert service, yet charging average fees. Your prospective clients have been told since they were kids, that when something sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true. So they don’t believe it. ‘High quality’ and ‘cheap fees’ are opposite ends of the spectrum. Putting them together creates massive doubt in what you’re saying.
• Promising a professional service, yet having an amateur image. It’s like a restaurant serving a delicious meal, but on a dirty plate! Low quality logos, DIY branding, poorly designed websites, amateur marketing copy etc, totally destroy trust. And it does so literally (not figuratively) in seconds. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. You lost the sale or client enquiry needlessly. And you won’t even know.

If you notice anything that could cause a stranger to get a negative impression of your business, fix it. And fix it today. It’s that important!

Why?

Because while it’s broken it’s losing you money and opportunities. While it’s broken, the lifeblood of your business is broken. And to ignore it is like ignoring black smoke bellowing from the back of your car, hoping the car will ‘just get better’. When in reality that car will just grind to a halt.

Summing up

Those 3 examples of why people don’t buy from you are easy wins. They’re easy, because with the correct approach, they can easily and quickly be overcome, allowing you to blow the lid off your potential.

What you mustn’t do, is carry on as you are and expect things to ‘just improve’. You’d think that goes without saying, right? Yet time and again, we see small businesses that still face ongoing struggles, years and years after they started.

Here’s just one example, from an email I received.

The guy who wrote to me is in his late 60’s. He’s worked hard all his life. He told me that he’d never made any “real money” and that he kept waiting for things to improve. With some expert help, he could have quit working decades ago and been very comfortable now. However, he explained that he still needs to work in order to pay the bills. It’s heartbreaking, because it’s completely avoidable.

Moving forward

As Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” In business we simply say, “more of the same leads to more of the same”.

If your business is on the right track to get you where we want to be, more of the same is exactly what you need. If you’re frustrated with your progress and want something better, then you need to improve things. And those 3 areas are a pretty good place to start.