How Do You Know When to Close the Sale? What Water Skiing Taught Me About the Moment to Ask

There is a great deal of conversation these days about the idea that we should never close a sale.

The argument runs like this. If you sell consultatively, if you ask good questions and serve the client properly, then the conversation will arrive quite naturally at the point where the client, customer or patient simply says yes, I will go ahead.

I do not believe that. Not for one moment do I believe that.

Having spent a working lifetime in selling and in persuasion, my view is this. We learn how to sell, then we stop selling, and then we allow people to buy. That belief sits at the heart of everything I teach. And yet it still comes to a point in every conversation with a prospective client where you and I have to come up with the right words to say.

Which raises the real question, and it is the question I want to answer for you here. Not whether to close, but when.

Money is the silent applause for a job well done.

What You Will Find in This Article

• The Fashion for Never Closing
• What Actually Happens When Nobody Asks
• Learning to Water Ski
• Crossing the Wake
• What Crossing the Wake Has to Do With Closing
• The Signals You Are Already Receiving
• Why Closing Too Late and Too Soft Teaches You Nothing
• The Gentle Words to Use
• The One Question Worth Memorising
• Sell, Stop Selling, Allow People to Buy
• Your Next Step

              The Fashion for Never Closing

I understand why the never close idea has taken hold, and I have sympathy with where it comes from.

Most of the people I work with are helpers by nature. Coaches, consultants, trainers, therapists, accountants, advisers. People who came into this work because they wanted to make a difference, not because they wanted to be the pushy one in the room.

So the promise that a good enough conversation will close itself is enormously appealing. It lets us off the hook of the one moment we find uncomfortable.

The trouble is that it is not true. Or rather, it is true just often enough to be believed, and false often enough to cost you a great deal of money over a career.

I should be clear about what I am not saying. I am not arguing for pressure, for scripts, or for any of the hard closing techniques that gave selling its bad name in the first place. That approach is a poor fit for the helping professions, and it tends to sit alongside underpricing and undercharging rather than solving it. What I am arguing for is the courage to ask a warm question at the right time.

              What Actually Happens When Nobody Asks

Here is the pattern I have watched hundreds of times, and it almost never looks like a failure while it is happening.

The conversation goes well. The client is warm. Everyone is nodding. There is real rapport in the room and a genuine sense that this could work. And then it drifts to a polite ending. You say you will send something over. They say that would be lovely. And nothing happens.

You did not fail to persuade them. You failed to invite the decision.

Two weeks later you send a follow up email and get no reply. A month later you tell yourself they were probably not serious. They were serious. They were simply never asked, and life is busy, and the moment passed.

You did not fail to persuade them. You failed to invite the decision.

              Learning to Water Ski

Let me give you the picture that sits in my mind whenever I think about this, because I find a story lodges where a rule does not.

Years and years ago I learned to water ski. I eventually got to the point where I could just about come up out of the water on one ski, which was a bit of a struggle, but I managed it.

The technique, as anyone who has tried it will tell you, is counterintuitive. You must not bend your arms. You keep them straight, all of the time, and you imagine the rope running through the back of your shoulders and onwards behind you. Then you let the boat pull you out.

What you must not do is try to pull yourself up. And my word, does it hurt when you get that wrong and hit the water.

There is a lesson sitting in that on its own, and it is worth pausing on. The power is not coming from you. The power is coming from the boat. Your job is to hold your position, keep your nerve, and let the pull do the work. Selling is remarkably similar. The power is in the value you have built during the conversation, not in the force of your personality at the end of it.

Then, having got reasonably confident at getting up and following along behind the boat, I found there was something else waiting for me.

              Crossing the Wake

I had to learn how to cross the wake.

You will know the ones I mean. Those two great big V shaped waves coming off the back of the boat, with a sort of hump along the top of them. You sit there behind the boat looking at them and thinking, how on earth am I going to get across there into the calm water at the side, and then do that lovely skiing along beside the boat thing that you see other people do?

It looks impossible from where you are standing. And it is entirely possible, because human beings do it every day of the summer.

So how do you know when to cross the wake?

I will tell you exactly how you know. You just know.

There is no signal. Nobody blows a whistle. You simply make the decision that you are going to do it, and having made that decision, you pick your moment and you go.

And what you find, as I found, is that it is a great deal easier than you thought it was going to be. There is a bit of bopping up and down, your knees working like pistons for a second or two, and then suddenly you are out there in the clear water.

Knowing when to close is trusting your sensory acuity to know this is the moment.

              What Crossing the Wake Has to Do With Closing

Crossing the wake is very similar to knowing when to close.

The moment is not announced. There is no phrase the client says that means it is now safe to ask. If you are waiting for that phrase, you will wait a long time, and the polite ending will arrive instead.

What there is, in every conversation, is a stream of information you are already receiving. The subtle messages. The unspoken ones.

Your sensory acuity is picking all of that up whether you choose to act on it or not. The question is not whether you can read the room. You can. The question is whether you will trust what you are reading enough to act on it.

So knowing when to close is not a matter of finding a rule. It is a matter of trusting yourself to know, and then saying to yourself, yes, I am going to ask this client whether they would like to go ahead, because everything I am picking up tells me we are at the right point.

              The Signals You Are Already Receiving

Let me put a few of them into words, not so that you can tick them off like a checklist, but so that you recognise them when your instinct flags them up.

• The questions change. They stop asking whether this could work and start asking how it would work. Who would be involved, when could you start, what would the first month look like.
• The pronouns change. You and your quietly become we and our. That is the sound of somebody trying the arrangement on for size.
• The posture shifts. They move forward, or they sit back and relax. Either way, something has settled.
• The tone softens. The professional voice drops away a little and you get the real person.
• There is a tiny pause before they agree. That pause is not doubt. It is very often the sound of a decision being made.
• They start talking about practicalities. Budgets, diaries, other people who would need to know. Nobody discusses logistics for something they have already decided against.

None of these is a green light on its own. Taken together, they are the hump on top of the wave, and you have a choice about whether to go across.

              Why Closing Too Late and Too Soft Teaches You Nothing

Here is an old expression, and it is still slightly true, so let me give it to you and then explain why I am saying it.

You never learn how to close by closing too late and too soft. You only ever learn how to close by closing too soon and too hard, and then realising that you got it wrong.

That is uncomfortable for the helpers among us, so let me be plain about what it means. It does not mean go and be pushy. It means that timing is a skill, and skills are learned at the edges, not in the middle.

Every time you ask a shade too early and feel the conversation stiffen, you learn something about where the moment actually sits. That knowledge is not available from a book, mine included, or from any training course. It comes from having misjudged it and paid attention.

It is the same as catching a ski in the wake. You go head over heels, you smack your face on what feels like concrete, and you never make that particular mistake again.

The person who has closed too late every time for fifteen years has fifteen years of experience of nothing at all. They have simply never tested where the edge is.

              The Gentle Words to Use

So let us say you have decided to trust yourself and ask. What do you actually say?

This is where a lot of capable people freeze, and then fill the silence with more information instead of a question. More features. More reassurance. Another case study. Anything rather than the ask.

The words are far gentler than most people expect.

Notice the word might in two of those. I believe strongly in words such as might, maybe and perhaps. That seemingly soft approach works far better than being far too certain far too soon, which pushes clients away rather than drawing them in.

And then, having asked, stop talking. The silence that follows a closing question belongs to the client, not to you. Filling it is the most common and most expensive habit I see.

              The One Question Worth Memorising

If you take only one question away from this article, take this one.

That question does three things at once.

• It reaches back across the whole conversation. Not the last two minutes, but everything you have discussed, which reminds the client of all the value you have built together.
• It asks how they feel. People make decisions emotionally and then justify them logically, so you are asking about the part that actually decides.
• It is open. Anything still sitting unspoken now has somewhere to go before the decision is made. That is your last and best chance to deal with a concern you did not know was there.

That third point matters more than it looks. A closed question gets you a yes or a no. An open question gets you the truth, and the truth is what you can work with.

              Sell, Stop Selling, Allow People to Buy

None of this is about convincing anybody of anything. As the old saying has it, a person convinced against their will is of the same opinion still.

Our job is to create the conditions in which yes is the natural next step, and then to have the courage to invite it.

Treat people as though they have already said yes, not as though they will say yes.

If you have treated the person throughout the conversation as though they have already said yes, rather than as though they might one day say yes, then the closing question is barely a close at all. It is the obvious next sentence.

This is also why the gathering stage matters so much. If you have asked proper questions, understood what the person is really trying to achieve, and been clear about the value you create rather than the hours you spend, then by the time you reach the moment of asking, most of the work is already done.

But somebody still has to say it. And that somebody is you.

              Your Next Step

The next time you are in a client conversation and you feel that moment arrive, I would like you to do one thing. Trust it, and ask.

You may find you have asked slightly early. Good. That is how the skill is built.

You may equally find, as I found out there behind the boat, that it is a great deal easier than you thought it was going to be.

Learn how to sell, stop selling, and allow people to buy.

I wish you every success in all your adventures in life.

Peter

Peter Thomson

'The UK's Most Prolific Business Development Author'

PS: If you lead a sales team and feel they might benefit from a more confident, consultative and ethical approach to selling, I also provide practical sales training for teams. Drop me an email at [email protected] and tell me a little about your team and what you would like them to do more effectively.