Master the Art of Closing Deals in 2023

Towards the end of the sales process, there’s often a moment when a deal hangs in the balance.

Even if your product is a match made in heaven for the prospective client, it doesn’t take much to stop a deal from happening — a delayed response, focusing on the wrong features, or misunderstanding the client’s use case. Seemingly minor missteps like these can often stop your sales team from closing deals.

To top things off, your sales reps can do nothing blatantly wrong and still have a poor closing rate. Getting prospective clients from “interested” to actually signing on that dotted line is a delicate process.

So how do experienced sales teams avoid these hiccups? They create a closing system using proven tactics and techniques that help overcome a buyer’s doubts and get that signature.

In this article, we’ll share our recommended closing strategies and techniques based on advice from reputed sales experts, and also explore exactly what your team needs to do before initiating a closing conversation.

Necessary steps before your team can close deals effectively

Closing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It doesn’t matter how effective your closing system is if your sales team can’t properly coax prospects down the sales funnel until they’re actually convinced your product is a good match.

To set yourself up for success from the start, understand your prospects, and follow sales strategies that’ll help you cater to their needs and wants.

Focus on the right prospects and customize your sales pitch to match their unique needs

If your client doesn’t 100% believe that your product or service will help them solve a real problem, you might as well give up. There’s no point in introducing urgency, offering a “final” discount offer, or using any other closing tactic. All appeals will fall on deaf ears.

Effective closing starts with effective, personalized selling. Make sure your sales reps embody the consultative sales technique.

Your sales reps should always:

• Use prospecting tools to vet potential clients and make sure they align with your ideal customer profile (ICP). Use criteria like demographics, industry, or buying behavior. This data helps your team focus on prospects with the highest conversion potential.
• Identify a prospect’s preferences and pain points and tailor their approach to highlight your product in a way that most appeals to each potential client.
• Don’t sell features, explain exactly how your product can solve the prospect’s problems. (And preferably, back this up with a relevant case study.) Personalize every sales pitch and pitch deck to each client.

If your best sales reps already do it effectively, but most of your sales team struggle with this, try developing a sales enablement program. By leveraging sales enablement software, you can more effectively train new sales reps in your overall sales strategy, techniques, and tactics.

Also, if you use automated lead nurturing (like TigerLRM’s auto follow-ups) make sure to leverage segmentation to personalize your messaging. This helps you deliver targeted content that addresses each lead’s specific challenges.

Identify and get through to key decision-makers

It doesn’t matter if you convince a tech-loving software engineer or a single sales rep that your product is great‌ — ‌you need to convince the actual decision-makers that have the power to sign a lucrative deal with your company.

Here’s a simplified version of how your sales reps can do this:

• Identify key decision-makers within the organization, and find a way to engage them in the sales process.
• Leverage whoever is already interested in your product (your product “champion”) to get access to them and start off on the right foot. I know this is a lot harder than it sounds, so here’s a real sales conversation by SaaS sales expert Chris Orlob doing just that, recruiting his champion to get the CRO of the company on board.)

It’s a lot easier to get your entire sales team to do this consistently with your sales playbook, pitch decks, case studies, and even video tutorials baked into the CRM they use. With TigerLRM’s CRM with robust sales enablement features, you can set all of this up in a few clicks, without having to integrate multiple solutions or do any custom coding.

Your reps can easily store and update contact information, record important notes, and track interactions. Plus, you can train them on exactly how to sell effectively according to your ideal best practices from within the CRM.

Prioritize team collaboration to deliver the right experience to each prospect

The assigned sales rep isn’t always the perfect match for a client. By fostering a culture of team collaboration (rather than a typical “lone shark” attitude), you can near guarantee a better experience for the majority of your prospects.

One way to create a foundation for better communication in your team is to get everyone working and talking on the same platform.

For example, TigerLRM's collaboration tools can help your team act as a cohesive unit across locations (or even with remote team members). Everyone in the sales process stays up to date on prospect details; they can even access this data from their phones if needed.

And if a particular rep has an in with a potential client, or simply more experience in that vertical, a rep can quickly get the help they need to make the necessary adjustments to their pitch and approach.

If you follow these three simple (but not easy) strategies, your sales reps are in a much better position when they initiate the closing process. A prospect who truly feels your product is the best solution for their company is much easier to close than someone who views your product as just one option among many. (It also means you don’t have to compete on price to be the cheapest option.)

Instill the 5 principles of closing into every sales rep

Now that you’ve set the stage properly, with sales reps using a personalized, consultative sales process to nurture pre-qualified leads, it’s time to work on the actual closing.

The first step is to examine how much room your sales reps have to improve. The average closing rate in the software industry in 2022 was 22%. Find relevant data for your industry, and use it to benchmark your progress.

Before we get into specific closing techniques, and exact word-for-word questions your sales reps can start using today, you need to ensure that your sales reps have the right foundation.

Instill the five principles of closing into your sales team, and they’ll consistently do a good job, regardless of the sales closing technique they choose.

1. Always ask questions to keep the potential customer engaged. The last thing you want is for your sales reps to go into a long monologue trying to pitch every benefit of your product. Getting to the close is all about guiding your prospect down an engaging journey from their needs and problems, to how your product is the solution. Actively reiterate and summarize the client’s needs and problems with questions.
2. Prepare for potential objections. Based on the client’s current situation (financially and otherwise), brainstorm potential objections and prepare a powerful response to each one. One benefit of researching and focusing on the client’s needs from early stages in the sales process, is that your sales reps should be familiar with every potential objection the prospect will throw at them. (If you have a very clear ICP, your sales team should have a shared library of objections and responses in your media center inside TigerLRM. Here are some examples to get you started.)
3. Introduce a sense of urgency to overcome buyer inertia. Deal slippage (when a deal seems like it’s going to come through, but it slowly fizzles out) hit a record high in 2022, with an average of 37%. To overcome a client’s tendency to stall the deal, introduce an element of urgency into your closing efforts. Offer a limited-time discount, free coaching, or another incentive to get that signature ASAP.
4. Personalize the closing technique based on your impression of the potential customer. Aggressive urgency-based selling isn’t the right approach to convincing everyone. You have to adapt the approach to each prospect’s personality. Your best sellers will do this instinctively, so a good way to teach the rest of the team is to record their sales calls and have them explain the why and how. The key here is listening to your client.
5. Follow up. While urgency is one aspect of limiting the amount of deals that simply “slip away,” the second (and just as important) aspect is following up. Too many deals are lost each year because sales reps decide to simply wait or move on. Following up isn’t just a general sales tactic to use to get that first response from a prospect — it's ‌ also a crucial step to close more of your qualified leads.

If your team follows these principles, they'll consistently convince potential customers to sign on that dotted line.

7 effective closing techniques your sales reps can start using today

Below, we share some of our favorite closing techniques (and actual questions and scripts) that your sales reps can start using today.

Offer a limited-time deal

This is a universal closer used by sales professionals in virtually every industry. Here are a few example closing phrases that do this well:

• “If you sign up today, we can offer you a 30% discount off the first year.”
• “If you sign by the end of the week, I’ll secure you a spot in our onboarding program for free.”

It works because it helps to get the deal closed right now, instead of slipping into becoming only a forgotten memory in the prospect’s mind.

Summarize the sales conversation and the benefits of your product

Help the prospect internalize the benefits that you covered in the sales conversation by summarizing them. For example:

• “As we covered in the call, employee onboarding is a big problem for your company because of how difficult it is to use the system. I hope I’ve shown you how our product can help you deal with this through in-app tutorials and a dedicated learning management system.”

Focus on how your product solves their problems.

Asking for specific objections

If the client isn’t jumping at a deal, it’s important to find out exactly what’s holding them back. Ask questions like:

• “What specifically is holding you back from pulling the trigger on this?”
• “Is there any specific reason stopping you from signing this deal today?

And if your sales reps have done their research, they should already have the perfect response to the answers they’ll get.

The sharp angle close

The sharp angle close is a way to turn a client's objection into an opportunity for closing the deal. If they ask for specific features or extra up-front work (that you don’t typically do), you say you’ll accommodate them as long as they sign the deal right now.

For example:

• Prospect: “Can you get the installation finished up by the end of the week?”
• Sales rep: “Normally it takes our team two to three weeks, but if I squeeze you in on Thursday (at no extra cost) would you sign the deal today?”

Let the prospect lead

Another approach that is gaining popularity in this noisy modern world of sales, is to take the pressure off your potential clients.

Josh Braun, former head of sales at Basecamp, is a big believer in reducing sales pressure with a more prospect-driven sales and closing process.

He recommends sales reps use phrases like: “There’s no rush or obligation. We can proceed at your pace.”

The goal is to establish more trust with the client, get to the core of their problems, and together, figure out how your product/service fits into that picture.

The puppy dog close

Just like its adorable nickname indicates, this sales closing technique is another soft approach. It involves giving the prospect a free trial of your product or service. The idea is that the product itself will enchant the prospect enough to make the purchase, like a family friend who you convinced to “watch” a puppy from your dog’s litter for a week.

Example question:

• “Want to try our product for free without any obligation? I can offer a free 30-day trial to your entire sales team.”

It also goes by another (more boring) name, the test drive close, which is self-explanatory.

The ownership close

With the ownership close, you proceed with the conversation as if they’ve already agreed to purchase your product, and try to paint a vivid picture of what this potential future looks like.

For example:

• “Once you get the new routing system installed, you’ll save between 8-12% on fueling costs. Where are you planning to invest the money you save?”

Creating your own effective closing system

Effectively closing deals is a complicated process that means revamping not just the last two minutes of your reps’ sales calls, but the entire process leading up to that stage. You not only need to figure out what works for which types of clients, but train your whole team to use that new approach. And once you start closing — keep closing! It is tempting to want to revert back to the pitch to help the client in the decision making process but if you do that, you’ve lost. Once you enter the closing phase do not go back.

How can you do this effectively at scale? One option is to use TigerLRM’s CRM, which has robust sales enablement features built in. With a few clicks, you can create a sales playbook and media center that any sales rep can access from anywhere, at any time. Sign up for free today to see how TigerLRM can help transform your sales team’s performance.