Last year, we asked you to share your selling services challenges. You flooded us with your challenges and concerns, which included communicating the value of your services, client relationship management, and qualifying leads. In this blog series we identify 12 of the major selling obstacles you are struggling with the most and offer advice and suggestions for overcoming them.

Today’s challenge: closing new business.

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You’ve gotten to the end of the sales process—you’ve built rapport with the prospect, uncovered their full set of needs, they see the impact and ROI of your solution, and they are ready for the proposal. You put everything together, the proposal is heavy with goodness, and you send it off. One day goes by and no word. Two days go by and no word. Now it’s a week later, and you’ve left two voice mail messages and three emails—and still no word.

What went wrong?

It’s an all-too-common scenario for those of us selling professional services. We think a prospect is hot and ready to go, but when it comes to signing on the dotted line, the process drags on, the prospect goes dark, and you lose the sale.

To prevent that from happening again, you try one of the tried-and-true closing techniques that you’ve read about:

• The presumptive close: You assume the prospect has already made the decision to buy. “We’re ready to start right away. Let’s schedule the kick-off for next Tuesday.”
• The 1-2-3 close: This technique takes advantage of the power of threes. “If you sign today we’ll give you this, that, and the other thing.”
• The ask-the-manager close: Here you set the expectation that you have only so much authority to negotiate the terms and to make the change you need to “ask the manager.” And of course you are able to “persuade” the manager to make this one exception, but only if they sign today.
• The “everybody’s doing it” close: Pure peer pressure.
• The calculator close: When it comes time to close the deal, you sit down with the prospect and when you start talking about price, you pull out the calculator to determine the discount at the table.
• The sense of urgency close: This can take many forms. You may offer the prospect something extra or special if they sign now or you may create a deadline (i.e. if we don’t get started by next week, we won’t be able to fit you in until two months from now). The underlying theme is that you are creating a sense of urgency to get the buyer to “act now before the special deal goes away.”
• The alternative close: Here you give the prospect a choice of a yes or a yes. “Do you want me to start this Tuesday or Wednesday?”
• The banana close: OK, maybe I’m making this one up, but you get the point.

But guess what? Those techniques won’t help you. Selling professional services is all about trust, not tricks, and these types of psychological closing techniques can erode any trust you may have developed. They come from the mistaken belief that the close is the final step in the sales process that manipulates the prospect into making the final decision. These techniques may work when selling a product where the prospect never has to see the salesperson again, but when selling professional services, the close begins the relationship.

It’s not about “closing at all costs” because you actually have to work with the client after the close. It’s your job during the sales process to build a trusting relationship with the prospect that carries through to when they become a client.

That is not to say you shouldn’t ask for the business and you shouldn’t communicate the impact of moving forward. You should. Gaining commitment to engage with your firm is an essential skill. The fact is you should be closing throughout the entire sales process by building trust, demonstrating your expertise, uncovering the impact, and painting a picture of the new reality. By the time you get to the “close” you should simply be confirming the agreement you’ve already reached.

When done right, you don’t need sleight-of-hand phrases to cinch the deal.

Setting the Table for Closing Success

To increase your odds when it comes time to close, a few key things need to be in place. Before closing, be sure that the:

• Prospect is ready to make a decision: Before sending the proposal, get the buyer to agree to make a decision upon receipt. Schedule a time with them to review the proposal. If they won’t commit to a time before you send it, they’re probably not ready to make a decision and this can cause the process to drag on.
• Prospect has the funds and is willing to spend them: Rookie mistake #1 is sending a proposal before gaining agreement from the prospect on the ball park budget for the project and their willingness to spend. The proposal should not be the first time the prospect sees the price. They should already have a clear sense of what it will cost and have indicated that they are willing to invest that amount.
• Prospect has articulated the value of your solution: It’s one thing to lay out a fancy spreadsheet and calculate the ROI for the client; it’s another to get the prospect to articulate the value themselves.  If you can get the prospect to “do the math” and communicate the impact your solution will have on their firm, you’re in a much stronger position to propose your solution within the context of the value they see. Value is in the eye of the beholder.
• All decision makers are involved: Nothing kills a sale faster than adding a last-minute decision maker to the mix. Early in the sales process, be sure to gain an understanding of the prospect’s buying process and exactly who is involved in each stage, and get all decision makers involved as early as possible. (See the 10 Rainmaker Principles—Principle #4)

When it comes to closing, no technique late in the process will win you the deal. You should be closing throughout the process, so when you send the proposal you’re simply summarizing everything you’ve already agreed to. Do this, and you’ll find that the number of proposals you send goes down, but your win rate will more than make up the difference.

Are you making these common proposal mistakes?

I had a conversation recently with a client who was struggling with his sales efforts. The conversation went something like this:

Me: How has your selling effort been going?

Client: Unbelievable. I sent out four proposals last week and three more this week.

Me: That’s great. How many new deals have you closed?

Client: Well, er…none. But I’ve sent out 16 proposals in the last six weeks. I’ll be in great shape if just a few close soon.

Me: But zero out of 16 have closed in the last 45 days? It’s possible you may want to take a close look at why you haven’t closed any so far. There might be something wrong with your proposal process.

Client: I’d like to hear more about why you say that. Let’s talk about it after I write these last three proposals.

Many a consultant has fallen into the trap of equating proposal activity with sales activity. If a prospect asks for a proposal at the end of a conversation (and they often do) or they send you an RFP, consultants are all too happy to oblige. Preparing these proposals then takes a heck of a lot of time, and too often they end with no sale. If it’s not the right time, or not the right situation, you shouldn’t submit a proposal.

Avoiding the following three common proposal mistakes can help you save time and effort by avoiding proposal goose chases and avoiding bad business situations, and it can help you increase your win rate.

1. Too Soon

Scenario: You’ve just had an initial sales call with a prospect during which you’ve learned some useful things about the company and the issues it is facing. The call is going well, and the prospect appears interested, but it’s not clear he knows what he wants to achieve or what he really wants to do.

You only had an hour for the call and could really use another hour or two to ask more questions and talk him through a few approaches to solving his challenges.

Just as the call ends, the prospect says, “Could you send me a proposal?”

In spite of the request from the prospect, you really don’t have enough information to help him, and thus it’s not yet time to write a proposal. Too many consultants somehow figure out how to send one anyway.

You have a much better chance of writing a winning proposal if you work instead to set up a second conversation. Don’t get hijacked into sending a speculative proposal before you really understand the prospect and their needs, before they know how you would approach solving the problem, and before they have an idea of what it might take—in fees, effort, and time—to do so.

A proposal should formalize what has already been agreed upon. The prospect should already:

• Understand the impact and see the value of working with you
• Know the ballpark fees and communicate to you a willingness to spend
• See a compelling reason to buy—and buy from you
• Commit to making a decision within a given time frame

If you send a proposal without attending to each one of those points, you leave much to chance.

If you decide to send something because the prospect would like very much to see something “on paper” and you believe it’s worth your effort to invest the energy, send a discussion letter. In this letter:

• Summarize your understanding of the situation
• Outline the critical questions that you still must answer with the prospect before you can suggest a firm solution
• Outline a few possible approaches in broad strokes
• Remind them the next step is to dig more deeply to figure out the best path for moving forward

Should you decide to send a discussion letter, don’t commit to writing it until you have a time to discuss it. If you are willing to commit to spending the time to write a letter, they should be willing to commit to a time to review it. If they’re not willing to put something on the calendar, then they’re probably not invested enough in the process and a sale is unlikely.

2. The Lure of the RFP

Scenario: You’re going through your mail and open an official-looking envelope. It’s an RFP from a Fortune 500 company with which you’ve never worked, but you would love to have them as a client.

The RFP is 25 pages long, but for all its length, it is not very specific about the underlying issues the company is trying to address. You estimate the RFP would require several days to complete.

RFPs are usually low-win percentage opportunities, but you can win them.

Let’s say the RFP is perfect for you, and you do want to pursue. Don’t just respond!

• Work to develop a relationship inside the company issuing the RFP or see if anyone in your firm has already established a relationship.
• Set a time to talk to the decision maker. Be prepared with intelligent questions that show you understand the issues involved. By asking these questions you differentiate yourself from the competition and sometimes can even reshape the RFP based on your questions. Most RFPs say “no phone calls or emails.” This is usually perfunctory, and does not mean they’re not willing to talk.
• Find out who else is competing and position your firm accordingly. You might also find that your competition is a friend or brother-in-law of the top decision maker, or already an approved vendor within the organization. In that case, politely declining to respond may be the best choice.

3. The Bigger, Not Better, Pitfall

Scenario: You’ve had a series of very positive sales conversations with a new prospect. The organization needs assistance integrating its disparate regional processes, systems, and personnel.

You’ve developed a good relationship with the key players. They clearly think your firm is the right one for the job.

The project would be larger than anything your firm has done before. Huge. And it has more than a few components that will be new and different for you to tackle. The revenue from this alone could put you over your annual revenue target.

The client has given you an idea of what they expect to spend, but it isn’t enough to get everything done and done right. If you price the engagement within their range of expectations, you could win a huge deal revenue-wise, but your rates and profitability will be down.

Sometimes it may be better just to walk away in spite of (or because of) the size of the project. Ask yourself:

• Will I be establishing a fee level with this client that I must forever honor?
• Will the size of the project tie up too many of my resources such that I won’t be able to deliver other, more profitable work?
• If I take this work, will I be so busy for so long that my pipeline will dry up and I’ll be left with a great famine after the feast?
• Since some of the work will be different from what we have done in the past, will I spend that much more time getting it done, further reducing my profit?

Often in this situation you can work with the client to see that what they expect to spend isn’t enough, and then they can find more funds. If that is the case, you may decide you still want to catch this elephant. If it isn’t, don’t be lured by the high revenue number. Make your decision to pursue or not based on the impact on your practice and firm.

[This post is excerpted from our free special report Deal or No Deal: Sales Mistakes That Turn Buyers Away.]

Do you sometimes wish you could just read your prospect’s mind? Understand what it was you did or didn’t do that caused the buyer to close the deal with someone else?

What if you knew what was most important to your buyers in their purchase decisions? What if you knew the top complaints buyers had with you and the sales process? What if you could pinpoint the areas  of improvement  you can make that will have the greatest impact on your ability to close new deals?

Could you take that information and use it to improve your close rate?

To help you demystify the professional services purchasing process, we set out on a journey to uncover exactly how purchasing decisions are made. More than 200 buyers of professional services shared key insights with us and along the way we found that many service providers—just like you and me—make costly sales mistakes that are losing them new business.

In fact, 80% of buyers say they experience at least one major problem during the professional services purchasing process.

In the special report, Deal or No Deal: Sales Mistakes That Turn Buyers Away, we highlight the most common sales mistakes service providers make—according to your buyers—and provide tips you can use to identify where your challenges lie so you can succeed in selling.

If you find the information in the special report helpful, could you go ahead and share it with others? Here’s the link to the original Sales Mistakes Report page: http://www.raintodayblog.com/sales-mistakes-report/. Thanks!