3 questions to ask your salespeople to improve closing percentages

This past week while working with a client’s sales team, I came to discover he has salespeople who have closing ratios on quotes and proposals ranging from under 20 percent to more than 80 percent. The sales manager couldn’t understand why his underperformers were failing, nor understand why his top-performers were succeeding. Why was there such a huge variance?
The reason, I discovered, was that his team was sending quotes and proposals with varying ground rules, such as “Can I call you to see if you have made a decision?” or “What is the scope of this project?”
The key to a top performer’s success is qualifying the prospect before ever producing a quote or proposal. To do so, your salespeople need to ask three key questions:

  1. What is the prospect’s compelling reason(s) to change what he/she is doing now?
  2. Does the prospect have any money?
  3. Are you talking to the decision maker(s)?

If a salesperson cannot answer these three questions with conviction and confidence, they do not have a prospect. In fact, if this happens on my sales team, their prospect is taken out of their sales pipeline and no quote/proposal leaves the office. Period. End of story.
So, why do you want to know what is the prospect’s compelling reason to change? If the prospect is not willing to change what they are doing now, then regardless of your price, features and benefits, loyalty to the current vendor, etc., what’s the point of sending a quote? You don’t suppose the prospect just wants to see your price to leverage its current vendor or benchmark you?
It is also important to know if the prospect has any money. Have you ever spent hours or days on a quote, sent it to the prospect, and then come to find out your quote is too high in price, the prospect just filed chapter 11 bankruptcy, or the monies simply weren’t budgeted? How do you get the time back that you spent preparing the proposal? You don’t.
Lastly, you need to make sure you’re dealing with the decision maker. Have you ever made your sales pitch to someone only to find out that they need to get someone else’s approval? It is in the salesperson’s “Bill of Rights” to always meet with the decision maker. While a first meeting may be with someone who is not the decision maker, from that meeting on consider it part of the salesperson’s “Bill of Rights” to find out who the decision maker is or what the decision process is.
Sometimes, the bigger issue is the salesperson not feeling worthy to be in the presence of the decision maker, and then he works the sale at a lower level — that is another issue for another blog.
For now, remember that the next time your salesperson tells you they have a “live one” and it’s going to close soon, pump the brakes a few times and ask them the three questions we’ve gone over. If they don’t have the answers, they don’t have the sale.
Dave Harman is an associate with Sandler Training. He has over 30 years’ experience in sales and sales management with Fortune 500 companies as well as small, family-owned organizations. He has held positions from sales to senior management with companies such as Conoco/Vista, Amresco and Ohio Awning, and owns his own business. He earned his MBA with a concentration in Marketing from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. You can reach him at [email protected] or (888) 448-2030.