I recently talked to two women who each came to me for advice on how to close deals.
They had a steady stream of leads, but after a few conversations or a proposal, the leads would either drop off or stop responding. It was the closing part that they couldn’t do.
And as I was listening to these women, I couldn’t believe my ears. The reason? Both of these women bill themselves as “helping people get clients.” Sales coaches.
Out of curiosity, I asked each one, “So you’re having trouble closing; how does that jive with what you’re teaching your clients to do?”
One woman, who teaches how to get clients from social media, said “Oh, I only help them get the leads. Then I assume they know how to close them.”
The other woman, who promises to help you converts leads into clients, said that in the sales process she teaches, there’s a big open space that says, “Here’s where you close the sale.”
In other words, they don’t teach it. Because they don’t know how to do it.
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The obvious question here is: how can you promise to help get clients, if you can’t CLOSE clients?
You can be great at getting leads. You can be great at Linkedin, or Facebook, or any other marketing channel.
But if you can’t CLOSE clients, then the promise of, “I help you get clients”… well… do you really?
Imagine if you wanted to learn how to fly an airplane. An instructor taught you how to get into the airplane, how to turn it on….
And then the instructor said, “Ok, now you just fly it.”
What?? That’s what you hired the instructor to teach you!
That’s exactly what happens when you skip the most important part: closing.
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Sadly, I see this all the time in the “I help you get clients” space. There are a ton of people who figured out a way to get leads, but don’t know the necessary steps to actually close the sale.
And it pains me when people come to me after they’ve worked with these folks, because even though they bought into the promise, it didn’t deliver.
That’s why I’m so proud of my SIGNED students who are learning how to sell to — and close — new clients.
One of my students had never closed a client on the phone, and she closed two new clients in one day.
In the first two weeks of SIGNED, another student closed her biggest deal ever.
And one SIGNED student’s week looked like this:
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Selling and closing. As the kids say, “get you a coach who can do both.”
