Closing the Deal

Baseball has "closing" pitchers and lots of large corporations have "closers" on their sales teams. When your team is ahead and you're within striking distance of winning, whether it's a game or an order, someone specialized is often sent in to take everyone that last little distance to success. Small businesses are too small to have specialized closers and so they lose orders because the people on the front line don't know how to close the deal.

Although more and more work is done remotely, most people still like to close major deals in person. There are four steps to closing a deal:

1. Make sure the decision maker is available. If he's not at the table, he has to be available to sign off the order. If he's not available, explore open questions, but don't try to close. You'll have to come back in any case.
2. Get open questions off the table. Since you're close to making this deal, there are obviously no major deal-breakers left. If you know you can satisfy the customer on an open item but it will take a bit of time, offer to make the contract conditional on completion of that item or offer to postpone the initial payment. The important thing is to get the contract signed, even if there are a few conditions which you know you can satisfy.
3. Ask for the order. Many sales people wait for the customer to tell them that they have the order and lose out to more aggressive competition. Take care of a couple of open items and ask the customer whether he is now ready to place the order with you. You can also identify the biggest open item and ask whether, if you take care of that one, you'll get the order. Even if the answer is "no", you can then ask what it will take to get the order and deal with those items.
4. Get the order signed or get a firm, short-term commitment such as, "I'll courier it to you tomorrow morning." Anything else is risky, especially when the detail people get around to going through the agreement and find lots of things wrong with it. Then, as soon as you get the signed order, courier back an acknowledgement with a thank-you.