The Best Sales Closing Question – Ever.

If you have been building pipeline all year, in order to move them to a close, you need to have some killer sales closing questions up your sleeve. We’re going to talk about what we think is the best sales closing question, and it works particularly well for higher value, enterprise deals.

The best questions get your prospect thinking and gets them to open up about their business situation. With their answers, you will gain insight on how to move the deal forward. Or, their answers may mean it needs to come out of your pipeline altogether.  As painful as that can be, it’s better to find out sooner rather than later so that you can direct your energy towards genuine deals that have a chance of being closed.

The best sales closing question

The most effective closing question is the “Return-On-Investment (ROI) Question”

This question is focused on the customer’s end goal: what kind of return can they get from investing in your product or service?

Here’s an example:

“Bridget, IF we could retire 3 of your underperforming software applications and save you £340,000 for a £26,000 investment with us, would you sign it off?”

The construction of this question is important, as is the psychology behind it. The word IF doesn’t immediately promise anything; it’s a hypothetical question designed to generate a response from a customer. Also, the ROI Question puts the customer’s value (£325K) before yours (£25K), with the first amount completely overshadowing the second. And it’s simple – no messing around, straight to the point. Best of all, it’s a proper business related proposition with no product mentioned. This will encourage a more business-focussed sales team culture.

What’s the likely response from the ROI Question?

Importantly, one of two things is going to happen. Either it’s a ‘yes’, and you have advanced the sale to a quicker close. Or it’s a no/maybe (very close cousins) and you can find out why, which may move you towards the truth and a quicker advance. Or, you can finally kill this deal and shake the remains out of your pipeline.

Your challenge is to work out the best version of this question that naturally suits your business. There’s a version of this closing question that fits you like a glove!

The problem with this closing question

I know what you’re thinking: “What if we don’t know the numbers we need to input into the ROI question?”

Bingo! If you don’t know your ROI numbers,  it’s time to do a ‘Value Sense Check’ on your deal.  Note – the following questions are for  you, not for the customer…

The Value Sense Check

1. Who are we talking to? (are they REALLY the right person?)
2. What problem are we solving? (If you don’t know, then customers won’t buy)
3. Why can we solve it better than anyone else? (competitive advantage)

This Value Sense Check might result in you flushing out some of the reasons why you aren’t in a position to close. In some cases, you might find you’re almost back at square one. But that’s okay – saves us from kidding ourselves that we are closer than we really are.

So look through your pipeline, run a value sense check for each one and start posing those ROI closing questions! We’d love to hear how it goes.

Time for the close:

If ‘closing’ has become a dirty word in your business, open your doors and your deals to Natural. IF we are able to deliver to you £500,000 worth of sales for a £25,000 investment would you authorise us to get started?

If you want to close more deals, check out our Deal Closing Power Up training programme.