Because we are salespeople we are expected to know when and how to close a deal, right. I thought so too until I tried to buy something this weekend. I guess retail sales is different because I was sending buying signals to our salesperson and he wouldn’t close us. After three solid buying signals like – “This seems like a great buy” or “It would look great in the back yard” and even “this seems like the right one for us”. We were ripe and ready to close. My wife was ready to take out the checkbook. The young man helping us was very knowledgeable about his product line and was showing us all the features and the benefits of the different units in the show room. It was a very large show room and so we narrowed down the perfect unit for us. We were ready to buy and write a check. And you are right; we didn’t and ended up walking out the door. We even gave the young man a last minute chance. We said to him, “Is there anything else you want to say to us before we leave?” “Thanks for dropping in” is what he said, and we left.

What happened to my sale?

We ended up buying what we wanted but not at the store where we first met Bob. We drove down the street and across the freeway to visit another specialty store. At this store we met Barbara. Barbara was nice, friendly and also knowledgeable. She had the exact same unit but under a different brand name for a little less than Bob. I was frustrated by this time and unloaded all the information needed for a salesperson to use on me and close the deal. But guess what? Barbara didn’t know how to close either. I must have given her a half dozen buying signals before she said, “So, would you like me to give you a written quote”. We couldn’t believe what we were hearing so we told her we want to buy the unit and have it delivered in a few weeks. By this time we knew what we wanted and wanted someone to take our order.

The sales examination

The first salesperson had our order in his hand. After doing a beautiful job of giving us valuable information and steering us to the best unit for our back yard and showing us the best value we were ready to buy. Bob simply didn’t close us and kept on talking about more features and benefits of the product. Bob told us what to watch out for in other units and what others might say about the unit we were ready to purchase. This allowed some questions to enter our mind. Since Bob hadn’t closed us, we thought we should look at a few more units before we made our purchase. That is when we met Barbara and she did a miserable job of closing too. But we bought anyway. The moral here is to listen for buying signals and close. You might just talk yourself out of a sale if you keep talking.