I’ve been selling for more than 50 years, and I’ve learnt a lot about closing and negotiation techniques but I’ve not heard too much about button up techniques in that time. Yet in my opinion, being able to button up has to be as important as making the Sale – and in the hands of most of the Professionals I know, the button up process can take as long as the Sale itself. At other times longer.

Yet the button up is perhaps the most neglected process in selling. In simple terms, the button up is the post sell or consolidation stage of the sale. And in many cases, its the button up alone that holds together a shaky sale. Perhaps a cleaner way of explaining this process is to say, the better the button up, the less the chance of a cancellation. In fact button ups can be so effective that cancellations need not exist.

Summarise

Leave before he changes his mind

Don’t bring up an important point that was overlooked during the selling process.

Don’t try and re-negotiate the terms.

Don’t take the customer out to celebrate – or accept an alcoholic drink.

Notice how easy it was to incorporate both methods of asking for the prospects dominant buying motive.

At first the Seller asked “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?” and then he followed up with “Why is this important to you?” . As heard, the dominant buying motive was a van that would work for around 6 months with little or no down-time. That’s a tall order given that it will be driven some 40,000 or 50,000 kilometres in that time. But because the salesperson now has this information, it becomes a formality in the hands of a professional to negotiate the wants and needs of the prospect to a satisfactory conclusion and close the sale the same day.

A lesser known reason for failure among non-professionals is that the majority of the time they are waiting for the right conditions before they make their move. Many of them plan and prepare for anything up to months at a time, only to go back over and make a few final adjustments here and there. Then they tinker with it again and again.

To the seasoned professional, this is call reluctance at the highest level. For a professional knows he or she can only get paid on the calls they close, and procrastination doesn’t close calls. Yet these people find excuse after excuse not to make calls. They spend their time filling in time rather than making their time a productivity producing financial pursuit.

Some psychologists call this syndrome “waiting for all the lights to turn green”. The act is, in any stretch of road anywhere in the world it is impossible for every light to turn green as you approach it. Some will be amber, and some red. The same applies in selling.

Conditions will never be perfect no matter what – and he who ventures out does so at his own risk. Anything could go wrong, and sometimes does. But life is full of risks and those that don’t take risks never usually amount to much anyway – do they???

If a goal is everything you want to be, have or achieve, why is it so many salespeople never put it in writing and subsequently limit their potential?

If You Want to Flatter Someone

If you want to flatter somebody, just look serious and ask him what he thinks of any general situation