New Closing Techniques: How To Get More Business Now

Has this ever happened to you?

You start working a prospect and it’s going well. You create the rapport. You establish some trust. You establish an agreement that if you provide what is needed for a decent price, then there’s no real reason that your prospect wouldn’t agree to switch to you. You’re starting to become confident, this will be your new account soon.

A couple of weeks later, you’re presenting your proposal, feeling good. As you close, your prospect says, give us 24 hours to talk it over, but you look good, we like what you have.

Oops, then in comes the incumbent. The incumbent has had your prospect as a client for quite a while. Your prospect really has no problem with the incumbent. It was just a price issue. So Mr. Incumbent matches your price. Where does that leave you? Rolled! You just got rolled.

In this article, I’m going to give you an outline of how you can beat the incumbent by using something we call a Wedge.

There’s a common misconception in sales and that is that there are two parties – the buyer and the seller. From a seller perspective, if I can provide the services the buyer wants at a reasonable price, the buyer will buy from me. This completely overlooks another party to the transaction and that’s The Incumbent. In more cases than not, your prospect already has someone providing the same service or a similar service to the one that you offer. So for that prospect to be a real prospect, you are going to have to address your #1 Challenge- The Incumbent. But how?

Well, first it requires a good deal of research. You’ll need to find out who that incumbent is and how they operate. What are their weaknesses?

Next, look at your own processes. Look for places where they are weak and you are strong and make note of these. Usually, these are going to have to do with a process that is proactive.

Now, when you are with the prospect, the idea is to ask questions to determine the pain points. When you are asking these questions, steer the conversation to those places where you noted you were strong and the incumbent was weak. What’s important here is to address the question in such a way that you are clear everyone provides the same level of service that you do and if your incumbent is not providing that level of service, well then the prospect is being underserved. This is a Wedge. You are driving a Wedge between the prospect and the incumbent.

This, of course, is a simplification of the process but I believe that you can start to understand the concept. If you use this along with the rest of the Wedge process, you’ll be able to close many prospects that were previously inaccessible.

If you want to integrate this concept into your business process, the Sales Manager Toolkit has everything you need.