IME the key to closing a sale is to open it in a way that makes the buyer comfortable saying no. If you get them to commit up front to the idea that no is acceptable, even desirable, and that "maybe" is a waste of time (and really just a polite way of saying "no"), the "yes" will be obvious.

Example:

[At beginning of sales meeting]

"I'm going to show you my product and I hope it's a good fit for you. But our product isn't a fit for everyone. So, if you decide that we are not a good fit, are you comfortable telling me no?"

[At end of meeting]

"Now that you've seen my product, on a scale of 1-10 how good a fit do you think we are?"

If it's less than a 7, you can either explore their problem more deeply and see if there's something you missed, or just say:

"So it sounds like that's a no. Am I right? I know we're not a fit for everyone, so it's okay if the answer is no."

I learned this (and a lot of other stuff) via Sandler Sales Institute several years ago and have found it's very effective in all kinds of situations, not just sales.

It's easy to hate on sales as being full of manipulative, pushy people. But there are good, authentic techniques that work better than just showing up and giving a demo.

I agree that giving people a "get-out" clause allows for more honest answers. It pays off because you don't waste your time chasing the 'maybe' that turn out to be a 'no'.

I think that builds up more trust and pushes more towards a yes than any other technique.

Ugh. Please don't read this and think you know anything about "closing" a sale. Closing techniques work well for small, unimportant, everyday purchases.

They do not work at all on sophisticated buyers. They might in fact cost you the sale.

The rule of thumb is: If there is any chance that the prospective customer might have heard of such a thing as a closing technique - DON'T USE THEM.

I actually don't think this article falls in the same category as someone doing "A benjamin franklin close" or a forced close or whatever other closing technique involves manipulation.

The article states very simply that there are three different ways you can close a call, hard, medium and soft. It's not a technique, he paints with a broad brush and leaves the article very open to interpetation and adaptation to your sales style.

Exactly my point. All fluff, no informational content.

Read SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham instead of this (crappy) article, if you're selling "major sales".

http://www.amazon.com/Major-Account-Sales-Strategy-Rackham/d... is good, but SPIN Selling itself is a better intro.

Last summer I spent a day on a motorcycle tour with two retired IBM salesmen. They reminisced sales stories all afternoon. I couldn't believe the amount of preparation and planned sales tactics they employed. A blue suit was required at all times because blue conveys trust and will result in a higher sale.

I used to work at a place that used ClearCase and Lotus Notes. I can tell you that the only people who put any thought into that decision were the IBM salesmen.

What's wrong with "Thanks for your time and allowing me to discuss product x with you. Is there any reason why you think this wouldn't be a good fit for your problem y? I want your business, and I look forward to working with you further."

Nothing. But without having coded languages and competing to manipulate each other, sales and business folks wouldn't have much left to do. They call it "people skills". And while being direct and honest might be a good way to communicate, it's not nearly as challenging, so it's not a "people skill" and the Harvard Business Review would have nothing left to write about.

So frustrating that you have to virtually manipulate people to accomplish a goal that ultimately both of you want.

"With experienced buyers, consider a softer close because how many times do you think they have heard "this is our best and final offer" and every other type of hard close before?"

I have yet to find a professionally trained salesman that has called on me that doesn't immediately telegraph that he has read some book, took some course, or is following some technique he learned somewhere. After a while it sounds to any experienced ear phony. In the same way a politician sounds phony.

Sales is all nuance and it's really difficult to master without spending considerable time actually doing it and building knowledge about what works for you in a given situation (which may not work for someone else in the same situation because of delivery of message among many other variables).

My own favorite sales technique to find out the upper range of a buyer is to casually ask 'up to' when they reveal their budget

Which is why as a buyer, I never even get close to giving a real answer to this question =)

Some people, (edit) men/women do this so much that I punish the behavior. Instead of then saying "I would rather you not do X" they come up with some cryptic encoded message that leaves you wondering why they said it and what they want. The one issuing cryptic messages often gets angry when things do not change the way they expected. When people do this to me, I go out of my way to not read their mind and not give them what they want. If you are going to communicate like a 6 year old then expect that you wont always get your way.

And people wonder why women feel excluded from technical forums. Yikes.

(The edit makes it better, but the fact that this was written about "some women" in the abstract who need to be "punished" for doing it remains really disturbing. This was a complete tangent to the linked article, not a point that really needed to be made. How would you react if you pulled up a forum comment where the top post talked about how "Some geeks are so socially awkward that I can't understand them. So I punish them for it". See the point? What you did was deliberately exclusionary: it's just plain mean. Stop it.)

If I did find a comment like that, complaining about a predominantly male behavior on a forum for some female-dominated hobby/profession/interest, I wouldn't be surprised or outraged. Some patterns of behavior are more common among one sex than the other; some of those patterns of behavior bother the opposite sex; sometimes people complain about things that bother them.

Which is what I'd expect you to say to your peers on the predominately male-dominated forums you frequent. :) I suspect (based on my own personality) that your personality isn't nearly so confident when you're out of your comfort zone. Now picture a world where that zone outside your comfort is an important part of the career path.

To tickle the startup thing: picture a site where a bunch of VCs sit around talking about money stuff. You want to get into that world and you know you need to be part of this site to do it. Yet half the time you start posting you find the people you want to interact with complaining about how infuriating "tech people" are to deal with. Think hard about what you'd do: jump into the conversation anyway or just stay silent until you have something "serious" to say? I know what I'd do.

> just stay silent until you have something "serious" to say

That's my MO on any new forum. I only stopped following that rule on HN as HN itself got increasingly sillier.

And really, your VC example, in reverse, is in full display on HN. There are always articles complaining about unfair shit that VC's pull, and VC's probably talk about unfair shit founders pull. The proper response, assuming you're a VC that doesn't pull unfair shit, is to say "yeah, I hate that shit and I never do that." Look at how Peroni (a recruiter) contributes to the perennial complaining-about-recruiters threads.

The OP is about using indirect, passive-aggressive communication techniques to close sales. I think it's fair game to complain about indirect, passive-aggressive communication techniques and the people who use them, and if someone observes that it tends to be women more often than men, so be it. If you're a woman who doesn't use indirect, passive-aggressive communication techniques, you come into this thread in the same position that Peroni comes into the multitude of threads about how useless recruiters are.

(late reply to late reply, but I couldn't let this one go)

'I think it's fair game to complain about indirect, passive-aggressive communication techniques and the people who use them"

Good grief. No. Just no. Not when the "people who use them" are generalized (maeon3 didn't even hedge with "tend to" like you did) to half the species.

Sorry, that's not objective argumentation, it's plain bigotry.

Would you have stepped up in the same way if he had jumped into to say the darkies are lazy and dumb? That the muslim faith is evil?

I'll just repeat my original "yikes" and leave it at that. People like you make me sad for humanity.

I don't think he implied anywhere that all or even most women (mis-) communicate that way, but rather that most people who mis-communicate that way are women. That is a fair observation, and similar comments about men largely pass without comment.

The original post has been edited, but the phrasing was "some women [do this], so I punish them for it". And he went on to use the female pronouns throughout. It was a rant, not an argument. And there wasn't even a tiny nod to the idea that anyone other than a woman would be so afflicted.

The fact that some behaviors are more frequent in one sex vs. the other is a biological one.

True, but unrelated to my point. I was reacting to maeon3's use of a link to a list of sales techniques (!) as a springboard for a rant about "some women" communicating badly and needing to be "punished" for it. It may be true or not, but it's uncalled for and exclusionary.

It's the moral equivalent of walking around telling every german you meet that the Nazis killed six million jews and that the holocaust is the worst thing in history. Might be true of "some germans" but it's not something polite people do. And in the context of underrepresented demographics like women programmers it's really hurtful to all of us.