The Selling Essentials Minute, Ep. 35: Closing: Magic Words

Welcome to the new episode of the Selling Essentials Minute!

For those unfamiliar, The Selling Essentials Minute is a series of videos that offers one sales idea in about sixty seconds. You can use the Minute to kick off a sales meeting, push an idea out to your team, start a discussion or reinforce your training.

On today’s episode: Conventional wisdom says that the more control sales professionals have, the likelier they are to win a sale. But too much control can lead to trouble. What to do? Watch this video and find out.

Video Transcript:

You’ve heard it a million times, sales is like fishing, the more control you have, the more likely you are to land a big one. But be careful because sometimes control can spell trouble, too much of it can make the buyer feel bullied or manipulated an that fish can become dinner for someone else.

So what to do? Set your buyer free by using one simple phrase for magic words that research shows let your buyer retain decision-making power while doubling the chances that you’ll close that sale and those four words BUT YOU ARE FREE as in but you are free to say yes or no or but you are free to accept or refuse.

It seems simple enough but literally dozens of experiments have found that adding these four words to a closed made people more likely to give charity more willing to complete surveys and happier to participate in group activity.

The four words work because they allow the buyer to retain a sense of control simply by acknowledging his freedom to say  one very important word, NO! And the studies showed that sales people who used the four magic words were better liked than those who didn’t.

Of course you are free to not try the four magic words, just try not to be upset when the big one gets away.