The Single Biggest Closing Mistake

by Graham Denton

The single biggest closing mistake is not to ask for the order. That may sound laughable, but research studies bear it out. Michael LeBoeuf refers to them in his stimulating book How to Win Customers and Keep Them for Life. After defining closing as the act of "asking for the business," he observes that, "incredible as it seems, almost two-thirds of all sales calls conclude without the salesperson asking for the order." Two-thirds! That's a lot of business being lost on a Selling 101 blunder.

Asking once, moreover, usually isn't enough because, according to LeBoeuf, 60 percent of all customers say no four times before saying yes. That means that, if you want to get the order, you may have to ask for it as many as five times. And that's just what the sales superstars have learned to do. Consider a few more of LeBoeuf's thought-provoking statistics. Of the salespeople who do ask for the order:

• 44 percent give up after one "no."
• 22 percent give up after two "no's."
• 14 percent give up after three "no's."
• 12 percent give up after four "no's."

Do the math and you'll find that after four no's, 92 percent of the askers are out of the running. The remaining 8 percent comprise the sales superstars -- and they are pulling down 60 percent of the business!

LeBoeuf turns to a fellow sales trainer, Hank Trisler, to provide a moral to this little arithmetic game. In his book No Bull Selling, Trisler puts it this way:

Нere's the real key to selling. You ask, you get. The more you ask, the more you get. If you don't ask you don't get. You can go to all the seminars that come to your town, read all the books, listen to all the tapes. If you don't learn to ask, you're going to go broke.

You ask, you get. The lesson doesn't get simpler than that -- or more on target. The only way to improve on the phrasing, perhaps, is to quote the epigraph to LeBoeuf's chapter on buying signals. It's from the irrepressible Mae West: "He who hesitates is last."