Closing a Sales

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We’ll deal more with how to assume the sale later. If you can do it well in your organization, you will find your selling culture will thrive.

Learning to close a sale is also key to building your selling culture. Use your alternate-choice close. Are you familiar with the alternate-choice close as a standard selling technique? You actually know it. You use it all of the time, or you have it used on you all of the time. You walk into a store to look for an item, and the sales clerk says, “Did you want that in red or green?” You hear it all of the time. You go to the restaurant, “Smoking or non-smoking?” Your kids want to go to the movies; they say, “Hey, Dad, let’s go to the movies. They’ve got a show at seven and one at nine. Which one do you want to go to?” You use it everyday, and you have it used on you every day. It’s powerful stuff. Teach it to your people and learn it and use it all of the time. Self storage has many excellent alternative choices built into it. There are climate controlled and regular units; first floor or upper floor; 5 by 10 or 10 by 10, and so on.

You should also seek out good examples of selling cultures and talk about them with your staff. Photo studios are a good example of a great selling culture. When was the last time you took your family to a photo studio to get family pictures taken? These people are great! How many times have you walked in there thinking, “Mmm, I’ll probably spend X-dollars on a package?” and how many times have you actually have walked out of there spending what you intended to spend? It’s always two or three times more, isn’t it? Always. And aren’t you happy that you did it? Were you were mad afterwards? Or if you were mad, it lasted a second or two, right? Until Grandma saw the pictures and went “Ohhhh!” Right? How do they do it? They do assumptive selling. You show up there, and they know you’re not there to look at a picture and go home; you’re there to buy pictures. So everything they do is assumptive selling.

And they’re masters of the alternate-choice close. They take several different poses, and then they show you the pictures and they say, “Of Pose A, which is your favorite picture of Pose A? Is it this picture or that picture?” You pick one, and they put it to the side. “Let’s look at Pose B, which one do you like best there, number one, two, or three?” You go, “Well, I don’t like number three? “Okay, let’s forget three. How about number one or two? Number two looks good, doesn’t it?” “Yes, it does.” “Okay, great!” Now you’ve got another one. And they go through every pose until they’ve alternate-choice closed you into a seven-page package. You can’t say no. Are you going to say, “No, I don’t want gorgeous pictures of my lovely children!” You can’t say it…well, some people could, but it’s very hard to say that. Especially when they’re sitting right next to you listening to you. These people in the photo studio business are masters of a selling culture.

And then they’ve got 17 different payment options. So if you try to get out of it by saying, “Well, you know, I don’t have that much with me…” they’ll say, “Oh, well, no problem!” because you can do this option, this option, or the other option. They’re masters of it.

Look at other businesses that you deal with that are masters of the selling culture, and then think about how well you master it at your store. Are you really mastering it, or are you just kind of skating? Take a look and see what you think.

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Disclamer: This entry is intended to promote our partner StorageMart and some or all participants received compensation.