This most important part of the selling process is: the close. Everything is lost if you get to the point of closing and learn that the customer isn’t buying. The goal is to get through the process with a sale. From the beginning of the sale cycle, you must be confident that you will close the sale because without closing it, you have wasted your time as well as your customer’s time.Nothing occurs until the sale has been made. There isn’t anything mysterious about closing the sale. In order for success, there needs to be both a method and management system within the sales cycle.
There are seven important and specific steps in the solution-sales method. Changing a prospect into a records-management solution sale is a long and hard process. If done right, you should know if your sale will close by the time you have finished step three of the process. Therefore, the close begins with step three. Let’s discuss the seven crucial steps.
Step 1. Determine Prospects and Make Contact
From the resources available such as the Yellow Pages, local business guides and the internet, make your prospect list.Establish an understanding with your customers and create an environment amenable to them so they accept you as a preferred provider of records-management services.
Step 2. Customer Interest
It’s important to understand your prospects’ organization. You want to be able to identify key influencers and decision-makers and grow interested in your services. Do this by explaining the customer-needs assessment method or CNA.
Step 3. Understand Customer Requirements
Perform the CNA, examine the data and confirm it with your client. Step 3 is the most important step because here is where you make sure all your client needs are met, especially the needs of the process owner and decision-maker. If you hope to sign the agreement later in the process, you need to do everything possible to get unanimity of the decision-maker.
Step 4. Determine Client Solutions
Until this point, you should not have assumed any solutions. You have just exposed the problem that causes the client pain. Step four is to develop the solution to lessen the customer’s pain.
Step 5. Proposal and Justification
The intention of step 5 is to establish and begin the application of a work plan, prepare the proposal documents and cost justification. The work plan creates a logical basis for declaring the proposal based on the customer’s needs and requirements.
Step 6. Negotiate to Close the Contract
Here is where you negotiate the terms of the agreement, settle any issues and have the customer sign the contract and process the order.
Step 7. Management/Implementation
The purpose of step 7 is to make sure all of the customer’s requirements are met. The customer needs to be trained on all of the systems. The initial batch of records is adjusted and business begins.
Always remember that records management services present a long-term service and solution to your customer. It is not like making a one-time sale or service. Records-management companies become resource partners to their long-term clients. After the sale, you will provide a priceless administrative service that becomes a reward to you and a resource to them for life.
