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Warren Wechsler's
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Why Johnny Can't Close

Warren Wechsler, bestselling author and national sales and motivational speaker, provides many valuable resources free of charge to sales trainers and sales managers. Some restrictions apply to the use and distribution of this information. For more valuable materials, visit Warren's web site www.totalselling.com. All materials and content © Warren Wechsler, 2001 – All rights reserved.

I was just talking to a senior VP of sales, the national VP of sales for a Fortune 100 company. He said, "When it comes to teaching my people how to gain commitment, how to close sales, my people are wimps." He said this to me. I was shocked. Then I remembered that just last week I was speaking to the president of a telecommunications company. He said, "You know what the problem is with my people? They can't close."

For the last couple of weeks I've been in Birmingham. I'll be in Burbank. I've been in Minneapolis. During the time when I ask for questions from the audience, people wanted to talk about closing. Closing, closing, closing. So what do you think the topic of today's show is? Closing!

I thought of a great idea for a show, except that nobody would want to be on the show. What do you think it's called? "Who Wants to Earn a Million Dollars?" I guess they could not sell advertising on that show. Over your lifetime in sales, if you're in the top ten percent of sales, you will earn well over several million dollars in your lifetime. I council a number of salespeople who earn in excess of a million dollars a year. So I'm almost half tongue in cheek and half not, where if you're good in sales, if you find a good product, and you have a good audience and a good market, and you're good at listening to your clients, you could earn a million as a salesperson. But again, I think the pilot program for that show would never get sold.

The topic of today's show is not closing. I tricked you. I said that today's show was about closing, and it is and it isn't. The theme of today's segment is why Johnny can't close. I'm ripping off a government study "why Johnny can't read". My topic is why Johnny can't close. There is a tremendous amount of myth and misunderstanding around the whole subject of how people make commitments when they buy. I've created a program called The Six Steps to Excellence in Selling, and that's also the topic of my book by the same name.

Just to review the steps, it's like a building block. It's a pyramid. The base of the pyramid is called Step One: Find the Prospect. Step Two is called Find the Decision-Maker. Step Three is Arrange an Appointment. The fourth step is Ask Questions and Listen. The fifth step is Present the Solution. And in my live seminars, when we get to that part, I say, "What is the sixth step?" Invariably the audience responds, "Close the sale. Get the business. Get the order."

And I nod my head and listen to all those people say those things, and then when they're quieting down, I say, "You're all wrong. You're all wrong because you can't close a sale." I'm met with lots of puzzled looks when I say that. I say, "You can't close a sale, but there is something you can do that is very closely related to closing the sale. It's just a different way of looking at it."

Sometimes people get it and sometimes they don't. And when they get it, they shout out, "You have to ask for the order!" And I say, "Yeah, now you're getting it." The sixth step in the model that I've created is called Ask for a Commitment.

You might be saying, "Warren, you're splitting hairs. Aren't closing and asking for the order the same thing?" And the answer is no it's not.

Let me tell you where this all started. This is my opinion. Sales as we know it, commerce as we know it, once we went from an agrarian - just pick your own wheat and eat it, or kill your own food and share it with the clan - once commerce was created which most people say happened in Persia about six thousand years ago, there was something that started where you had to learn how to dicker and ask people and all those types of things. And asking for an order, asking for a commitment is still something that we practice today just like we did all those years ago.

But as far as professional selling, the industry as we know it today was really born right after World War II, in the middle 1940's and early 1950's. Think about this. In our society, in our culture, a lot of young men came back from World War II, and we couldn't put them to work making bombs and tanks and airplanes and all that. Rather than go into recession, we needed to figure out something to do with all those people. Many of them went into the profession of selling. Selling insurance, selling refrigerators, what have you.

A cottage industry grew up in the late 40's and early 50's. A whole bunch of people traveled from coast to coast. They were America's first sales trainers. In order for the companies that they represented to be able to get more and more business, in this age of innocence back in the 1950's, they created all these manipulative closes. The Ben Franklin close, the Puppy Dog close, the Let Me Think It Over close, the Reduce to the Ridiculous close, the Triplicate of Choice for Money close, the Duplicate of Choice for Product close. I could go on and on. The Silence Means Consent close.

The interesting thing is the philosophy behind all these closing techniques was: I win, you lose; I win, you win; I win, I don't care if you win. From a salesperson's perspective the only thing that mattered was getting the order: I win. Well, that was good for sales organizations that practiced it but it was bad for the industry as a whole. It was bad for the whole image and stereotyping that follows sales people around.

Even today, when I do my seminars and I say, "Who's ever had a negative experience with a salesperson?" every hand goes up. I say, "Anybody ever had more than one negative experience? Raise your other hand." Invariably everybody's second hand goes up. And as I probe to find out what that was all about, it's usually because some person was overly aggressive, very pushy, manipulative, high pressure, forcing people to make decisions they didn't want.

Well I stand for not closing sales, although I really want my customers to buy. I stand for allowing my customers to buy, and the only way I know how to do that is to ask questions, ask obligating questions.

When I was new in sales I was what's called a professional visitor. I was a straight commission professional visitor. Now what does that mean in English? It means that as I review these five steps I talked about today, even though I hadn't invented the system yet, I was good at all that stuff. I was a fearless prospector; I got appointments; I asked questions; I presented my company eloquently. And unless the person I was working with said to me, "Hey, I want some of that. I'll buy it," I never asked them to do anything. They liked having me around. I was a nice visitor.

But when I came back to the office and my boss would say, "What did you sell?" We-l-l-l-l, unless the person just handed me the order, I wasn't getting too much business. He said, "Warren, you're a professional visitor. You need to learn how to become a professional closer."

I read all those books on closing, but I just couldn't bring myself to practice any of those techniques. I wanted to be successful, so what I learned was that in order to get people to make decisions, I had to ask questions. And that's how that sixth step Ask for the Commitment began for me.

There are only two parts of that sixth step in my model, Ask for the Commitment. Number one is ask an obligating question. "What's an example of an obligating question?" you might ask. In my live programs when I say to people, "OK, the first step in this model, in this part of selling called Ask for the Commitment is to ask an obligating question. Audience, somebody give me an example of an obligating question." I usually count in my mind as the seconds tick by. And then I realize what so many salespeople fail to realize. They think they're closers. They think they're asking for the order. But when challenged they have no idea what those obligating questions might be.

I start spitting them out as fast as I can. "Where do we go from here? How are we doing so far? Have I earned the right to your business? Would you like to take delivery of a truckload? When do you want to get going? Who else needs to get involved? Who should I talk to next? When does that committee meet?" I show people examples of obligating questions. What's the definition of an obligating question? If the person says yes, they bought. If the person says no or maybe, you've just been presented with some resistance to work through. So an obligating question is the question that determines if the person is going forward or not.

Now what's behind our fear about asking obligating questions? Anybody who has listened to this show, especially recently, knows that the word that we're all afraid of is the word no, n-o. If you think about how long it takes sometimes to position some situation to even ask for the order, ask for the commitment, we'd rather keep presenting, hoping that that customer is just going to say, "I'm ready to buy," so we don't either (a) have to face that failure or (b) find out that all this time and energy that we've invested with this particular customer or prospect is not going to be something that's going to get us what we need or want on that particular day.

The only guidance I can give us - ourselves, me, you - is that we need to learn how to ask obligating questions, and a time will come in the sales process where it's time to stop presenting, and then you'll know it's time to start asking an obligating question.

I told you there are two rules. The first rule within this commitment step is called ask an obligating question. And the second rule is usually the most important rule that I share when I work with people. That is that every single time you ask an obligating question, shut up. Shut up.

I know some of you have heard this before. You remember the old sales saying, "Ask for the order and then shut up because the first person who talks loses." You've got the right idea; you've got to ask for the order and shut up. But it's for the wrong reason. It's not because the first person who talks loses.

Let me tell you what happens when you are a buyer or when I'm a buyer or when Steve Smith is a buyer or Jay Mitchell is a buyer. Anytime we're about to buy something we go temporarily insane. What that means is that if someone says, "Do you want Chinese food today?" you might have a discussion in your mind that takes anywhere from a millisecond to a nanosecond to three seconds to a full minute where you decide if you want to say yes or no to that question - which, by the way, is an obligating question. "Do you want to go get Mexican today? Yes? No?" It's an obligating question.

We face decisions all day long where we can master how to answer those in just a fraction of a second. We do those things all the time. Sometimes, however, we need more time to think it through. If you were going to go look at a new car, and you drove a car that you really, really liked, and you knew that it was something that might be in your budget, and the salesperson said, "Well, what do you think? Do you want to drive it home? How are we doing? Do you want to buy it?" we might want some time to think about it. That is the importance of practicing silence after you ask an obligating question as a salesperson.

You might say, "Warren, isn't that high pressure?" The answer is no, it's not high pressure at all. It's simply a way to have the person who is about to buy make a decision in their mind whether or not they're going to own this product or service or not. They visualize what it's like to own the product. They think about the pros and cons. They add it up, yes, no. They maybe do some type of tabulation of all the yeses and all the noes.

Our minds can work incredibly quickly if we allow them to. What a lot of salespeople do is either they don't ask the obligating question, or if they're met with one or two seconds of silence, they just start mumbling and stumbling and talking, and pretty soon they get to the point where the customer says, "Oh, I don't know. Let me think the whole thing over."

Our job as sales professionals is to learn how to ask the obligating question and then shut up and wait for the answer.

Let me give you two more ideas on this subject. The first is you have to be neutral as to the outcome of every obligating question. In other words, you don't really care. I know I've said before you have to believe in your company. That's true. You have to be enthusiastic and passionate. That's also true. But when it comes to asking the obligating question, you absolutely have to be neutral as to the outcome of the question. In other words, you can handle yes, no, or maybe; and because you're neutral as to the outcome, that will take the pressure off of you to ask the question. Don't worry about the outcome. You can't control it. The only thing you can control is asking the question.

Here's the second idea. If you're looking for clues or guidance on when it's appropriate to ask obligating questions and what the obligating question ought to be, all you need to do is ask yourself in your own mind, "What's next?" You're meeting with a group of people. They represent the committee that's making the decision. You've presented all your findings and all that type of stuff. All you need to do is say in your mind, "What's next?" And what's next might be something as simple as "Have we earned the right to your business? Would you like to go forward? Should we schedule the next meeting now?" Once you know what the "what's next?" question is, then the obligating question becomes so obvious, all you need to do is ask it.

That's what asking for commitments is all about. It's not closing because, like I said, Johnny can't close, Warren can't close, Steve can't close. All these people are giving me these things like "Oh, my people cant close. They're wimps." They've got the wrong idea. That makes it fun for me because I get to educate people about what the real way to do it is. And that's what I hope I've shared with you today during this segment: how to learn how to ask for commitments. And when you ask for commitments you don't have to be a strong closer; you just need to be a strong asker. So what was the subject of today's segment? Was it closing? No. It was asking.

This was a partial transcript from Warren Wechsler's weekly radio show. Warren Wechsler, bestselling author and national sales and motivational speaker, provides many valuable resources free of charge to sales trainers and sales managers. Visit Warren's web site www.totalselling.com Also, listen to Warren's weekly radio broadcast Wednesday's at 4:05 - 5:00 pm Central time, on KMCD-AM 1570AM. Shows are broadcast live on the internet at http://www.warpradio.com/asx/KMCD-AM.asx