Drill a team on closing

1. Why train closing

Closing is the big game. It is where you win or lose, and how you play when the game is on the line. Do it well and the business can become a legend. Do it badly and the business fizzles into obscurity.

When your team learns to close the right way, you:

• lower your cost of getting customers;
• improve the return on advertising spend (ROAS) of every campaign;
• get better customers;
• improve cash flow, with more paid-in-full sales and fewer payment plans;
• get customers better results, because they are fully bought in;
• out-execute competitors in your market who sell the same services;
• keep your closers longer;
• get salespeople who are paid better, because they make you more money, and everyone wins.

When your team closes the wrong way, you:

• drive good customers away;
• pay more for each customer;
• find it harder to stay profitable on your ad campaigns;
• create more friction when you try to scale;
• get customers worse results, because they are not bought in;
• stretch out your cash flow: what should have been a prepayment becomes a long payment term, and sometimes it ends in non-payment;
• lose good salespeople, because they are not making enough.

The claim made for training. Closing does not take long to learn, and sales teams routinely double their close rates with effective closing. It is called hard to beat as a use of time: how else could you reliably double the close rate of a whole team?

2. The case: a team that could not close

This is one business's month, told for its lesson.

The money. A business owner had new launches to run and was spending money the business did not have. Travel and other costs came to $3,300 a day. The owner had a $100,000 limit on a business credit card to put toward it. Once the ads went live, the debt grew at a stated $412 per working hour. At $3,300 a day, $412 an hour is an eight-hour working day.

• Day one: −$3,300.
• Day two: −$6,600.
• Day three: $10,000 in the hole.

Three days at $3,300 is $9,900. This page does not settle which reading is right.

The problem. The ads worked, but people were not buying. The owner joined the sales huddle and asked each rep for their numbers. They came back as pairs: 2 for 14, 3 for 11 and 2 for 8; then 3 for 7, 0 for 7 and 4 for 10; and one rep at 0 for 18. What each number in a pair counts is not defined. Not established on this page.

What the reps were hearing. Some prospects needed to talk to their husbands first. A number needed to think about it. A lot thought it was too expensive.

The first answer, on the spot. The owner gave quick fixes:

• If someone stalls, ask for their main concern and work with it (SOP 101 — Run the general closes, section 2).
• If someone wants to ask a decision maker, lean on past times that person supported them.
• If someone objects to price, explain the value. Connect their life now to what it could be after they buy. The comparison offered: if you sold luxury sports cars at this price, people would be fighting each other to pay you.

The turn. Then one rep asked whether the owner could teach them this. No one objected; they all looked to the owner for an answer. The reps were not lazy. They were not dumb, and they were not unmotivated. They did not know how to sell. They wanted to sell; nobody had ever taught them how.

The owner took the blame: this was on them, and they should have prepared the team better. The rest of that huddle went to objections. Before the next huddle there would be one master document with everything needed to close the sale, and the team would drill it every day.

A caution came with it. The owner had closed this sale more times than the whole team had had sales appointments, combined. So it would probably take them longer. The team had 27 days.

The drill. At the next huddle the owner did not review the numbers. They were already known to be bad, and there was no need to embarrass the team again. Instead the huddle went over the team's most common obstacle: the stall. The next day, the same. The day after, the same.

Sales started to tick up. The team could now handle stalls, but struggled most with price. So they drilled price for a few days, and sales ticked up again. The business started to go from red to black. By the end of the month it had made up for the early weeks and broken even. The owner kept training the team, and the team kept getting better.

What came after. This page gives no figure for what training did to revenue after that month. The business went on to become a very large company, and the claim is that it would not have without training the team to overcome sales objections. Not established on this page.

3. The drill, as steps

Each step below is something the business in section 2 did, in the order it did them.

• Get the numbers, then the obstacles. Ask each rep for their results. Then ask what prospects are saying when they do not buy.
• Find out whether anyone taught them. In the case, the owner found out when a rep asked to be taught: nobody had ever shown the team how.
• Own the gap. If they were never shown, the gap is yours.
• Write it all down. Put everything needed to close the sale into one master document.
• Skip the numbers you already know are bad. At the next huddle, the case did not review them, so as not to embarrass the team again.
• Drill every day, starting with the most common obstacle. In the case, that was the stall. Drill it day after day.
• Move to the next obstacle the team struggles with most. In the case, that was price, drilled for a few days.
• Keep training after the numbers recover.

A second way to find the obstacle. One practice here is to give an AI tool the written text of every sales call from a period, won and lost alike, and ask it for the top five objections; the real concern under each; the moments a prospect said no politely; and the objection the reps keep talking past without answering. In another example, a weekly automated pass over the sales calls picks out the problems and objections leads raise and turns them into the ads and scripts to make the following week. Marketing asking which objections it could handle, one call a week, is SOP 135 — Run the cross-department call review, section 3.

How long a drill runs, who runs it, what form it takes, and when an obstacle counts as handled are not established on this page.

4. The rules of closing that build a closer

These rules come from the same numbered set as the rules on SOP 96, SOP 97, SOP 98, SOP 99 and SOP 100. They cover practice, what happens before the ask, and power.

Rule 9: enough volume takes luck out of it. The best way to guarantee you become world class is to do so many sales that it would be unreasonable for you not to be.

Rules 12 to 16: what happens before the ask.

• 12. If you feel like every call is a battle, look at what happens before they show up to the call, and at your script before you ask for the sale.
• 13. Only ask for the sale when you think you have them. If you think they need more convincing, keep probing. (Part of this rule is not established on this page.)
• 14. People want to believe you. They want to buy. Your job is to help their brains justify the decision they already want to make.
• 15. Selling happens before you ask for the sale. Closing happens after.
• 16. Problems are easier to handle before you ask for money than after. Settle as many as you can before the ask.

SOP 97, section 6, names rules 12 and 13 among the ways trust gets built.

Rule 27: record all your sales, and learn from them. Champions watch game tape. How champion salespeople treat each sale is only partly established: look at what you did well, and at what you could improve. Then focus on improving, until you have corrected the things you are weak at so thoroughly that you are actually good. How much to work on at once: not established on this page.

Rule 28: power. Power means being able to direct or influence people. To be powerful, you must understand how to close.

How to learn the closes. Keep practicing, and do not give up. Commit a few closes to memory. Try them, and watch them work. Then try a few more. Before long you will be one of the top closers on the team. Closing is a skill, and a skill can be learned.

The other practice rules sit on other pages. Practicing on unqualified leads is SOP 98 — Qualify with the four-letter test, section 4. Stacking closes, learning them by their logic and knowing a few per obstacle are SOP 100 — Run the reason close, section 5.

5. What this page does not decide for you

• What the huddle numbers count. Not established on this page.
• The form of a drill (how long, who leads, what the team does in it). Not established on this page.
• When to move to the next obstacle. The case moved when sales ticked up and the team could handle the first one. Not established on this page beyond that.
• Revenue after the first month. This page gives no figure for it.
• Whether your team will double its close rate. Not established on this page.

6. The checklist

Step	What you do
Ads work but people do not buy	Join the sales huddle and find out why
Find the gap	Get each rep's numbers, then what prospects are saying
Or read every call	Have an AI tool list the top objections across won and lost calls, and the one reps talk past
Find out	Were they ever shown how?
Own it	If not, the gap is yours
Write it down	One master document with everything needed to close
Bad numbers you already know	Do not review them in front of the team again
Drill	Every day
First obstacle	The most common one, day after day
Next obstacle	The one they struggle with most now
Before the ask	Handle problems there; ask only when you think you have them
After each sale	Review it: what went well, what could improve
Volume	Do so many sales that not being world class would be unreasonable
Keep going	Keep training after the numbers recover

7. What this page does not cover

Pages to drill from include SOP 96 to SOP 101: sorting the objection is SOP 99 — Classify an objection; the reason close is SOP 100; the general closes are SOP 101, and SOP 249 — Keep asking with the general closes, then book the next meeting runs them as a loop. Finding salespeople is SOP 252, which runs recruiting the way you market to prospects, and screening many applicants at once is SOP 253, the group interview. Other sales-team pages: memorizing a script and role play are SOP 250 — Memorize the script, then drill it in role play; sales pay and a career path are SOP 251 — Set sales comp and a career path for reps; and onboarding a new rep is SOP 255 — Onboard a new rep in phases, with a test to pass each.