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How to Close the Deal - and Get a Job Offer
Editor's Introduction:A professional job search requires many skills: self-assessment skills, research skills, organizational skills, marketing skills and, at the top of the list, sales skills. By using effective sales techniques such as the final close and asking the big question, you can easily convert a higher percentage of those hard-won interviews into bonafide job offers.
If you want to outdo other job candidates and successfully win a job offer, look to exceptional salespeople for inspiration. You can use the strategies they apply in successfully making a sale to your own job search, particularly in snagging that elusive job offer.
Before proceeding to the sales strategies themselves, it's best to first recognize the many misconceptions about professional selling. Doing so allows you to view the sales profession in a much better light, and to see how you can relate its success principles to winning a coveted job offer.
One myth is that the sale is a contest of wills - one where the salesperson keeps talking and talking so that he wears down a resistant buyer until, ultimately, they both collapse in an exhausted heap over a completed deal. Nothing could be further from the truth. Any professional sale of goods or services should be a meeting of the minds, a meeting where the salesperson learns the needs of the buyer and where the buyer leans how the product or service the seller is offering can help meet his needs. If the salesperson is not actively listening for the potential buyer's needs, the sales will not happen. If the salesperson is preaching ("My product is great") rather than teaching ("Here's why my product is great"), the sale will not happen. These two points reinforce why the winning job interview must be an exchange of ideas, not a one-way infomercial.
Another sales myth is that there is only one successful sales personality. The stereotypical image of the successful salesperson is that of a sharply dressed, fast-talking extrovert. While some personality types do have an easier time learning professional sales techniques, many low-key, informal introverts make excellent salespeople (Warren Buffet, investor extraordinaire, and Bill Gates, who built Microsoft into the biggest software company in the world, come to mind). Regardless of what type of personality you have, you can learn and easily use super sales techniques to your enormous advantage.
The last sales myth is that some things sell themselves. Wrong! Every product or service must be fully and engagingly described to the potential buyer in a way that demonstrates how it meets the buyer's needs. You couldn't sell chocolate-covered bars of gold bullion for 10 cents a pound unless you knew how to fit their desirable characteristics to the needs of the customer and then help your buyer overcome whatever objections, logical or illogical, he may have so that you can close the deal.
That said, here then are the techniques super salespeople use which you yourself can employ:
1. Make an effective "close."
In the terms of professional sales training, the "close" is when you strive to uncover any objections or reservations your potential customer has, and you help your potential customer communicate the decision he has made during your presentation. Notice the use of the word "help," not intimidate, dominate, or bludgeon your potential customer. An intelligent potential buyer (that is, your interviewer) will resist any effort by you to manipulate or overwhelm him even if he has already made a potential buying decision in your favor.
There are those few occasions where some buyers can be bullied or mesmerized into putting their name on the dotted line or saying yes, but getting them to follow through (that is, putting through the purchase order or taking delivery) will be next to impossible. They were probably just agreeing with you to get you out of their office.
A close is successful if the buyer immediately responds and says, "Yes, I love what you're selling, when can it be delivered?" Interestingly, the close is also successful if it succeeds in uncovering an objection that the buyer has to the sales. Only by discovering potential objections can the salesperson tailor his presentation to more fully explain how his product or service can meet the needs and desires of the potential buyer. If those objections exist but remain unspoken, they cannot be overturned; the sale will not happen and, even worse, the salesperson will never know why.
Your job interview is a sales call in which you communicate your knowledge, skills, experience, and personal qualities to demonstrate that you meet and, you hope, even exceed the needs of the potential buyer. Through your pre-interview research and by asking insightful interview questions, you have uncovered these needs (the job specifications). Via your interview answers, you have succinctly but completely presented the reasons why you can do the job in question. Now you need to help your potential customer express the decision he has made during your presentation.
2. Use a trial close.
The trial close is when you ask a question to get a feeling for how ready your buyer is to make a decision. After you have answered a question about some aspect of your background that closely relates to the job you're interviewing for, an effective trial close might be, "Mr. Necco, I'm really glad you asked me about my turnaround strategic experience. When I was thinking about this interview, I was hoping you'd agree that such experience would be a great asset to someone working in your organization." Notice this is one of those "non-question questions." You're not "forcing" him to respond, but if he does, there are three potential outcomes:
Mr. Necco agrees with you and tells you that he is ready to hire you. This is the best news. You can stop selling and start working out the details.
Mr. Necco agrees with you and asks another question. This is also good news in that he has bought one of your selling points and is now moving on to discover more.
Mr. Necco disagrees with you. But how you handle this disagreement - this objection - can still provide you with a selling opportunity.
Consider another example of a trial close. It's nearing the end of your interview. You've been asked a lot of questions, and you've asked a couple of good ones yourself. Try something like this: "Mr. Strauss, I realize our time is starting to get short. I've really enjoyed learning more about Lesco Ventures and I think I could be very successful here. (Pause a moment here to look for some non-verbal feedback.) What questions or issues have I left answered?"
Notice a few things that are built into this trial close. You have shown appropriate courtesy, which is always a good idea. You have expressed strong interest in the job and have given your positive evaluation of the fit between your background and the needs of the job.
You're not blaming Mr. Strauss for not having asked enough questions; you're accepting that you might have left something unsaid. You have left Mr. Strauss with an opportunity to endorse your candidacy and suggest a positive next step. And most importantly, if Mr. Strauss has a reservation about your candidacy, you have offered him the opportunity to get it out in the open so that you can address it or, even better, overturn it.
When do you use a trial close? There are three answers to this question. The trial close used in the interview with the Mr. Necco example demonstrates an old sales axiom that you can remember with the letters ABC: Always Be Closing. In job interviewing, this works only after some level of mutual interest is established. Come on too strong, too early, and it won't work. But after you're well into the interview and if you have a strong feeling that it's going well, you might slip in one of those "non-question questions" and see how you're really doing.
The traditional time to try a trial close in the job interview is demonstrated in the Lesco Ventures example. Working it in near the end of the interview has a more natural feel to it, but it comes with a risk. Your interviewer may indicate more than one possible objection. This is not necessarily a deal-breaker, but if you have only another five or 10 minutes left in the interview, you may not have time to address them. This is why it's usually a good strategy to try to slip in a subtle trial close when you estimate that you have at least 25 percent of your interview time remaining.
3. Be alert to buying signals.
There is no single best time to try to close a sale. However, you should always be on the lookout for a buying signal. At whatever point you see or hear a buying signal, use a trial close to solidify the progress you've made up to that point and to see if the potential buyer has made up his mind.
Interviewers transmit two kinds of buying signals: overt and covert. The winning job interviewer will pick up on both and seize the opportunity for a trial close. The overt buying signals are the ones we love to hear and are easy to pick up on. They include:
"You sound like our kind of person."
"That (specific experience or skill) would be quite useful to us."
"What kind of notice would you have to give your current employer?"
"I think you'll fit right in."
"When can you start?"
It's important to stay focused and remember that you still have to close the interview on the strongest possible note. Despite the very positive impression these buying signals may give you, nobody has yet said, "You're hired!"
Covert buying signals from the interviewer are a lot more subtle and may only be well-prepared questions designed to dig below the surface of your candidacy. This is good news because it shows a growing level of interest in you. After hearing a few of these signals, you should work in a trial close. Some samples of covert buying signals are:
"That's a good approach. How do you think it would work here?"
"I love that story. That situation happens here all the time."
"That makes sense on the supplier side, but tell me how it would work on the user side."
"How would you recommend that we restructure that department?"
"Your approach makes sense to me."
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