Always Be Curious, Always Be Opening
This whole theory of “Always Be Closing” is awful in our world today. That might have worked in Glengarry Glen Ross in the 1950s. That does not work in 2019 for a myriad of reasons. In fact, my acronym of A-B-C is “always be canvasing” or A-B-C, “always be curious!”
The power of being curious is that you’re gathering information. Remember, this is like matchmaking. You have a service and you have a prospect. You have a product and you have a prospect. Does your product match your prospect’s needs? If you jump to the closing, that’s like walking up into a bar and asking for a girl to go to your room. You need to stop and take a couple of steps back and woo the prospect. You need to see if it’s a match, if the chemistry’s right. You need to know what their needs are, and if you have a product to match their needs. That’s the biggest difference between trying to jam in a close.
“You should lease here, you should lease here. This is the price. Let’s close the deal.” You don’t even know if they have the money to invest, if they have money to pay the rent, if the space size is correct, who’s signing the lease. You just need to slow down and ask the questions. And then when they answer the questions, you need to be listening.
With “always be closing” they’re basically saying hard sell, hard sell, hard sell, and that is not going to get you anywhere in this world.
I had a client call me once, in the middle of the global crisis. Not a lot of deals were happening during that time. He said, “I need you to come meet with my employee, John*. He’s having a problem closing. He’s gotten 37 LOIs in the last 90 days and hasn’t closed any.” And I’m thinking to myself, “I haven’t had 37 LOIs in the last 3 years, let alone in the last 3 months. Something’s up here.” I knew their portfolio, so I knew there was a big issue.
I went to the office and I met with the boss and John, and I said, “I hear you have 37 LOIs that you haven’t been able to close on and turn into leases and get executed?” He said, “Yeah.”
He brings in one of those copy paper boxes with the lid and he opens it up and inside the box, there were 37 manila folder files. He pulls out a couple and I open them up, and what do you think I find in the files? A lot of outgoing proposals to the prospects. I asked John, “Where is the information on the prospect?” and he said, “What do you mean?”
I said, “Do they have other locations, a business plan, financials?” He replied, “Oh, no, I was going to get that later, after they had signed the LOI or the proposal.”
????
Basically, someone would call in on his space and he would just start shooting out these proposals, and he told his boss he had all these proposals, where he may or may not have shown them the space. He definitely had not collected any of the information. There was no closing problem with John. It was all an opening problem.
We reverse-engineered it. We took a step back. I showed him my top 20 questions to ask a prospect. He’d been in the business for a few years, but I just think that sometimes when your clients or your bosses are pushing you to close the deal, you forget to slow down and ask the questions.
Slow down and always be opening or always be canvasing, always be prospecting, always be curious, and forget about the closing, because if you do the canvasing, the prospecting, and the opening, the closing will take care of itself.
*The names have been changed to protect the innocent.
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