Five Steps to Close More Sales at Higher Prices

There are two critical ways to increase your annual sales. First you can increase the number of sales that you actually close, and secondly you can increase the price at which you sell your product or service. By combining these two components together you’ll dramatically increase your sales.

Five Steps to Closing More Sales at Higher Prices

# 1. Get your prospects talking. When you do all of the talking in a selling situation, you lose engagement from your prospects and miss understanding their specific challenges and objectives. Get prospects to speak more; this way you’ll really understand what’s going on and will know how to craft a solution to help them achieve their goals.

# 2. Disqualify. At least 50% of your prospects won’t be a good fit for your company, product or service. The sooner you disqualify them, the sooner you’ll be able to move on and focus more on truly compatible prospects.

Most salespeople milk unqualified prospects, sinking precious time into people who’ll never do business with them. You must take a deep breath and just toss these prospects; they’re excess baggage weighing you down.

#3. Understand challenges. Your prospects do not buy your product or service. They want to buy a solution to some type of a challenge. Very few salespeople do an effective job of truly understanding what these key challenges are—the very challenges that can motivate prospects to actually buy from you. Pour effort into understanding inside and out what these challenges are.

#4. Get a budget. Understanding what your prospect’s budget is will help you craft a solution that your prospect will be eager to invest in. Remember, don’t ask about a budget early on in the sales process.

Save this for some point midway or towards the end (but before the presentation!). It’s critical that before you present a solution, you understand your prospect’s budget. This way you can craft a solution that will fit nicely within that budget, increasing the likelihood of closing the sale. You may even be able to close the sale at a higher price.

#5. Case study presentation. When it’s finally time to give a presentation, don’t just give some canned presentation of all the features and benefits of your product. Instead, provide a case study presentation drawing from specific examples of past clients showing how you have solved similar challenges.

By providing these examples with case studies, you’ll keep your prospects better engaged, while at the same time be able to demonstrate some social proof of what you have done in the past.

When you start applying these five steps to closing more sales—and at higher prices at that—you’ll begin seeing both a significant increase in your closing ratio as well as a surge in the price of your sales…a greater average price. More sales + higher selling prices = a dramatic increase in sales. Which of these five steps did you find most useful for your sales world? Please share below in the comments.