Review closing techniques

Sit down with the people who sell and write a list of the ways they ask for the decision. Common ones are:

• The direct ask: "Do you want to go ahead?"
• The summary close: recap what the buyer said they need, then ask.
• The next-step close: agree a dated plan with the buyer, ending in a signature.
• The choice close: offer two options and ask which suits them.
• The deadline close: tie the price or start date to a real date.

Add anything else your team does. Include what happens when the buyer says "let me think about it", since that is where many deals slip.

Take the last 20 to 30 closed deals, won and lost, and add a column to your sheet, or a field in your CRM, for the closing approach used. Fill it in from call recordings if you have them, using a tool such as Gong or Fireflies, and from the rep's own account if you do not. Be honest about what happened, not what the playbook says.

Add three more columns: deal size, buyer role and whether the decision was made on the call or after it.

Count wins and losses for each approach, then split by deal size and by buyer. A simple table like this is enough:

• Direct ask, small deals: 6 won, 4 lost.
• Direct ask, large deals: 1 won, 5 lost.
• Next-step close, large deals: 4 won, 2 lost.

With 20 to 30 deals, the gaps are only hints. A difference like 6 of 10 against 3 of 10 is worth testing. A difference of one deal is noise. That is why the next step is a test, not a rule.

Open the recordings for the won deals and look at the five minutes before the ask. You will usually find signals such as the buyer asking about onboarding, contract terms or start dates. They bring in someone from finance or legal. They ask who else uses it. They start saying "when" instead of "if".

Write these down as a list of signals your team recognises. A close that arrives after those signals feels natural. A close that arrives before them feels pushy, whatever the technique.

Look at the deals where the buyer signed and then went quiet, asked for a refund or left in the first year. Did the close involve a deadline that was not real, or a discount the buyer did not ask for? Closing techniques that push people into a decision they were not ready for lose you the deal later. If a technique shows up in those deals, drop it.

Pick one approach to try, for example the next-step close on deals above a certain size. Agree who uses it and for how long. Keep the other parts of the process the same, so a result can only come from the change. Review after ten deals.

Pair this with Price and propose to close, not to inform, because a good close cannot save a proposal that gives the buyer nothing to decide on.

For each buyer type, write down:

• The signals that tell you it is time to ask.
• The words your team uses, in a line or two.
• What to do on a "let me think about it".
• What not to do.

Keep it to one page for each segment. Review it quarterly. It should link to your handling of price pushback in Improve your negotiation approach, and to the follow-up discipline in Follow-up is a system, not a personality trait.

• Judging a technique on three deals.
• Mixing small and large deals in one comparison.
• Relying on the rep's memory of how they closed.
• Treating a scripted close as the cause when the deal was already lost in discovery.
• Using false urgency to move a deal.
• Changing three things at once and being unable to say which one worked.

Your team can answer, for each buyer type, which approach they use and why. Win rate on the segment you tested rises, or at least you can see it falling when you drop a technique. You can also point to the recording, not an opinion, when someone asks why the ask went well. Compare the result with the reasons found in Analyse lost deal reasons.