I recently facilitated a selling skills seminar for a large group of retail sales managers and salespeople. I was amazed at the responses in the feedback sheets from the attendees.
One of the questions was "Which steps of the sale would you like to have spent more time on." The overwhelming answer was "closing the sale" followed by "overcoming objections." Let me explain why they are having difficulty closing the sale and one of the reasons they get so many objections.
Throughout the course of the training it was evident why they wanted more time spent in both of these areas. In most cases, they were not taking the time to build rapport with the potential customer. Many thought that the concept of never greeting a customer with the standard "Can I help you?" was radical. They had a hard time buying into the idea that salespeople should take the time to warm the customer up with a little non-selling conversation. Talking about the weather, the kids that were with them and so on would help them in the sales process by getting the customer engaged and would begin to build rapport; but they wanted to get right to selling the product as soon as possible.
There has always been an interesting dynamic between sales people and customers. It's the understanding of those dynamics that can go a long ways towards selling success.
Customers walk into an organization with a natural skepticism of salespeople because they feel they're only there to "take their money." The salespeople, at least the ones that struggled the most, felt a lot of the customers were wasting time by "just looking" and were not ready to buy.
This is quickly validated in the salesperson's mind when they start the interaction with "Can I help you?" I don't know about you, but I'm a busy person and if I have chosen to take the time out of my day to look at televisions, or home theater systems, it means I have an interest in them; I'm not just killing time.
Selling, done properly, is a process not an event. The fact that the attendees wanted to learn to close and handle objections is noble but misguided. The close is the culmination of everything you did in the sales process that preceded it. There is nothing you can say during a close to make up for a botched presentation where you didn't discover customer needs or build value.
Try greeting a customer with a comment or question that has nothing to do with selling. Create a little conversation. Once you have broken the ice, make a nice transition into the selling process by asking them what brings them in today. They'll feel more comfortable and you'll be amazed at the results.