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How to Leverage the Trial Close in Your Ultimate Sales Presentation

The Trial Close is both Step 5 and Step 8 of your Ultimate 10-Step Sales Presentation.

Yes, indeed, the trial close is so important; it is two steps of your Ultimate 10-Step Sales Presentation!

The reason is simple. If you don’t understand and master the trial close, you might as well look for another career right now. Without the trial close, you’ll never be a top salesperson.

Think about it for a moment. Have you ever been a buyer when the salesperson pitched their product, and they never stopped talking until they asked for the order? So, have I! I didn’t buy their product either!

Here’s what happens. The salesperson starts talking. You have a question, but they keep talking. As they talk, you realize you don’t agree with what the salesperson just said, but they just keep talking.

This goes on for what seems like an eternity.

The salesperson is talking, and all the while, you have questions and objections piling up in your head like a major traffic jam on the freeway!

Suddenly, without warning the salesperson, asks for the order. You can’t wait to blurt out, “NO!,” “HECK NO,” “OH, MY GOSH, NO,” or some other appropriate variant.

However, when used properly, the trial close will keep you from being THAT salesperson.

Instead, as you start talking to your buyer, you will stop after every major point and ask questions. If the buyer asks you a question or raises an objection, you will stop, address their question or objection, and make sure you’ve answered it to their satisfaction before you move on with your presentation.

These questions, when they are correctly constructed, are known as trial closes, and we will learn all about them today!

Content

In this article on using the Trial Close, we’ll examine:

• What is the Trial Close?
• The Four benefits of using Trial Closes.
• When to use a Trial Close.
• Examples of Trial Closes.
• How to Leverage the SELL Sequence.

 

 

What Is A Trial Close?

A trial close is an important tool for every professional salesperson. The trial close allows the salesperson to determine whether or not the buyer is ready to buy.

A trial close is different from the close!

A trial close asks for the buyer’s opinion, while the close asks for the buyer’s decision to buy. By asking for the buyer’s opinion, the trial close gives you, the seller, immediate feedback about the buyer’s state of mind.

Think of this feedback like a stoplight.

• Proceed. The buyer agrees with your proposal.
• Proceed with caution. The buyer partially agrees with your proposal. However, there is something the buyer does not agree with or something they don’t understand about your proposal. So, you need to figure out what the issue is and clear it up before you can move on to your next point.
• Stop! The buyer doesn’t agree with the claims in your proposal. You need to back up and figure out what went wrong, before moving on to your next point.

Without the trial close, you will keep going with your presentation without knowing whether the buyer is stuck on something you said four points back. Then, when you try to close the deal, the buyer says “no” and you have no idea why!

Using the trial close prevents that surprising “no” at the end of your presentation.

4 Benefits of Using Trial Closes

I have explained to you that a trial close is a tool that provides feedback regarding the buyer’s state of mind and specifically their readiness to buy. Here are four benefits to using trial closes in your presentation

1. It reveals obstacles

A trial close can help reveal obstacles that may prevent you from closing your sale. Most often, the obstacle is a question or objection that the buyer has about something you’ve said. The trial close will flush these obstacles out in the open so you can deal with them.

2. It reveals opportunities

Sometimes an obstacle, like the ones I mentioned above, are really opportunities. A buyer may like the main points of your proposal but be concerned about one thing. Maybe they think the order is too small to meet their needs, so there is an opportunity to increase the order. Or, perhaps the buyer wants to proceed but is nervous about signing a long-term contract. Here, there is an opportunity to shorten the length of the contract or provide an escape clause in the contract.

The trial close helps bring these opportunities to light

3. It builds trust and relationships

As I said before, the trial close asks for the buyer’s opinion about something. Don’t we all like to be asked for our opinion? And, don’t we love it when we sense the person asking the question actually listens to us and cares about our answer?

Asking questions and listening to the buyer demonstrates your intention to build a relationship and serve the customer.

4. It increases the likelihood of getting a “yes”

The more “yes’s” you get throughout your presentation, the more likely you’ll get a yes at the end.

Using trial closes throughout your presentation allows you to deal with obstacles while it reveals opportunities and builds trust. So, you come to the end of your presentation knowing exactly where you stand, and with the buyer having said yes to all the major points you discussed along the way.

So far, we learned what a trial close is and how it differs from the final close to our presentation. We also learned four benefits to using trial closes. Next, let’s consider when we should use trial closes in our presentation.

When to Use A Trial Close

There are four distinct opportunities to leverage the power of the trial close in our presentations.

• After every main selling point in our presentation.
• After answering any question from the buyer.
• After answering any objection from the buyer.
• Just before we are ready to close the sale.

Using a trial close at each point in our presentation accomplishes four things.

1. It tells us whether the buyer agrees with a feature, benefit, and advantage of our product or proposal.
2. It tells us whether we have successfully answered a buyer’s objection or overcome some obstacle.
3. It tells us whether or not there are additional questions, objections, or obstacles.
4. It tells us whether the buyer is ready for us to close the sale.

If inexperienced salespeople have one glaring weakness, it is the tendency to get so wrapped up in giving the presentation; they forget to use trial closes to make sure the buyer is tracking with the presentation. In effect, they are pushing forward without realizing they left the buyer behind!

Generally, when salespeople tell me they failed to make a sale, it is almost always because they didn’t use enough trial closes. In all my years of selling, I’ve never seen a salesperson lose a sale because they used too many trial closes.

Examples of Trial Closes

Remember, the trial close asks for the buyer’s opinion. So, the trial close is always posed as a question.

Here are a few examples of common trial close questions.

• How do you feel about what we have discussed so far?
• What do you think about the solution I’ve shared with you?
• How does what we’ve talked about sound to you?
• Based on what you’ve heard so far, what are your questions?
• If you had your way, what changes would you make to the proposal?
• Does the product/solution make sense to you?
• What do you think about this (insert idea/benefit)?

The trial close question you ask needs to be tailored to the opportunity. For example,

• Did you just deliver a major selling point? Then you might ask, “What do you think about this (insert benefit)?
• If you just answered a question from the buyer, you might ask, “Does that answer your question?” Or, “Does that make sense to you?”
• If the buyer just raised an objection and you answered. Then you might ask, “What do you think about this solution?”
• When you are just about ready to close the sale, you might ask, “Does the product/solution we’ve been discussing make sense to you?

One of the most common places where we lose a buyer during a presentation is when we explain a feature, advantage, and benefit of our product or proposal. That is why it is so important to use a trial close after every major selling point in our presentation.

So, let’s review the SELL sequence to see how the trial close should be used when discussing features, advantages, and benefits.

How to Leverage the SELL Sequence

In the last article, 6 Key Elements to Use in Your Ultimate Sales Presentation, I introduced the concept of the SELL sequence. As a refresher, the SELL sequence stands for:

• Show the feature,
• Explain the advantage,
• Lead into the benefit, and
• Let the customer talk!

The last “L,” let the customer talk, is where we leverage the power of the trial close. We show a feature, explain the advantage of the feature, and discuss how it benefits the buyer. Then we use the trial close to ask a question and let the customer talk!

The response from the buyer at this point tells us whether the buyer accepts the point we’ve made or whether he/she has some concern that we need to address.

The SELL sequence is especially important to use after every major selling point in the presentation where you introduce a feature, advantage, benefit combination.

The trial close is deceptively simple yet is among the most powerful tools in the salesperson’s arsenal. I urge you to master the trial close. Use it in every selling situation as often as you can until it becomes second nature.

You won’t have a better friend helping you to close sales than your trial close!

The Ultimate 10-Step Sales Presentation Series

Step 5: The Trial Close is the sixth in a series of articles, which have been created to teach you how to craft and deliver the Ultimate Sales Presentation in 10-Steps.

If you missed a prior article in this series or you want to review one again, you’ll find them here:

• Kick-Off: The Ultimate 10-Step Sales Presentation
• Step 1: The Complete Guide to Sales Prospecting for Your Ultimate Presentation
• Step 2: A Complete Guide to Planning Your Ultimate Sales Presentation
• Step 3: A Complete Guide to the Approach Step of Your Ultimate Sales Presentation
• Step 4: How to Create Your Ultimate Presentation (Presentation Part 1)
• Step 4: Key Elements of Your Presentation (Presentation Part 2)
• Step 5: How to Leverage the Trial Close in Your Ultimate Sales Presentation (you’re here)
• Steps 6-10: Coming soon. A new article releases every two weeks.

If you want to make sure you don’t miss one article, you can sign up to receive the series here.

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Category: Salespeople