Close Your Sale With These Sales Closing Questions

Building relationships is a crucial part of being a great salesperson. Knowing your customer can help tailor your approach while developing the trust needed to secure their business. But having a great relationship doesn’t guarantee a sale – you need to ask the right questions.

Closing is the skill that turns great relationships into great returns. In this article, we explore the best sales closing questions you should be using.

• Questions to Confirm Understanding
  
  • Do you have any questions?
  • How could that work for you?
  • Does this solve your problem?
  • Which of your needs does this address?
    
• Phrases to Probe for Objections
  
  • How well do you know the product?
  • Do you have any specific questions?
    
• Tailored Package Phrases
  
• Soft-Close Questions
  
  • If I could do this for $X, would that be within your budget?
  • Is there any reason this wouldn’t meet your needs?
  • It seems like this is the perfect solution. What do you think?
  • If I throw in X, would that get you to sign today?
  • Shall I send the contact over to legal for review?
    
• Phrases to Test for Upsell Opportunities
  
• Ask for the Sale
  
  • Would you like to buy?
  • Are you ready to sign the contract?
  • Will you be paying with cash or card?

Confirm Understanding

When trying to make a sale, you need to communicate the benefits of your offering rather than focusing on the features. For example, telling a prospect that a tumble dryer has an 1800 RPM might not have much impact, but saying clothes will be dry in half the time will.

Using carefully crafted questions can help you confirm whether your customer understands the benefits you are explaining. These questions vary depending on your sales pitch but could include:

• Do you have any questions?
• How could that work for you?
• Does this solve your problem?
• Which of your needs does this address?

Confirming that they fully understand the benefits will limit any potential objections when you ask your final closing question.

Any Questions?

Asking your customer if they have any specific questions about your product or service will also help limit objections.

Don’t wait until the end of your sales pitch or discussion to ask whether the customer needs clarification. Asking them at regular intervals throughout your conversation will help you tailor the information you give, better meeting their needs.

For example, you may ask the customer how well they know your product at the beginning of the presentation and whether they have any specific questions. You can then ask them this again after any technical explanations to ensure clarity and again at the end of the presentation to probe for any potential objections.

Build a Tailored Package

Offering your customer too many options isn’t always a good idea as it can often lead to indecision. However, offering a small number of options with varying price points can help your customer assess the trade-offs when it comes to cost.

For example, a salesperson for a social media agency may offer three packages, each one more costly and offering more coverage than the last. Although there is likely great flexibility in the agency’s offer, delivering three options helps the customer gain clarity and understand potential costs.

Delivering three options helps sales peoples judge the customer’s needs and provides them with a solid question that will help them sell. Once you have delivered the options you can ask your customer which one best suits their needs – this is considerably easier for your customer to answer than asking a very open-ended question ‘what do you want?’

Soft-Close

It can be tricky to know when to ask for the sale.

Asking whether a customer is ready to buy only allows them to give a yes or no answer. If you have not quite convinced your customer of the benefits of working with you or haven’t quite found them the right offer, you may risk losing a sale, even if the customer was on the verge of making a purchase.

Using soft-close questions will let you judge the customer’s readiness to purchase without risking a lost sale. Some good examples of soft-close questions include:

• If I could do this for $X, would that be within your budget?
• Is there any reason this wouldn’t meet your needs?
• It seems like this is the perfect solution. What do you think?
• If I throw in X, would that get you to sign today?
• Shall I send the contact over to legal for review?

The brilliance of using a soft-close question is that regardless of the answer, you are gaining useful information. Either the customer will be accepting of the question, showing they are ready to buy, or they will share what you need to do to get them into that position.

Test For Upsell Opportunities

Before asking the final closing question, it is a smart move to check whether you can help your customer in any other ways. One good way to do this is by giving multiple package options such as those we discussed earlier in this article.

Asking your prospect whether there is anything else you can help them with opens them up to share other challenges or needs they may have. Throughout your conversation with your customer, you may also pick up on these challenges and can present solutions, building a wider offer that better meets their needs.

Ask for the Sale

The questions we have outlined in this article offer great ways to move your prospect closer to the sale. There is every chance that these questions will prompt the customer to ask to buy. However, in most circumstances, there is one final closing question that is crucial in making a sale.

Would you like to buy?

The adage is true – if you don’t ask, you don’t get.

It may seem fundamental but without physically asking your customer if they want to make a purchase, they may not ever do so. The final closing question can take many forms depending on circumstances but should be a closed question such as:

• Would you like to buy?
• Are you ready to sign the contract?
• Will you be paying with cash or card?

Timing this question is crucial. You should only ask your final closing question in two circumstances – when you are certain your customer is ready to buy or when you believe the sale is unlikely and your time would be better spent elsewhere.

Sale Closing Questions

Considered and well-delivered sales closing questions are the cornerstone of selling. Use the questions highlighted in this article to learn how to move your prospect closer to a purchase and eventually close them on a sale.

Which questions do you ask to close a sale?

Want to close more sales? Read our guide to sales closing techniques you need.