Mini-Closing Is The Best Sales Strategy You’ve Never Heard Of
What is a mini-close?
It’s a close that’s small enough to fit in your carry-on luggage. ✈️
No, but seriously …
“Mini-close” is a term that we coined ourselves, so here’s our definition:
Any question, before the final ask for the sale, by which a salesperson aims to determine if their prospect is still planning to become a customer.
In other words, a mini-close is when you ask your prospect if they’re still planning to buy, at any point before you actually ask them to buy.
It’s similar to Sandler’s “up-front contact” in that its purpose is to “avoid surprises.”
But while Sandler’s “up-front contact” is primarily used to get on the same page with a prospect in terms of expectations before a meeting, a mini-close can be used at any time to make sure that your prospect is still moving in the direction of the sale.
Why is it important to mini-close?
As a salesperson, your time is valuable.
If you’re spending time on a deal that’s NOT going to close, it will cost you time that you could otherwise spend on a deal that WILL close.
A longer sales cycle exacerbates this problem. Because the amount of time at risk of loss grows in proportion to the amount of time invested into a longer sales cycle.
Assuming you have a large market of prospects to pick from, you should start with the prospects that have the highest chances of closing, in order to get the greatest return on investment from your sales time and effort.
The trick, of course, is figuring out which prospects have the highest chance of closing, and doing so as early as possible in the sales encounter.
This is where mini-closing comes in.
How do you mini-close?
The most direct and brutally honest form of a mini-close sounds like this:
“Are you still planning to buy my product?”
But that’s too rough, and will likely cause an end to the sales encounter.
So we need to add a little filler and fluff on the front-end.
Something like this:
“I want to take a second to check in here, Bob, just to make sure we’re being respectful of each other’s time, are you still planning to buy my product?”
But still, the question itself is too direct.
And the topic of being “respectful of each other’s time” can be emotionally-charged and misinterpreted.
Our preferred mini-close language sounds like this:
“I want to take a second to check in here, Bob, just to make sure we’re on the same page, if I can offer you a product that fits all your requirements, would you be comfortable moving forward today?”
Here’s why this wording works like a charm:
- It’s polite – includes filler and fluff so that you can save face from the true question.
- It creates urgency – the question asks about moving forward “today.”
- There’s a “back door” – woven in with the line “fits all your requirements.”
Because if a product fits ALL your requirements, then of course you would be willing to buy. In this way, the question is designed to encourage a “yes” answer.
It also sets the salesperson up for a perfect rebuttal if the prospect answers “no” to this question.
You can rephrase your question to make it sounds like your prospect is saying they’re no longer interested in that which they already told you that they were interested in, earlier in the sales encounter, maybe during qualifying, or when you up-front-contracted before starting your pitch.
You could say,
“You mean to tell me, Bob, that if I found you a product for half of what you’re paying currently that does twice as much as the product you already have, AND you didn’t have to even lift a finger to get it started, that’s not something you would be interested in?”
This is a good “back door” to save yourself if you’ve mini-closed too early and need to buy yourself some more time to show your prospect some more value.
The idea is to keep getting yes’s as you move along in your pitch, leading up to a “yes” in response to your final ask for the sale.
When is the best time to use a mini-close?
Anytime!
But the formality and directness of your mini-close should be adjusted, depending on how far along you’ve gotten in the sales encounter.
At the very beginning of the sales encounter, your mini-closes should be informal and less direct, like this:
“If we can save you money on car insurance, does that sound like something you might be interested in hearing more about?”
As you get closer to asking for the sale, your mini-closes should be formal and direct, like this:
“If the price is within your budget, do you have a payment method to move forward with making the purchase today?”
Use mini-closes to manage “red flags” and anticipated objections.
Mini-closes are particularly useful when you’ve predicted an objection early on and want to see if it can be handled before you spend the time and effort to go through your entire pitch.
For example, let’s say you’re selling HR software.
You’re qualifying at the beginning of the call, and you ask about your prospect’s timeline.
Prospect:
“We won’t be able to get anything started until January next year. That’s when our contract with [other HR software company] renews and we want to get everything started on the first of the new year. But we’re still open to discussing it now.”
Uh-oh. That’s a non-starter.
Because you’re having this conversation in June and January is six months away. It’s your company’s policy that you can’t sign any contracts with a start date more than a month in the future.
And we don’t want to just “discuss it,” like the prospect suggests. Remember, your time as a salesperson is valuable. And you don’t want to spend time and energy on a deal that can’t close.
It would be better to just wait and pitch this account closer to their possible start date, or you have to figure out a way to convince them to start sooner …
So you ask for a mini-close:
“Susan, if I showed you an HR software that was a dream-come-true for your organization and could relieve a lot of your pain points, would you be willing to get something like that started sooner than January?”
If Susan says “yes” …
Then you can proceed with your pitch, but you want to continue mini-closing throughout to make sure Susan continues to see that your product really is a “dream-come-true” that they would be willing to start before January.
If Susan says “no” …
Then you have a decision to make.
You can either …
(1) Dig deeper on the mini-close
And possibly decide that the prospect isn’t worth pitching any further because their probability of closing is too low.
(2) Show a little more value
In an effort to show Susan that your product really is a “dream-come-true” and then ask the mini-close question again to see if she’s changed her mind about getting started before January. If Susan still hasn’t changed her mind, then it might be time to move on to the next prospect.
After all, this is the purpose of mini-closing: to conserve your time and energy once you’ve determined a prospect is not a buyer so that you can then spend that time and energy on a higher-conversion prospect.