- January 28, 2025
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
As regular readers know, I often use baseball as an analogy to help readers more easily understand the many facets of selling. We are going to discuss closing but we’ll begin with closing’s baseball cousin, scoring.
In baseball, when a team is having trouble scoring runs, they don’t usually blame their baserunners. For example, in my son’s senior baseball season at Bard College, he scored only 9 runs in 26 games despite reaching base via hit or walk 35 times. Is the fact that he only scored 26% of the time he was on base a statement about his base running? No, he was an excellent base runner. It had much more to do with the batters who hit behind him in the lineup, who usually failed to drive him in.
Sales Leaders who are frustrated with low win rates place the blame on closing skills when, in reality, it has NOTHING to do with closing!
Watch this 2-minute video for an explanation and then continue reading below.
There are typically three categories of opportunities that don’t close:
- Prospect/Customer chose to buy from someone else
- Prospect/Customer chose, or their indecision led them to do nothing or postpone
- Prospect/Customer chose to do it themselves/internally
Regardless as to which category we are in, the question that must be answered is why weren’t our salespeople more effective at getting the desired outcome? By asking that question, we are much more likely to explore reasons OTHER than closing as the reason for the undesirable outcome.
As for the possible reasons why, there are many possibilities but these twenty are among the most common (with the categories they cause):
| Possible Reason | Bought Elsewhere | Did Nothing | Did Themselves |
| No compelling reason to buy from you | x | x | x |
| Lack of urgency alignment | x | x | |
| Failure to Monetize | x | x | |
| Lack Commitment to Solve Problem | x | x | |
| Didn’t confirm willingness to spend required budget | x | x | x |
| Failed to meet stakeholder(s) | x | x | x |
| Lack of alignment on timeline | x | x | |
| Not a great fit | x | ||
| Lacked insight to competition and how we compare | x | ||
| Not aware of decision making criteria | x | ||
| Not aware of decision making process | x | ||
| Proposed solution was not cost/needs appropriate | x | x | |
| Salesperson was not likable | x | ||
| Lacked relationship | x | ||
| Lack of trust | x | ||
| Lack of credibility/respect | x | ||
| Lack of need | x | x | x |
| You lacked all of the required capabilities for success | x | ||
| You have product/company reputation issues | x | ||
| You can’t meet delivery requirements | x |
This list is not in order, is by no means complete, and is not applicable to everyone. But it should help to illustrate how skipping or missing even one important qualifier could lead to not winning the business.
*This is so important*
It’s never about closing skills. It’s always about how well qualified the opportunity is and exactly when in the sales process salespeople should seek to uncover these individual snippets of information as well as how they ask. Timing is everything.
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