Selling to Oil and Gas – Closing

Part three of a three part series on how to sell to the Oil and Gas industry. This episode we talk about what Closing is and what it is not, and how to Close successfully. For the free Closing cheat sheet click here: Closing Effectively And we have a new book coming out on how to sell to the oil and gas market. Click here to learn more about the book and sign up to be notified of its release. Plus be invited to some “invitation only” live events where we help you with your selling efforts. Hey, folks. Let’s learn something new about the oil and gas industry. [Music] All right. This is our final of our three-part series in how to sell in oil and gas. And today, we’re going to be talking about something that a lot of people don’t understand and they get it wrong, closing. So, if you’re that guy, the ABC guy the Alec Baldwin always be closing guy, you’re aggravating and you’re not accomplishing a lot of stuff. That disappeared twenty years ago. You should not always be closing. There’s no tricks to close. So, with our clients, closing starts from the very beginning of the process. If we both can’t agree in the very first meeting that we have something of value to offer to our clients, that we can help them with the problem, then we don’t need to be talking to them. The close comes naturally. There’s a couple of things that you need to do to make sure that happens. Number one, build value early. Your very first meeting with the prospect, you should be able to clearly define what the value is you bring to the organization, literally what problem do you solve that they’re struggling with. Now, whether they will actually close the deal with you or not at this point, you don’t know because there’s other stuff you have to figure out. But, if you can’t show value early on, you’re not going to be able to close. The second thing is have an open dialogue and transparency. Nothing secret, right? The client knows you’re trying to sell them something, and you should know that you can help them with the problem by selling them whatever this product or service is. So, being totally open and transparent is key to that. With our clients, we from the very beginning we talk about our sales process, we talk about pricing, we talk about what we can do and what we can’t do and clients appreciate that, right? They’re busy. The next thing is a working proposal. We never and I mean never just throw a proposal over the fence. When we do proposals, we start off with the client’s decision making team in a room and we work on their proposal together and we work on everything; time frames, expected outcomes, deliverables, who’s going to be involved, and pricing, right? That way, the client has buy in and sees everything that’s going on. This is how you partner with a client. Don’t ever just throw a proposal over the fence, you won’t close that. And in closing like I said, starts in the very first meeting. You need to show real value early on and you also need to have mutual buy in. If the client’s decision making team or your client doesn’t agree that you can help them with something, you need to go somewhere else. This industry is so huge and you could spend every working hour putting together proposals and putting it in front of people and never close any business. The way we do it, we have almost 100% close ratio because we bring value early on in the process. Now, in order to help you close more effectively, we have a free closing cheat sheet that will be attached to this blog. And then, I have a couple of favors to ask. Number one, if you’re on YouTube or if you’re on the modalpoint blog, will you please spread the love and share on social media just by clicking these buttons? It takes one second. Number two, if you’re not already on our monthly newsletter, sign up for our newsletter. We give away free all the upcoming oil and gas events, info on those events. And it’s the only place that I know that you can find everything in one place, so it’s very useful. And then, we also have a book coming out, how to sell to the oil and gas industry. Take a second, go sign up for the pre-release so you will at least be notified when the book comes out. Folks, I hope this helped, we will see you next time.  

Closing in this market is the payoff of everything that came before it — qualification, multi-threading, and timing against the capital cycle. If the close keeps slipping, the fix usually lives upstream; walk the whole sequence in the full oil & gas sales playbook.