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•46 The 100 Greatest Business Ideas of All Time

by a letter, a meeting, a telephone call or a presentation, without first of all thinking
what they want to get agreement to, i.e. what their objective is in communicating.

Such managers should learn from salespeople, who use closing techniques
throughout a sales campaign to make sure that they are on course to their final
objective of a sale. It is hard to find the source of the greatest closing techniques as
they have been around for ever, or at least since people tried to persuade others to
follow their line of thought or action.

We’ll start with the one that even the most seasoned salespeople sometimes get
wrong. It happens when, in a competitive situation, the prospective customer tells
the salesperson that they have a problem with price.

Idea 29 – Trial closing a price objection

A group of professionals in a chartered surveyors firm were discussing what they
should say to clients who tell them that they have other quotations which are cheaper
than their’s. Here is a selection of their replies.

• ‘If you pay peanuts you get monkeys.’
• ‘But the other firms do not have the experience that we have in this area.’
• ‘We’ll match their price’ (i.e. give away most of the profit).
• ‘We have been established for over a hundred years.’
• ‘We are the Rolls Royce of the chartered surveying business.’

It is obvious what they were getting at, but none of these responses would be in the
objection handling bag of a professional salesperson. Indeed some professional
salespeople might describe the professional chartered surveyors’ remarks as bullshit.

The worst response of those above is probably the offer to match the competi-
tor’s price. Salespeople feel that, say, 10% off the price is not a big deal, because