Just Closing

One evening my young daughter dragged me out to "walk around" the Haifa Mall (today's Azrieli Mall). It was late (around 10 p.m., if I remember right), and the shops were starting to close one after another.

While she wandered from store to store, driving the salespeople crazy, I spotted my friend Arieh Moskovitz, who at the time owned a shop called 007, Gifts for Men.

Arieh had once been a student of mine in one of the MATI courses (MATI is Israel's network of small-business development centers). He's also a sailing enthusiast like me, so before I knew it I'd wandered into his shop and we were swapping stories.

The shop door was already shut, though not locked, and Arieh was cashing out the register while we chatted away.

Suddenly the door opened partway, and I saw a woman of about 30 with a little boy beside her. She poked her head in while the rest of her stayed outside. All she wanted was to find out how much the big picture in the window cost (roughly 1 by 0.5 meters), the one of Kramer from Seinfeld, with the pipe.

Arieh, busy closing up the shop, hesitated for a moment, and I couldn't help myself. I jumped in and asked her, "Did you come by car?" and she said, "Yes." So I turned to my friend Arieh and told him, "Then wrap it up for her with a handle so she can carry it to the car!"

"Do what?" Arieh asked.

"Tie the string so it makes a handle, so she can carry it to the car, Arieh!" I said.

"Wrap it?" asked Arieh, stunned. "Yes, wrap it!" I said firmly, and watched Arieh drag his feet toward the stockroom to wrap it.

By the time he came back from the stockroom with the picture wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, a carrying handle and all, the woman was already inside the shop. She heard the price from him, paid, and walked out with the picture.

Arieh, completely floored, turned to me and asked, "What just happened? She had no real intention of buying. She was only asking. What did you do?"

"Just closing," I told him. "Just closing, Arieh!"

The moral:

The Achilles' heel of many salespeople is a reluctance to close. Many of them depend on the customer being willing to take that step, and they lose a lot of opportunities. A substantial and very important part of every sales workshop is about strengthening the instinct to initiate a close, when one is possible, of course.

I won't go into why this is so common (there are four explanations for it), and I won't try to claim that a move like the one above has a high chance of success.

The main message here is: you have to try!