Recommend solutions. Here's where to show how the prospect's concerns and problems can be resolved using your strategies, products and services. Stress benefits and service, and get your prospects to agree to the direction in which they should be going.

Try this! Bring your prospect into the process. Presentations should be discussions, not monologues.

• Go through your proposal page-by-page, showing how the solutions meet your prospect's specific needs and wants and objectives.
• Ask confirming questions, such as "Have I made myself clear?" "Do you see how that works?" "Does that make sense?" and "Do you have any questions about that?"
• Look for buying signals and close on them. For example, if the prospect asks: "How much is that going to cost?" or "When can we start?" Don't trudge through the rest of the presentation — CLOSE!

Other buying signals to watch for include when your prospect...

• Leans forward to examine the proposal more closely;


• Nods, indicating agreement with a point you're making;


• Asks you to go back over something covered earlier; or


• Takes out a pen.

Answer comments, questions and objections. Remember, if your prospect agrees to the need or want and has made a "financial commitment" to solve it, all you should have to do is make sure the solution fits. And, with a laptop computer, it's easy to modify proposals or present alternative solutions at the point-of-sale, if necessary.

Try this! By staying calm, listening carefully, and treating comments, questions, and objections as real issues, you can actually use them to close sales. A process to use in answering the most common types of objections appears later. As with the other field-tested, suggested "words-to-say" here, you can use them as is, adapt them to your selling style, or come up with new ones!

If your prospect is asking a question you can't answer, don't fake it. You could get caught between a hard question and a vague answer. Just say that you'll get the information to your prospect as soon as you can.

Get a "Solution Commitment" and close the sale. Even if a prospect is convinced the plan will meet a need or want, you must still encourage them to act. However, you've built a consensus with the prospect at each step of the sales cycle so that, in effect, you've been closing all along. Unless you have to modify the proposal, or something has happened since your last visit, closing the sale really should be the next logical step. What's more, everyone knows why you're there, so don't hesitate to ask for your prospect's business.