Do not forget when closing to add force to your words by tones and gestures that emphasize ideas of the contrast in weights between the two sides of the scale.  By your light tone you can indicate the triviality of objections to your proposition.  With the heavier tone of power you can suggest the great weight of the favorable ideas.  If you use broad gestures of your whole hand and full arm, you can seem to pile a large heap of points on your side of the scale.  Conversely you can indicate the smallness of objections by moving your fingers only, as if you were picking up a tiny object.  Demolish unfavorable points with a strong gesture of negation, as by sweeping your arm horizontally.  Give life to the ideas on the favorable side of the scale by accompanying your words with up and down gestures that signify vitality.

[Sidenote:  Do Not Show That Closing Is Hard Work]

Your physical condition or outward appearance will help or harm your chances for success at the closing stage.  You should not manifest the least indication that you are under a strain of anxiety as to the outcome, or that you lack the strength to control the completion of the selling process.  Why should you not have a feeling of ease when you reach the close? If your bearing suggests your self-confidence, it will give the other man confidence in your capabilities. When a salesman has to “sweat blood” to finish a sale, he indicates that it is usually mighty hard work for him to get what he wants.  This impression suggests to the other man that there must be something wrong with the proposition or it wouldn’t take so much effort of the salesman to put it across. Any element of doubt at the final stage will almost surely delay or kill the salesman’s chances to close successfully.

[Sidenote:  Make Sure of A Good Batting Average]

Recall once more that the measure of success in selling is not 100% of closed sales; every possible order secured and none lost. Success is made certain when failures are reduced to the minimum and successes are increased to the maximum of practicability. There can be no question that if you use the right processes in closing, your chances for success will be so greatly increased that your batting average of actual sales should take you far above the failure line.  Your career as a salesman involves continual selling.  You must make sale after sale.  However skillfully you employ the right process at the closing stage, you may not accomplish your purpose the first time you try. But if you keep on selling your services in the right way, you will be as absolutely certain to succeed as the master salesman of “goods” is sure of closing his quota every year he works.

CHAPTER XII

The Celebration Stage

[Sidenote:  What Are You Going to Do With Success?]