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Yesterday, 50 salespeople gave me their biggest closing obstacles – about 25 – when we combined them all. I showed them the four bases in Baseline Selling and defined what must happen for the salesperson to reach each base. Then I asked them to identify the specific base paths where the closing obstacles should have been dealt with. Closing takes place at home plate and sure enough, all 25 of those closing obstacles actually should have been dealt with either between 1st and 2nd base or between 2nd and 3rd base. The moral of the story is your salespeople haven’t even earned the right to close until there are not issues that would prevent them from getting the business.

When some of your salespeople aren’t closing sales of certain products or services what does it mean? First it helps to identify the possible causes:

The interesting thing about this list is that most of the topics have little, if anything to do with closing. As a matter of fact, if a salesperson is effectively executing the process of selling, all of these topics are dealt with long before a salesperson determines that an opportunity is even closeable.