Mastering the Best Soft Close Techniques with Billion-Dollar Sales Coach Ryan Dohrn

Live from the BrainSwell Media Studios, this is the Ryan Dohrn Business Show. Hey, what is going on, friends and fans? Billion-dollar sales coach Ryan Dohrn here. And on this month's episode, we're gonna be focusing in on 2 or 3 different soft closes that I use on a very regular basis that tend to get me to a better point of decision. So, love to share those with you. And then also like to get into our listener questions. We've got a listener question coming in from Mark in Nebraska. And it's all about AI being wrong, meaning like it's giving him errors. What can we maybe do about that? Got some thoughts for you, Mark from Nebraska. And then let's see, we've got Wanda in Boston and she's coming up with all kinds of objections or her clients are giving her objections as it relates to the current state of the economy. So stick around, stay close. We've got that information, those listener questions all answered coming up here on this month's show. We'll be right back. Hey, what is going on, friends and fans? Ryan Dohrn here, Billion Dollar Sales Coach. Thanks for your listener questions sent into ryan@ryandohrn.com. And then also thanks for sending me emails because it gives me all kinds of really great ideas about what we should be covering here on the podcast and the video broadcast and YouTube and all those different kinds of things. Hey, if you like what you're seeing, if you like what you're hearing, give us a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel, and let everybody at the powers that be know that we're doing good things for all of you. out there in sales land. All right, in the introduction, I promised to talk about soft closes and how important these soft closes are to your total sales call, as well as if you want to increase your call-to-close ratios, your sales close ratios, here's some things that you might want to consider. All right, a soft close is just your ability as a salesperson to really just test the waters, to kind of figure out, hey, where is this customer at? In our total journey towards buying. Now, of course, on every sales call, no sales call is complete until a next meeting is set up. We never want to forget that. And then no sales call is complete without a soft close for us to test the waters. Let me run this scenario by you because I hear this on a regular— really on a regular basis. Ryan, I had a great meeting with my customer. I mean, it was great. Like Tony the Tiger. It was great. You don't know who Tony the Tiger is? Ooh, better Google that. It was great. And then nothing happened. They ghosted me. Well, it's at those moments that I think all of us need to do a little introspective kind of looking or thinking or kind of looking in the mirror ourselves. The call wasn't great because if the call was great, then you would have gotten a signed deal, right? Or did the call just go okay? You think it went great because you messed up and now you've got to backtrack and figure out what to do now. I would actually suggest to you that perhaps you could reduce your ghosting by as much as 50% if you had a great soft close. So there's 2 soft closes to test the water that I love. Let me share both of them with you. Okay, the first soft close, I call it the 1 to 10 close. So let's just say that my prospect is Bonnie. Bonnie, with all that being said, meaning that you've gone through the whole sales call, you're to the point where you're going to test the water, do your soft close. Bonnie, with all that being said, you know, kind of on a scale of say 1 to 10, 1, you know, you're okay, but 10, like you're really, really interested, like you absolutely love this idea. Where are you at on a scale of 1 to 10? Now, if they said to you, eh, eh, I don't know, I don't know where I'm at, okay, then that, you need to guide them through what you need from them. So you would say, well, on a scale of 1 to 10, a 5 would mean you're kind of on the fence. You don't hate the idea, you don't love the idea, But, you know, you're kind of on the fence, and I would love to get you from a 5 to a 6 or a 7. Now, if you happen to be a 3, a 3 would mean you're really not that interested, so let's not go any further. An 8 would be you're pretty darn interested, but you just need to get sign-off by somebody else, or you need to sleep on it, or pray on it, or whatever the circumstance is. So now, with that being said, on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 you're like, eh, whatever, and 10 you love it, where are you at? An 8. And hopefully you can get them to a 5, 6, 7, something along those lines. See, friends, if you don't do a soft close, you may leave the meeting thinking the meeting went great, and then they ghost you because they don't want to say no to a really nice person. Are you a nice person? I assume that you are. That's what happens a lot. So that's the 1 to 10 close. Now, another closing technique that I like, and I don't know where I learned this, if I, if I don't give you credit, be sure to pop up in the comments like you might do. And I say, hey, you got that idea from me. I just don't remember, to be honest. It's called if-then. So let's just say that the client has said one of the problems they need fixed is they need more sales leads. I say, how many sales leads do you need? They say, I need 10 a month. If— so here's if-then— if I can get you 10 sales leads a month, then would a good next step together be signing a contract? Okay, so let's just say one of their pain points that they expressed was they need their server to go online in the next 24 hours. If-then. If we could get that server online in the next 24 hours, then would a next step be that we can move forward together? So if-then can work. What you would be doing is taking a lot of really good notes on the conversation. Now, what you might consider doing is going online and Googling for soft closes in the sales business, but I think what you're going to find is a lot of them Are not written for 2025, even 2024, 2026. They're from the late '90s, early 2000s. See, some of the soft closes you'll hear are things like, you know what you're thinking about today, somebody else thought about yesterday. Okay, that's like a Glengarry Glen Ross type of sales technique or a Wolf of Wall Street kind of sales technique. And no offense to Jordan, he's awesome. Just be thinking about this, friends. Are you really going to get a long ways with the aggressive nature of that type of soft close? That's not what I'm looking for. What I'm looking for, and what I hope you're looking for, is to gauge the person that you're meeting with. Find out really where they're at so you don't leave the meeting thinking they're great and they're really a 2 on a scale of 1 to 10. Would you be surprised to know that greater than 75% of the sales meetings that I listen to, the sales calls rather, that I listen to, number one, people don't ask for the order, and number two, sales reps don't do a soft close. They don't gauge the water. Once I started doing that, I reduced ghosting. Because I determined that about 10% of the time, the person that, you know, felt like the meeting was great, quite honestly, what happened is they just actually weren't getting anywhere, and the person didn't want to tell them no because they were nice. So then ghosting was the only natural next step. So don't forget, friends, be great at your soft closes, be great at making sure it's a part of your total sales process, and then you need to practice it. Remember, amateurs wing it and professionals practice. So get great at your soft closes. All right, friends, we're going to come right back here in just a couple of seconds after we pay a few bills. We're going to answer some listener questions. The first one comes from Mark in Nebraska asking about why is AI wrong sometimes and how's that apply to sales. We'll talk about it. And then we also have a question here from Wanda, and Wanda's up in New England in Boston, and she wants to know what should I do about the economy and the objections related That, friends, is all coming up next. All right, friends and fans, welcome back to the show. Whether you are listening to the audio version over on SoundCloud, Spotify, Apple iTunes, whatever, wherever you're listening to it, we appreciate you. Be sure to give us a like, a thumbs up. We appreciate that. If you're watching the show on YouTube, hey, do me a big favor, subscribe to the channel. Greater than 80% of the people that watch these videos are not subscribers. So do me a favor and subscribe to the channel. I promise we won't spam you. And if you like the content, give us a thumbs up. Lets YouTube know that we're doing things right for all of you. All right, next question, or the first question, listener question comes from Mark in Nebraska. Hey Ryan, you talk about AI all the time as if it is going to be the thing that saves the sales business. Okay, so Mark, I don't really necessarily know that that's the case. All right. AI is wrong a lot. I've been asking it a lot of questions. I'm getting a lot of bad information and wrong answers. Is this really applicable to the sales business? And so, Mark from Nebraska, I say it is absolutely applicable to the sales business, but AI can give you bad results, especially if it's pulling from some outdated information. So if you notice that you're getting a bad result while using ChatGPT or Perplexity or Gronk or whatever, make sure you give it a URL where it can actually find the right information. Sometimes it's just not sourced accurately and correctly. Now, keep in mind, even the OpenAI project, all these large language models will tell you that sometimes AI does get it wrong. It's just a matter of you as a human not relying on it so much that you don't know whether the facts are correct. So you do need to kind of check your work, you know, in most circumstances. Now, Mark, where you're not going to find errors is with grammar, spelling, punctuation. But if you ask it for a legal opinion, you got to be pretty careful because a legal opinion is an opinion. Right? So if you ask it for an opinion and not for a fact, you've got to be careful what it is that you get back from the total process. Now, one of the things— so let's talk then, Mark, about what AI can really do for us in the sales process. There's 3 main prompts in AI that I absolutely love. Okay? One is strategize this. So strategize this colon, and then I type in what do I want to strategize about? So, for example, strategize this: what's the best day to host sales meetings with customers? What's the best time of day to email customers? Strategize that with me. Enter or go, and then it'll strategize with you. I absolutely love that. The second thing is I like to put inside of ChatGPT some emails that I've written, prospecting emails specifically, and say, read these emails and give me some alternatives. All the time sales reps say to me, I don't know what to say in an email when I'm prospecting. I don't know what to do or say or whatever. And so a lot of times I'll say, hey, look at what I've sent before, follow that format and give me some other suggestions. Now you can also say, go out and find new products for a particular company and then insert those products into the templates that you just provided me. And it will actually go and do that for you as well. Okay, one of them. So let's strategize, really strategize this. The second one is too long didn't read, TLDR. Okay, TLDR is the prompt, too long didn't read. And then I can put in a URL of something that I want to have summarized. So if there's a really nice blog post that I want to read, sometimes I'll put in TLDR colon. That means, hey, it's too long, I didn't read it, summarize this for me. Or you can just say summarize this for me. Put in the URL and it'll bring you back a nice little summary of a blog or an article or something like that. The last prompt that I use regularly is build prospect list. Build prospect list. And then what I'll do is I'll give it directions. I'll say, I'm looking for the top 25 medical device companies in the country with revenues under $20 million, whatever. I'd like a list of names of the CEO, CFO, CIO, and the marketing director or CMO. Please put it in a listing format and make it ready to export into Excel, something like that. So prospecting, sales prospecting, it knows how to do those types of things very well. Now, Mark, where you may be finding erroneous information is in the names of people, their email addresses, phone numbers, and things like that. I would say that the vast majority of the time, the information I get back is correct. I mean, the vast majority of time, not all the time, but The vast majority of the time what I'm getting back is actually accurate. And so that's something that you may also want to consider as well. So Mark, I don't think AI is always wrong. I think it's a great sales tool. Just pay attention just in case it's giving you back some information that might be inaccurate, and then try some of those prompts that I just suggested as well. All right. All right, next question comes from Wanda down in Boston. Or up in Boston from here where I live in Augusta, Georgia. All right, Wanda's question is, Ryan, I'm getting a lot of objections about the economy. I think people are economically uncertain and are not looking to buy much of anything right now. What should I do? So, Wanda, great question. I'm hearing it from a lot of my coaching clients. As a lot of you know, I coach anywhere from 80 to 90 salespeople a month. If you're interested in that, please reach out to me. This is becoming very common. All right, so Wanda and everybody else, there is this thing, thing called the survey of one. The survey of one is when people make big decisions or make decisions in general based on themselves, their own habits, their own intuitions, their own desires, and they make decisions based upon the survey of one person, and that's themselves. Let me give you a pretty easy example. A friend of mine owns a used luxury car dealership, and he advertises on the country western station in our town, KIX 99. Now, it's a great station, don't get me wrong, but you're selling used luxury cars and you're advertising no trucks or anything on the country station. Everybody see where I'm going with this? It's called the survey of one. So you want to make sure you're buying marketing solutions where your audience actually listens Not where you listen. Does that make sense? Okay, let me give you another example of the survey of one. Everybody's on Facebook. Everybody loves Facebook. Yeah, that is said by somebody that loves Facebook and is always on Facebook, because I certainly don't love Facebook. Does that make sense? That's the survey of one. Okay, so what does this have to do with your objection about the economy? Typically, if someone feels, if somebody believes, a business owner or whatever, If they believe the sky is falling, then they assume that everyone else agrees, that everyone thinks the sky is falling. Now, this is not a political conversation. If you want to have that, call me. All right, we'll talk about that in a different circumstance. But the survey of one is extremely real. So, if you're getting objections about the economy, it's not that things are not all over the place. I get it. But as at the time of this recording, we've been dealing with this for months and months. This is not— something that's brand new. We've been dealing with economic uncertainty since COVID right? So, and I'm not— that's not a jab at the White House or anything like that. It just is what it is. So, what I like to do is get people out of the survey of one mindset by saying things like, oh, interesting. I'm actually— though I'm not hearing that from other folks, tell me more. It makes somebody— gives reason— puts reasonable doubt in somebody's mind. It makes somebody go, well, you know what? If the glove doesn't fit, we must acquit, right? That's what reasonable doubt is all about, right? Forgive me for that kind of bad example, but you know what I'm saying. Reasonable doubt is what it is. So, you want to be always putting the little pieces of doubt in somebody's mind. Now, what a lot of you do is you find a data point to bounce back on that person. If someone says, well, you know, the economy, it's all over the place. Well, actually, you know, we're seeing a decrease in the interest rates, we're seeing the GDP grow. That's not the kind of thing that most people respond well to because they feel like you're arguing with them. Okay? So, one of the fastest things that I like to do is I like to use the good old-fashioned feel, felt, found strategy of sales. I don't know if that was— I don't think it was Gitomer. I don't know who— I don't know if it was Brian Tracy or somebody, probably Dale Carnegie back in the day. Feel, felt, found, or Zig Ziglar or somebody like that. Here I'm spending the whole show trying to give credit to other people. I should just roll on, right? Feel, felt, found. I understand how you feel. Company ABC, whatever it is, felt the exact same way. Here's what they found out after working with us for a few months. Feel, felt, found is old school as ever, but friends, I like the OG side of the business because there's some things that we really can use to our advantage. Feel, felt, found maximizes or accentuates success stories, and when you utilize success stories to answer objections, You're going to be heard and received so much better, Wanda, and everybody else, than when you try to fight somebody with facts. I say all the time, fighting with facts, okay, is futile. Fighting with facts is futile. It doesn't really get anywhere, even if the facts you're sharing are correct. I mean, friends, think about it. How many times have you been talking politics with a family member over dinner or something? You're giving them great facts that you know are facts, like 2 and 2 is 4. And your family member looks back at you and is like, yeah, but is it? I don't know. Okay, you're not going— fighting with facts is futile. Fighting with success stories or answering objections using feel, felt, found, now that is not futile. It's something that will help you, Wanda, in that particular circumstance. And then fingers are crossed that we're going to get back to some level of business being something back to normal here at some point in the very near future. Hey, I love these listener questions. Keep them coming. ryan@ryandohrn.com. If we don't answer your question here on the podcast or on YouTube or on Spotify or whatever, or if I don't reply back to you, I didn't receive it. I answer every email that comes in. Right now we've got 340 sitting here in my inbox, friends. I have no— I love your listener questions. Keep them coming to ryan@ryandohrn.com. All right, friends, that is the show for this month. We sure appreciate you so much. Subscribe to the YouTube channel. Listen to us over on Spotify or iTunes, wherever you're at. I'm speaking a lot these days, coming on in and motivating your sales team to great success. So appreciate all of you for having me come on location. Reach out to me over at ryandohrn.com. D-O-H-R-N, ryandohrn.com. And never forget, friends, if sales was easy, everybody'd be doing it, and they're not. You're not crazy, friends. This is a great career. It'll feed your families. For a lifetime. All right, we'll see you out down the road. Get out there and sell something and make us all proud, would you? See you next time.