Sales aren’t closed because you didn’t ask the right question. Every answer you need to get in order to meet someone, qualify them as to their needs, get permission to give a presentation or close a sale will come to you only if you ask the right questions.

Keep in mind it’s not just the question that matters, but how it’s presented. You may have to set the stage or tell a story leading up to the question that helps the client rationalize the buying decision. No matter how good your lead in or story is, however, you won’t get the sale if you don’t ask for it.

Here are a few closes that have proven successful. Don’t be concerned if they seem a bit wordy–you’re painting pictures and involving the emotions of your potential clients. Say the words with warmth and sincerity, and they’ll work for you.

When your clients hesitate because they aren’t sure it’s the right decision, try what we call “The Best Things in Life Close.” This is a great close to use with a personal sale, especially when you’re trying to sell something to a husband and wife. Compare the decision they’re considering right now to other decisions they’ve made and have been happy with. It’s especially helpful when they’ve admitted they want the product but are just struggling with saying yes. It goes like this:

“Isn’t it true, John and Mary, that the only time you’ve ever really benefited from anything in your life has been when you said yes instead of no? You said yes to your marriage. . .” [And this next part's optional: ". . .and I can see how happy you are." But don't add this phrase unless you've seen signs that they truly are a happy couple!] “You said yes to your job, your home, your car–all the things I’m sure you truly enjoy.

“You see, when you say yes to me, it’s not really me you are saying yes to but all the benefits this product offers… [and then list a few of the benefits they were most excited about.] Those are the things you really want for your family, aren’t they?”

With these words, you’re helping them focus on the benefits they want from the product rather than their hesitation to make the investment to own it. The little agreements you ask for during the close get the “yes” momentum started. If they do truly believe your product is good for them, these words will help them get over their hesitation to give you the final yes and close the sale.

Another situation might be during a business sale where the decision-maker uses “the budget” as a reason not to go ahead. This purchase might not have been in their plans, so the money isn’t in the budget. If you truly believe your product would provide excellent benefits to their company, your goal in this situation is to get them to admit and agree to that point.

Ask this: “John, if the money for this investment was in your budget, would you proceed?” If he says yes, agree with him by saying “That’s wonderful, John. I’m glad you see the benefits our XYZ product can bring to your business.”

At this point, you can either move on to a discussion of their return on investment or try these words:

“I can understand your concern with your budget, John. That’s why I contacted you in the first place. I’m fully aware of the fact that every well-managed business controls the flow of its money with a carefully planned budget. The budget is a necessary tool for every company to give direction to its goals. However, the tool itself doesn’t dictate how the company is run, does it?

“It must be flexible to allow the company to manage crises or take advantage of unplanned opportunities. As the controller of that budget, you retain for yourself the right to flex it in the best interest of the company’s financial present and competitive future, don’t you?

“What we’ve been examining here today is a system which will allow your company an immediate and continuing competitive edge. Tell me, under these conditions, will your budget flex or will it dictate your actions?”

Hopefully, you see the difference between just asking for the sale and helping people make decisions that are good for them. That’s the difference between an average salesperson and a great one!

The prices you charge for what you sell have an enormous ability to affect your company’s growth. They can lure some customers and drive others away, produce profits from declining products and turn cash cows into money-losing dogs.

These results can be produced by either lowering or raising prices. Results depend not on whether your prices increase or fall, but on your market, your product, your competition, your goals, and the precise mechanism you employ to adjust prices.

Prices fluctuate constantly for some things, such as food and gasoline, and remain about the same for others over years or even decades. Some products seem to have rapidly changing prices, but in reality the prices don’t change much it’s the products that change. For example, look at personal computers.

The price for a midrange personal computer has been about $2,000 for many years, despite the fact that the computer you paid $2,000 for last year can now be bought for less than half that.

Whether you are in an industry with rapidly changing prices or pricing that seems set in concrete, it’s a good idea to evaluate your pricing periodically to see if you could generate some growth by tinkering with it. There are several ways to decide what your prices should be. They include matching the competition, charging whatever the market will bear, and marking up from your own costs.

Competitive pricing seeks to match what others charge for the same product or service. All pricing has to take competitors into account. When you are a small company in a large market, you will almost be forced to follow others’ lead on pricing. That means pricing your product neither very far above or below what others charge.

As you grow larger, you will be able to exert more independence in pricing, especially if you can differentiate your offering as exceptionally high in value. You can take the lead in pricing, forcing others to match your low prices, when you gain enough experience and volume to truly become the low-cost producer.

Using the cost-based pricing technique, you calculate what it costs to produce your goods or services including such items as salaries and benefits, materials and supplies, and sales and overhead and then add whatever amount you think is appropriate for your gross profit margin.

Some businesses, such as those that perform repairs, have prices explicitly based on adding a preset profit margin to whatever it costs to do the job. However, customers are generally not concerned about what it costs you to provide a good or a service. So while cost have to be a consideration in your pricing, your costs are rarely justification for higher prices in the marketplace.

The main thing you should be concerned about with pricing is neither what others are charging nor what it costs you to compete. It is maintaining a proper balance of supply and demand. Simply put, if you have more business than you can handle, raise prices.

If you are sitting around with nothing to do, reduce prices. If competitors follow suit, you may have to discount again until you capture enough business to sustain your operation. If you can’t reduce prices enough to make money, you will have to cut costs somehow.

Various tactics can be used within these strategies. Skimming is the practice of charging high prices, usually for new products, to take advantage of the willingness of early adopters to pay more. Skimming can allow you to recoup development costs of new products and services.

Buying market share is what companies call it when they charge initially low prices with the intent of getting people to try their product and, hopefully, like it enough to pay more for it later on.

Managing the competing interests of supply, demand, cost and competition is a lot to ask. But pricing is up to the challenge. Finding the sweet spot between your cost and the highest price customers will tolerate, given existing competition, requires near-constant tinkering with prices, observation of the results, and frequent analysis of what you could do better.

You’re starting your own business. You know what to sell and who your customers are. But how will you decide what your marketing materials should look like or even what you’ll charge for your products or services?

You need to become an amateur sleuth and gather competitive intelligence to create an on-target marketing program and tailor your services or products to position against the competition.

It’s important to complete a competitive analysis during the start-up phase of your new business, about the time you’re putting together your marketing plan. In fact, if you get underway without performing a competitive analysis, you run the risk of creating marketing tools and product or service offerings that are way off the mark.

This can cost you valuable time and money during the critical early months. You should also plan to gather competitive intelligence as your business grows, in order to stay competitive.

Who’s Your Competition?

One of the biggest mistakes new entrepreneurs make is failing to recognize the range of competitors for their businesses. Your new company will have two types of competition-real and perceived. For example, imagine you’re a former college athlete who’s decided to start a personal fitness training business.

Your competitors will fall into two categories: other personal trainers, and gyms and health clubs that offer trainers or advisors on staff. Although you’d directly compete only with the other personal trainers, your prospects-people who want to shape up-would perceive the gyms that offer these services as a viable alternative to hiring you. So to complete your competitive analysis, you need to evaluate the marketing materials and services both types of competitors offer.

Get the Facts

The first step in your competitive analysis is to collect all the marketing materials used by your competitors-both perceived and real. Begin by clipping your competitors’ ads. Then request copies of their brochures and other marketing materials-not so you can copy their ideas, but so you can check out marketing strategies and formats, competitive pricing, special offers, the key benefits (or promises made), and clues to marketing niches that may be underserved.

If possible, you may even want to “mystery shop” your competitors-go out and actually buy their products or services so you can experience the purchasing process with their store personnel or salespeople. If your competitors are large enough, you can gather information about them on the Net.

Use major search engines to look for recent press releases and articles about them. There are even free sites on the Web that allow you to customize your own daily news page, such as NewsPage by NewsEdge Corp. (www.newspage.com).

And don’t forget to check out your competitors’ Web sites. How do your direct and perceived competitors use the Net to attract customers and sell products? This will give you important clues about information a Web site of your own should contain.
Put It All Together

Now you’re ready to draw some conclusions about the types of competitive offers and pricing your new business should use. Best of all, you’ll have clear guidelines for developing your marketing tools. Complete your analysis by answering these questions:

• What size are their materials? Do most of your competitors use standard mailing envelopes, or are they using large folders with inserts?
• Do your competitors use photography or illustrations in their materials?
• Do they have Web sites, and how deep are they? Do they sell products online or just offer information?
• How are your competitors’ products or services similar to yours? How are they different?
• What key benefits do their marketing materials communicate? Can you offer additional benefits that are valuable to prospects?
• What special product, service or pricing offers do your competitors use to stimulate responses to brochures and ads?

Once you discover the answers to these questions, create the marketing tools that will work harder than you do.

The ring of the cash register has long been the sound of music. But today the cash register of even the smallest business may be attached to a computer via “point-of-sale” (POS) systems. These systems have grown in popularity over conventional cash registers because they don’t just ring up sales. They amass vital, real-time information about your inventory and customers.

At the core of these systems are a standard-issue computers running specialized POS software, usually with a cash drawer and receipt printer, and often with a bar code scanner and credit card reader. Vendors often sell these systems pre-configured, or you can add these peripherals on as your requirements grow. The typical cost can be less than $1,500.

What do you get for your investment? Without a doubt, the biggest advantage is the ability to get an immediate, up-to-the-minute, accurate assessment of your inventory. Each time you check out a customer, the goods you ring up are immediately subtracted from your inventory list, which is maintained on the system’s hard drive.

That inventory may be surprisingly large. Many boutique clothing stores, for example, will stock SKUs numbering in the thousands, with actual counts exceeding 10,000 items. The same is true for shops selling everything from bicycles to cameras to cosmetics.

Keeping track of the thousands of items that make up a small business can be a real chore. However, consistently keeping hard-to-find items in stock can add up to a competitive advantage over much larger competitors. How to strike the balance?

A good POS system can help, allowing you to set an alert that lets you know when a given item is at the re-order point. When it’s time to re-order, some POS systems tell you both the most recent price you paid, as well as the average price you’ve paid in the past. Both can help you strike the best deal with your suppliers.

Off-hours, you can run a report that gives you inventory activity for the day, week or month. To get the big picture, some POS systems allow you to track your inventory year to year, allowing you to compare this year’s orders with those from last year. Doing so can help you anticipate where you want to head in the coming months.

Taking inventory is one of the most time-consuming and labor-intensive tasks every store owner faces. It is also one of the most crucial. Having too much stock, or too little, is costly. According to the National Retail Federation, U.S. retailers lose $224 billion due to excess inventory and $45 billion from not having inventory in stock.

While having a POS system track your inventory does not substitute for a physical inventory count, many shopkeepers find they can reduce the number of times each year they must conduct this time-consuming task. And when the time comes, the use of a wireless portable scanner in conjunction with a POS system can greatly reduce your footsteps, saving hours in the process.

In addition to tracking inventory, a good POS system will help you know who your best customers are and what they like. With the customer’s purchase history visible right at the cash register, a nursery owner might alert a tea rose lover to a new shipment of those flowers.

A camera store owner could tell a wildlife photographer about a new high-speed 35mm film ideal for capturing images of raptors in flight. Conversely, an auto parts store owner could query the POS system with a quick barcode scan to answer a customer’s inquiry about the availability of a spare part.

What it comes down to is this: In a well-run business, the point of sale is more than just the place where the money comes in. With the right equipment, it becomes your strategic service center, the place that will help you grow your business and keep your customers coming back.

And the ka-ching keeps on coming. According to Intuit market research, by using an affordable, integrated POS system, an independent retailer with revenue of $300,000 can cut costs by close to 10 percent, saving an average $30,000 a year. That’s a substantial return on a $1,500 investment. The question then becomes, How can you not afford a POS system?
Shopping for the Right POS System

In looking for a POS system, the choices are many, the price can range from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars, and the final decision can be difficult. Here are some guidelines to help.

• Three words of advice: inventory, inventory, inventory. All POS systems ring up sales and track inventory. But a good one will let you assess your inventory easily and thoroughly. You should be able to set alerts for items running low, readily add new items when they come in, account for back-orders, and even generate purchase orders to send to vendors.
• Weigh ease-of-use against functionality. Generally speaking, the more complex your orders are, the more features you’ll need. But consider as well the time needed to bring new employees up to speed and the time you’ll invest training them. The best systems offer a balance of both.
• Look for a system that can start small and grow with your needs. If you are on a tight budget, you can begin with a basic setup: POS software running on a PC with just a drawer and receipt printer.

  Later on, you can add on as your needs dictate, perhaps a bar code scanner and credit card reader to begin with, then add an inventory tag printer, pole display, or PIN debit pad. Also, you should pick a system, based on your needs, that doesn’t require having someone set it up for you.

How do you get paid? By accepting credit cards for payments. How do you do that? A good first place to start your search for merchant status is your own bank. Most issue credit cards, and if you have a long-term relationship, that’s a big plus. Your bank says no? Try a few other local banks–offering to move all your accounts–and you just may be rewarded with merchant status.

You may also try other companies that specialize in issuing accounts to online merchants, including:

• Cardservice International
• VeriSign
• Credit Card Processing Services
• The Processing Network
• 21st Century Resources

Or, log onto Google and search for credit card processing. You’ll find many dozens of outfits, large and small, that are on the prowl for startups seeking merchant accounts.

Credit cards aren’t processed cheaply, however, at least not for a startup. A typical fee schedule for a small-volume account (fewer than 1,000 transactions monthly) would include startup fees amounting to around $200 and monthly processing fees of around $20.

Making Customers Feel Secure

The one must-have for online credit card processing: secure, encrypted connections. You’ve seen this many times yourself. Go to virtually any major e-tailer, commence a purchase, and you are put into a “secure server” environment, where transaction data is scrambled to provide a measure of safety against hackers.

Truth is, these worries are generally unfounded–the odds of a hacker grabbing an unencrypted credit card number from a non-secure website are pretty slender–but buyers feel reassured when they see they’re entering a secure site, and that means you need to provide it.

Is this a technical hassle for you? It shouldn’t be. Whatever vendor sells you credit card processing should also, as part of the package, provide a secure transaction environment. If they don’t, look elsewhere.

Fraud Prevention Tools

Contrary to reports of rising fraud rates, credit card payments remain one of the safest payment methods available online. Sophisticated internet solutions, such as the LinkPoint Secure Payment Gateway, process credit card payments in real time using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology, which encrypts all confidential information during the transmission and authorization of transactions.

Other fraud-prevention tools, such as the Address Verification Service (AVS), make online credit card acceptance even safer. The service compares the numerical information in your customers’ addresses with records stored by card-issuing banks. It then returns codes that indicate whether the numbers match.

Although the information provided by the AVS does not affect the authorization of your transactions, it can help you make informed decisions about suspicious orders.

Besides the AVS, you can protect yourself by using the card validation code 2 (CVC2) and the card verification value (CVV2) verification systems of MasterCard and Visa, respectively. These verification services use the three-digit codes printed on all MasterCard and Visa cards to help you determine whether your customers possess legitimate cards.

Special Considerations

Be sure to ask prospective processors about the costs of storefront solutions that you must have to effectively operate your website, such as shopping carts, Web hosting, payment gateways, virtual terminals, virtual checks, databases for fulfilling orders, customer tracking, and a way to calculate tax and shipping charges.

Typical Fees

Shop around for a credit card processor that best suits your needs. Talk to several different processors and don’t be afraid to ask questions. Find out about:

• The discount rate: The percentage of each transaction paid to the merchant account provider. If your monthly charges are less than a certain volume, the processor may charge a higher percentage.
• Transaction fee: A flat rate charged for each transaction processed.
• Equipment: Some examples include point-of-sale terminals, printers and peripherals. Also find out about installation costs. (This may or may not apply to you as an e-business.)
• Monthly minimum fees: These are minimum fees that the merchant account provider collects each month from the merchant if the merchant’s discount rate and transaction fees don’t add up to the monthly minimum specified on the original merchant application. It is usually about $25 per month if the monthly minimum volume isn’t reached.
• Reserve fees: If your credit history is in question, or if you own a new or high-risk business, you may be required to set up a reserve account, which protects the processor from any future losses. The reserve account is calculated as a percentage of your sales.
• Chargeback fees: These are the costs charged by a processor to cover disputed charges.

Other Payment Options

• Money orders. For customers who don’t have credit cards, money orders are a great payment alternative, particularly if you sell your products in an online auction environment, such as eBay.
• Existing checking accounts. Services that transfer checking account funds electronically are another quick and easy option for customers without credit cards. Western Union’s MoneyZap service, for example, lets buyers pay merchants online from their existing checking accounts.
• Check cards. Offline debit cards–aka check cards–are typically issued by large credit card companies through their participating banks. U.S. consumers today make the majority of their offline debit purchases with the Visa Check Card or MasterCard’s MasterMoney card. These enhanced ATM cards carry the Visa and MasterCard logos, respectively, and may be used everywhere the credit cards are accepted, including over the internet.
• Electronic checks. These are another emerging e-payment option. Through a process called check conversion, brick-and-mortar merchants can transform their customers’ paper checks into electronic transactions that are processed through the automated clearing house (ACH) network.
• Internet checks. You can also accept checks over the internet using payment-processing software, such as LinkPoint International’s VirtualCheck. Customers who elect to make check purchases from a website are prompted to key their information into a browser-based form. Again, data is encrypted and captured by the transaction processor’s payment gateway.
• PayPal. Based in Mountain View, California, PayPal is the world’s largest online payment system. Recently acquired by eBay, PayPal lets consumers send money to anyone with an e-mail address through their credit card or checking account. Consumers sign up once for the free service-after that, they use their account number to buy products online securely, conveniently and cost-effectively.

Are You High Risk?

Just because some merchant account providers lump e-businesses in with other high-risk businesses, like telemarketers, merchants in the travel and cruise industries and internet auctions, it doesn’t have to mean you won’t be able to open a merchant account. It does mean, though, that it may be more challenging to set one up.

Merchant account providers–banks and independent sales organizations–will also consider how long you’ve been in business, your credit history and any previous merchant accounts you’ve held with other processors.

Your length of time in business matters because merchant account providers want an assurance that you understand the business environment in which you operate, can identify the potential risks you face, know how to prevent or reduce fraud, and understand how to manage credit card acceptance. Regardless of risk, this kind of knowledge comes only with first-hand business experience.

Your credit report will show how well you’ve repaid past loans, and if you’ve had any liens, judgments or bankruptcies filed against you. A favorable credit history will go a long way toward establishing your credibility as a prospective merchant.

And if you’ve had an earlier, well-maintained merchant account, it’s a positive indicator of how you’re going to deal with your new processor. Terminated merchant accounts will show up on the Member Alert to Control High-Risk Merchants file, also known as the Combined Terminated Merchant File.

If your previous processor terminated your merchant account because you defaulted on it, or if you incurred too many chargebacks, this may negatively impact opening a future account.

To increase your merchant account eligibility, follow these tips:

• Ensure a positive credit rating. Remove any past bankruptcies, late payments or liens from your credit report before you apply for a merchant account. To obtain your credit report, contact a credit reporting bureau such as TRW or a company that provides merged credit reports from major reporting agencies, such as Equifax, Experian or Trans Union.
• Be honest about previous merchant accounts, bankruptcies, liens or judgments. By acknowledging past financial challenges, you improve your credibility and may encounter one less barrier to opening a new merchant account. You cannot hide information that’s part of the public record.
• Be willing to pay higher fees or accommodate special account requirements. If you need to abide by special restrictions or pay slightly higher fees in order to open a merchant account, by all means do it! It’s worth it to provide your customers with as many noncash payment options as possible. It will help you generate revenues and stimulate impulse purchases.