By now, someone has already told you that sales is about building relationships. If you’ve ever been lured into the trap of trying to be your prospect’s best friend only to find out they weren’t interested, you’re not alone. As you’ll hear in this episode, JC Pollard isn’t afraid to ask tough questions, and that’s how he became a top seller at Gong, hitting 190% of his quota in his first year. Listen in as he and Donald Kelly discuss “soft closing” to get the facts about where your deals are at. Setting Expectations and Being Proactive As a rep, you are (or should be) experienced with your sales process. Take a leadership role in outlining the next steps in the process for your buyer. Give the buyer options so they know you can either close the deal quickly or take more time to evaluate, depending on what they want. Position the outcomes on every call and keep inviting your buyer to tell YOU where they stand. Soft Closing Many reps don’t know how certain their deals are. Instead of keeping yourself in the dark, set your buyers up with an opportunity to close at every step of the process.  If they say yes, this saves you a lot of time and effort. But if they say no, you have an opportunity to do discovery. Wrapping Deals Before the Trial Ends Never launch a trial or pilot without knowing what your customer’s success criteria are.  If you believe your product has checked all the boxes before the pilot is done, check in with them and see if they’re ready to buy yet. If they say no, don’t be afraid to ask, “Why not?” “The best salespeople are ones that are friendly, liked, create rapport, and can really drop the hammer when they need to... That’s what I try to be. I get close with my prospects. I truly care about making friends with them – I keep in touch with people I sold Gong to a year ago. But when they say something throughout the cycle where I’m like, ‘You’re not thinking about that the right way,’ I’m not afraid to also call that out and be like, ‘Hey, can I challenge you on that?’ If you can marry the two, I think that’s where you start to see some success.” – JC Pollard Resources Gong website Reach out to JC Pollard on LinkedIn JC’s post calling out Donald Kelly on LinkedIn! Sponsorship Offers 1. This episode is brought to you in part by TSE Sales Foundation. I think we can all agree that sales should be fun. However, many times, we find ourselves in a quagmire where we’re not progressing and deals are not going the way that they should. This is why we created TSE Sales Foundation. It’s a program designed to help sales professionals just like you master the fundamentals of sales so they can radically improve their sales pipeline and close more deals. To find out more about TSE Sales Foundation and our next start date, simply go to thesalesevangelist.com/foundation. Credits As one of our podcast listeners, we value your opinion and always want to improve the quality of our show. Complete our two-minute survey here: thesalesevangelist.com/survey. We’d love for you to join us for our next episodes by tuning in on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, or Spotify. Audio provided by Free SFX, Soundstripe, and Bensound. Other songs used in the episodes are as follows: The Organ Grinder written by Bradley Jay Hill, performed by Bright Seed, and Produced by Brightseed and Hill.