{"id":14136,"date":"2026-04-13T13:08:41","date_gmt":"2026-04-13T18:08:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/?p=14136"},"modified":"2026-04-13T13:08:41","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T18:08:41","slug":"rule-31-close-the-sale-or-close-the-file","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/rule-31-close-the-sale-or-close-the-file\/","title":{"rendered":"Rule #31 &#8211; Close the Sale, or Close the File"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Despite the best use of the many techniques we&#8217;ve discussed, failed sales will still be common reality in the life of any salesman, it&#8217;s why we talked about buoyancy so much. However, it&#8217;s still best to minimize wasted effort and time &#8211; time is money after all. This is where Sandler Rule #31 comes in, &#8220;Close the Sale, or Close the File.&#8221; All too often, salespeople allow themselves to be continually strung out with put offs and maybes. This is a critical pitfall that you have to avoid.<\/p>\n<p>As a salesperson, you should always be pursuing these three questions:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"2\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Is this a good fit for both of us?<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"2\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Is this person willing to work with me?<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"2\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Could my efforts be more productive somewhere else?<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>First of all, you want to ensure that the sale is a reasonable action for both parties, don&#8217;t try and sell something unneeded to the prospect, it can reflect badly on you and come back to bite you later. Don&#8217;t try and force a square peg into a round hole.<\/p>\n<p>Second, you should do business with people that are willing to work well with you. A sales relationship isn&#8217;t a one time thing, it&#8217;s a long term relationship of respect between two parties &#8211; trying to force a sale to someone who doesn&#8217;t like you will inevitably make the process more difficult.<\/p>\n<p>Third, always be careful of how much effort you are putting into a difficult prospect. If you spend tons of time on effort on a prospect who&#8217;s waffling, stalling, or clearly just doesn&#8217;t want to say &#8220;no&#8221;, but can&#8217;t say yes, you waste significant resources for no return. One way to help prevent this situation is to push for &#8220;No.&#8221; Instead of allowing a client to give uncertain answers, ask them if it&#8217;s time to end the relationship, give them a light push to say if they aren&#8217;t interested anymore. While this may seem counterintuitive, it often results in prospects swinging themselves back to yes, once they realize how close to the end of the relationship they were.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Despite the best use of the many techniques we&#8217;ve discussed, failed sales will still be common reality in the life of any salesman, it&#8217;s why we talked about buoyancy so much. However, it&#8217;s still best to minimize wasted effort and time &#8211; time is money after all. This is where Sandler Rule #31 comes in, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3241,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3241"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14136"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14138,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14136\/revisions\/14138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}