You will be able to use trial close questions to test readiness without asking for the final decision.
You reach the end of your presentation. You have covered the problems, the options, the price. You take a breath and ask, "So, would you like to go ahead?" The buyer hesitates, then says they have a couple of concerns. Concerns you had no idea about, because for forty minutes you never asked how anything was landing.
Most sellers treat the decision as a single question at the end. A better way is to check where the buyer stands all the way through, so that by the time you ask for the decision, you already have a fair idea of the answer. The questions that do that are called trial closes.
A trial close is a question that asks the buyer for their opinion on part of what you have shown, without asking them to commit to anything. You are testing how ready they are, and the decision itself can wait.
Compare two questions. "Shall we go ahead?" asks for a commitment. "How does that compare with what you expected?" asks for an opinion. The first can only be answered yes, no or not yet, and most buyers will not commit to yes until they are sure. The second is easy to answer honestly, because nothing is at stake.
Good trial closes are open, short, and about the buyer's view. A few that work in most situations:
"How does that compare with what you do today?"
"Is that the kind of thing you had in mind?"
"How would that work for your team?"
"If we went with this, what would worry you most?"
"Which of the two options feels closer to what you need?"
You already met a version of this in lesson 1.3, Run a demo around the buyer's working day. When Hafiz paused after each scene to ask Rachel how it compared with her month-end, he was using trial closes before he had a name for them.
Trial closes fit naturally at two points.
The first is after each part of the presentation. After the situation playback, after each problem and its solution, after the options, after the price. Each one gives you a reading at the moment the buyer has just heard something.
The second is after you have answered an objection. This is close to the confirm step from lesson 4.2, Listen, clarify, respond, confirm, but goes one step further. The confirm step checks whether your answer worked. A trial close checks where that leaves the buyer on the decision as a whole. "Does that answer it?" is the confirm. "With that sorted, how are you feeling about option two?" is the trial close.
Priya uses both in her proposal walkthrough with Joel and Lin. After the weekly till report, she asks Lin, "Is that the kind of view of the numbers you'd want?" After answering Lin's question about control, she asks, "With the Monday report in place, how are you both feeling about handing over the books?"
Trial closes are only useful if you act on what you hear. The answers fall broadly into two kinds.
Positive answers tell you to keep moving toward the decision. "That's exactly what we need." "That would save us a lot of time." "Option two looks right." When you hear several of these in a row, the buyer is getting ready, and lesson 6.2, Ask for the decision directly, covers what to do next.
Hesitant answers tell you to slow down and dig. "I suppose so." "Maybe." "It looks good, but..." A pause before answering. A change of subject. Any of these means something is unresolved. Do not push past it. Ask about it, gently: "You paused there. What's on your mind?"
When Priya asks Lin about the Monday report, Lin says, "It looks fine. I just worry about the cash float at the second outlet." Priya asks what she means. The second cafe keeps a cash float for small purchases, and Lin tops it up by hand, so it never appears in the till figures. Nobody mentioned it in discovery, and Priya would not have found it without asking.
It is tempting to see a hesitant answer as a setback. The buyer was going along nicely, you asked a question, and now there is a problem.
The problem was always there. The trial close did not create it. It brought it into the open while you are in the room and can deal with it. The alternative is that the concern stays hidden, the buyer says they need to think about it, and you never learn what went wrong.
So treat every concern a trial close reveals as a small win. Thank the buyer for raising it, then handle it with listen, clarify, respond, confirm. Once it is dealt with, ask another trial close to see where things stand now.
Priya explains that the float can be counted and logged in the same weekly check, and asks whether that would cover it. Lin says it would. Without the trial close, the float would have surfaced after the meeting, in a conversation between Joel and Lin, as a reason to wait.
Before the activity below, look at your presentation outline and mark the four or five points where you would want to know what the buyer is thinking.
Write five trial close questions you can use at different points in your presentation.
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