The time pressures today on salespeople and their prospects are out of control. Sellers react in two ways that undermine their effectiveness: First, in a misguided effort to save the prospects’ time, they take on more of the work and shoulder more of the burden themselves. And second, they turn proposals around with lightning speed, delivering the complete package, ready-for-a-signature, on the second call. That’s what I call handoff selling—where the salesperson does all of her work first, hands off the proposal to the buyer as if it were a baton in a relay race, and then the buyer begins his work, the detailed consideration of this and other proposals.

The seller believes in her heart that she’s doing the right thing, responding to urgency—hers or her prospect’s—and the time poverty we all suffer from these days, by delivering the proposal lickety-split. Little does she know: She’s her own worst enemy, every time she does that.

In that scenario, the seller stays on the selling track, the buyer stays on the buying track, and they rarely intersect. Yes, these are their respective job descriptions, but it’s time to update those job descriptions, as I make clear in my new book, Close Like the Pros. Selling and buying both can be made more efficient, more productive, and more successful when they’re merged into a single process—Interactive Selling.

Today’s complex sales invariably involve lots of back and forth, lots of give and take, lots of questions and answers, lots of modifying and tweaking. The pros out there, the ones who do the biggest deals and take home the biggest paychecks, get in sync with this reality and structure their selling-and-buying process to take advantage of all that interactivity, not to try and truncate it. Interactive selling is how the pros close big deals, and it’s a process anyone can learn.

Close Like the Pros does nothing less than redefine closing for the 21st century! In the book, I introduce you to a new way of thinking about closing—as a process rather than an event—and to the new language of selling: Contracting, Partnering, Ground Rules, Clear Paths, Genuine Agendas, Mini-Closes, Homework Assignments, Half-Baked Ideas, Trial Balloons, Progress Reports, the No-Surprise Proposal, the Critical Path, Molehill Decisions, and the Post-Sale Partner.

I guarantee you that Close Like the Pros is not a re-hash of what you’ve read elsewhere. This is the first time Interactive Selling has ever been revealed, explained, and turned into a system anyone can learn and use. You might consider the practices in this book to be sales basics—and I would agree!—but they’re the basics that are missing from every other book on the shelf.