“This book is just so real.” I can’t tell you how many times readers have told me that, using almost those very words. Most have read other books on sales—haven’t we all!—and found too many of them idealistic rather than realistic, found them filled with tactics that look good in print but don’t work so well where the shoe leather meets the carpet.

“I really liked what wasn’t in the book,” one reader told me. She went on to say there were none of the usual forms, checklists, and templates. She couldn’t find any magic lines to memorize and drop on her prospects. She was surprised—delightfully surprised—that there were no ways offered to trick or trap the prospect. Other readers admitted they had their guard up, wary about finding a lot of stuff they already know or stuff they’d already figured out for themselves… but found little of it in this book.

“You’ve described exactly how customers think and behave and decide,” said another reader. That observation gets at the essence of Close Like the Pros. Yes, it’s a book about selling, but in many ways it’s a book about buying—or buyers. There’s an old definition of selling that is simply “making buying easier for the prospect.” But that’s been misinterpreted over the years to mean you should just do everything for the prospect, lift every burden, complete every task, make everything turnkey. That doesn’t really make buying easier—but interactive selling does. When you truly understand how buyers think and behave and decide—in steps and stages and increments—that suggests a whole new way to move the sale forward. You make buying easier by making decision-making easier.

“I can do this.” I asked that reader just what he meant. For starters, he told me, “there’s nothing weird in here, nothing I’d be embarrassed doing.” More importantly, though, he said that interactive selling doesn’t require him to change everything he does… it’s not a total selling system that demands you dump your current system. He said he had added most of the practices of interactive selling to what he was already doing, and prospects were responding just as I had promised. They were participating more in the selling process and letting him participate more in the buying process.

“I’m a professional buyer and I’m giving copies of this book to the reps who call on me.” She was serious. “Working collaboratively—or interactively as you say in your book—reps can get bigger orders at better margins and I can better solutions that save me money in the long run.”