How to Follow-up

Description:

Following-up with clients can be a real art. Let’s look at how this can be done well. In this talk, excerpt from a Traction Tuesday, Florian goes over useful methods and tricks to keep a natural, engaging flow moving forward with different clients regardless of whether the deal is hot, warm or cold. Includes a typical e-mail chain that you can use as well as different phrases for different kinds of client follow-ups. Ultimately, we want to invite, even seduce, our clients back into our world and into shared conversation!

Exercises for this lesson:

Note: This exercise is intended for individual or team sales agents as a way to practice and reinforce learning. Incorporate this practice into your day and, if possible, into your ongoing sales work. Good luck and have fun!
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Instructions for "Clean your Funnel"

Step 1: Go through your entire funnel and check for deals without a next appointment together with the customer.

Step 2: Define a task for each one of those deals and set an appointment to catch up with this customer within the next two weeks.

Step 3: Find an accountability partner within your team and share your deal plans with her. While you are at it, you can ask your accountability partner about how she would approach your customer again or what she thinks about your follow-up approach in general. Bouncing off your idea with a colleague is a great way to tap into their creativity. [In case you don't have a colleague to bounce it off of, feel free to post this question in our slack community channel]

Step 4: Start acting on your plan - immediately!

Goal for the week
Tuesday: Make a conscious effort in 2 sales conversations to set and agree upon a next step as well as an execution date together with your customer.
Wednesday: Make a conscious effort in 4 sales conversations to set and agree upon a next step as well as an execution date together with your customer.
Thursday: Make a conscious effort in 6 sales conversations to set and agree upon a next step as well as an execution date together with your customer.

Your goal is to eventually make it a habit to ALWAYS set an appropriate next action for every customer interaction.

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✅A key element of follow-up is keeping your sales funnel clean - you can have a look at “How to Work with CRM Systems” and its accompanying exercise for extra practice

Timestamps:

1:10 if the deal were a car we are looking for a special kind of momentum

2:47 about defining the speed of a deal in 3 categories; more on “hot” and “warm” deals

6:03 …and yes, the deal can also run “cold”

8:03 structure of typical mail chain that you can use

10:50 handling a customer individually - first, ask yourself “Do I even know the customers pain points?”

12:52 for how long should you follow up with a customer?

14:05 different possible phrases and variations for the follow-ups

16:33 remember, you want to seduce and invite the client into an interesting interaction with you