How will you prepare to follow-up with future customers, between sales calls?

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Prepare the night before any sales meeting. Select a few prospects you can follow-up with, between meetings the next day. Collate all the info you need to contact and follow-up with them. When you arrive at one of your planned sales meetings and you have a few minutes available, either call a prospect as a follow-up call or call an existing client, how you can support or add value to them.

When you do this consistently, every day, you will astound yourself at how many calls you can squeeze in, between meetings, every a week. I have enjoyed weeks, where I have made between 15 – 20 calls, to support my existing clients; follow-up with prospects and in some cases even closed a few sales over the phone.

All it takes to gain this extra time weekly is a little planning at the end of each day and a commitment to use every moment of your day as productively as possible.

Please list all the follow-ups you plan to carry out over the next five days below:

How will you ensure that you send an agenda before every sales meeting?

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As you know, getting a meeting with a future customer can be quite challenging. It most often takes a number interactions with your future customer, either by phone, email or some kind of social media or networking process, to secure a meeting. To compound things, you have invested time to research your prospect and you have even sent them a teaser with valuable industry specific data that they will find useful.

AFTER GOING TO ALL THIS TROUBLE, “HOW SHOULD YOU SHOW UP”?

You most certainly do not want to show up without a clearly defined purpose and a very clear outline of exactly what you would like to achieve during the meeting.

THE MORE PROFOUND THE FIRST IMPRESSION YOU MAKE – THE BETTER

CREATE A WRITTEN AGENDA

A well prepared and thought through agenda does two things:

• It forces you to think about the purpose of the visit and forces you to prepare properly
• On receipt your future customer appreciates the fact that you are prepared and sees that you are not there to waste their time.

THE MORE INSIGHTFUL AND RELEVANT YOUR AGENDA IS, THE MORE EFFECTIVE IT WILL BE.

The agenda should look to address the following:

• It should address any questions you may have that would allow you to completely understand your future customers needs, expectations and values.
• It should address any topics or concerns you may have already discovered your future customer may have.
• The agenda should address the purpose of the visit and show your commitment to “HELP”
• The agenda must be as specific as possible
• The agenda should be engaging and energising
• The agenda should be functional and show that you have prepared for the meeting
  CREATING YOUR AGENDAIt is really easy to create a generic agenda, which is not tailored to suite, a specific meeting or customer. Although it is better to have a generic agenda, than no agenda at all, remember that you have invested so much into just getting the meeting in the first place. Should you not try to make the best impression possible during any sales meeting? Is it not worth investing sufficient time into creating a powerful, tailored agenda that will have a profound and positive impact on your future customer?

  A typical generic agenda might look something like this:

  • Meet the team
  • Feedback from the research we conducted
  • Outline of the projects objectives
  • What we can do for you?
  • Your Investment
  • Handling of any questions you may have
  • Next steps

  Although using an agenda like this is better than no agenda at all, you have already done the really hard work of securing the meeting, with the right decision maker. Is it not wise to invest some time into personalizing the agenda, so that you will really stand out? The more energising and specific your agenda is, the better.

  ACTION IDEA:

  • Make sure that your agenda is not too broad to really inform your future customer, as to the purpose and outcome you want to achieve during the meeting.
  • Make sure that your agenda is so specific that you can control the topics under discussion and guide your future customer to see how your value proposition is aligned with their needs, expectations and values
    EXAMPLE:
  • Let’s take the above agenda and change the statements into questions as shown below:
    • Intro to the team
    • Questions to guide discussion:
      • What specific industry trends have you encountered that will help to shed light on the performance analysis?
      • What different testing options do you believe would best suite your organisation?
    • Research results
      • How will the findings as listed in paragraph one suite your current circumstances?
      • What are the implications of finding 2 on your bottom line?
      • How will these findings positively affect your organization?
    • Project Objectives
      • How can we utilize the research findings to optimize performance on your plant?
      • What maintenance intervals will best suite your organization?
      • What timeframe best suites you?
    • Next Steps
      • When does your current contract end?
      • How do we begin to roll out the new project?

    As you can see a laser focused agenda, which is compiled using questions is far easier to follow and it also allows all attendees, who receive the agenda prior to the meeting to prepare properly.

Using the above example, please design agendas for your next 5 prospecting meetings below:

How are you going to ensure that you never leave a meeting without scheduling the next meeting?

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NEVER LEAVE ANY SALES MEETING WITHOUT A SCHEDULED COMMITMENT FOR THE NEXT MEETING

How many times have you left a meeting that went really well? You felt like this one was in the bag, but the next day or week when you follow-up with the prospect, you are unable to reach them. Your voice and email messages go unanswered. The best way I have found to close prospective deals faster, where you move your prospects efficiently through your sales pipeline, is to ensure that you never leave a sales meeting without a scheduled follow-up meeting.

As you know you prospect is extremely busy, with more work than they can complete in a day. So they tend to get drawn into a place where they have other priorities, which do not include you. They do however keep their diarized commitments.

Action Idea:

Prepare before the meeting and have three possible times and dates available for the meeting. Before leaving the meeting, suggest a date and a time for the follow-up meeting, where you can visit to review some of the ideas, benefits and value you have to offer.

Please describe how you plan to ensure that you will never leave a meeting, ever again, without having arranged the next meeting, below:

How are you going to ensure that you send an SMS,, to your customers after each sales meeting?

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A really powerful tool, which helps you to differentiate you from your competitors, is consistent and effective communication.

One of the best and most simple ways, I have found to immediately stand out, is to send my future customers an SMS message, from my car straight after the meeting.

In this message I include a thank you and a brief explanation about the next steps, required to complete the sale.

This simple technique, has helped me close hundreds of sales and I am sure that it will do the same for you too.

Please describe, how you will implement this in your sales process, going forward, below:

How are you going to ensure that your prospects, actually return your calls?

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LEAVE MESSAGES TELLING THEM THAT YOU WILL BE CALLING BACK

As you know, the majority of sales people only make a few sales calls and then, after they have been ignored, a couple of times, just stop calling. Most prospects, believe that, if they ignore a sales person for long enough, they will just go away.

A sales professional on the other hand, knows that they are calling the perfect prospect who needs exactly that they have to sell. So when they leave a message, they to tell them when you will be calling again.

Every time you leave a message leave a specific date and time when you will be calling back, so that they realize that you are not one of those average sales people, who just gives up. They will soon realize that you are serious about doing business with them. People want to buy from people, who show a deep-rooted desire to serve them.

Please describe how you are going to implement this into your sales process, below:

How are you going to reduce the risk of meeting with you?

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REDUCE THE RISK OF MEETING WITH YOU

Decision makers do not have time to meet with salespeople or to teach them their business. So don’t think you can arrange a meeting requesting they do either for you. If you want to arrange a meeting with a prospect, you need a meaningful value proposition.

Use descriptive language, which shows them “What, is in it for them”.

For example say something like, “I would like to share three insights with you, which will help you to improve your profitability or reduce costs or improve the efficiencies of your team, etc”.

Make a promise to them, similar to this, “I promise that the info, which I will share with you will help you to make better decisions about what you do in the future”

Be sure that you are then able to deliver on your promise with time or money saving strategies.

You could also, ask them for a 15 minute meeting. Thus reducing the amount of time they feel they would need to sacrifice to meet with you.

Think about your own markets and customers.

What could you do to reduce the risk of meeting with you?

What can you do to request a smaller time commitment from your future customers?

START OF ASKING FOR A LOWER LEVEL COMMITMENT FROM THEM

Be very careful around the language you select, when attempting to get an appointment with a prospect.

When you request a meeting at 10H00. Your prospect sees an hour fly out of their day. The more time they feel they will lose by meeting with you, the greater the chance they will say no.

Instead of stating a time for the meeting, rather say something like, “I need 20 minutes of your time, to share these cost saving or revenue earning or time saving ideas with you”.

Make sure you state the amount of time and the possible benefit, they will enjoy, when they meet with you. Once again make a promise to respect their time.

Think about your industry, markets and your future customers.

How could you offer them a reduced time commitment, thus reducing the risk of meeting with you?

What are you going to do, to ensure that you schedule time to carry out all your crucial sales related activities?

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SCHEDULE TIME TO CARRY OUT THOSE CRUCIAL ACTIVITIES

Unless you schedule time daily, to carry out your crucial sales activities, such as research, setting-up prospecting calls, writing thank-you notes etc, you never get to do them.

Create the new habit of blocking out time on your calendar daily to carry out these crucial activities. When you do this daily, your level of service to your existing customers will improve, and so will will the quality and quantity of prospecting leads you manage to discover each week.

Please describe, how you are going to utilise your time more effectively in the future