6 “follow-up failure” mistakes that can cost you sales
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Aug 03, 2009 @ 01:15 AM
My colleague Art Sobczak asked me to participate in an audio seminar on the subject of "following up after initial sales contacts, and then continuing to follow up while in an active sales cycle, or to stay in contact if an immediate opportunity is not present." In other words, you've already had the initial conversation. Now what do you do to ensure you stay in touch in timely fashion? I cover this material in my telesales training courses, but preparing it for the audio seminar caused me to narrow it down to the 6 most common "staying in touch" errors I've witnessed. And here they are... any of them sound familiar?
1) Failure to wrap up the initial conversation with action items for the next call, and gaining agreement from the prospect as to what they are, and when you'll call back. At the end of the initial conversation, you'll know whether your contact is a valid prospect or not, according to your qualification criteria. If you've got some action items, discuss them with the prospect, and gain agreement as to when and for what reason you'll call again.
2) Failure to call back in a timely fashion. A "timely fashion" depends on the urgency of the sales situation, but if you have a "live" opportunity, you should be calling at least once a week to discuss progress and action items.
3) Failure to have an exciting, compelling reason for your next call. Your call should make the prospect happy that you called. Have a valid new response to one of his or her concerns, a new solution offering that will improve your prospect's life, or discuss some good news about your prospect's company that might positively impact your sales situation. If you're involved in price negotiation and have a new angle on pricing, make it exciting!
4) Failure to log conversation results and scheduled callbacks in your Customer Relationship Management system (CRM). None of us can remember much about a conversation after it goes away, so important points have to be logged so that you can remember. If your pres-sales tech support people or sales engineers have access to your CRM, they'll need that info too, when they call to assist you in helping to qualify or sell to the prospect. And be sure to use your automated call scheduler to remind you when to make your next call.
5) Failure to use creative contact techniques when your prospect hasn't returned your call. Maybe your prospect is difficult to reach. Maybe he or she just doesn't want to talk to you right now, when your caller ID comes up on his or her phone. You really do have to get through, though, to find out what's going on. Three creative techniques you can use here are:
a) Use *67 to hide your caller ID before you place the call.
b) Listen to his or her voicemail all the way through to see if he or she lists an alternative contact. If so, call that person, and ask him or her to find your prospect.
c) Upon getting your prospect's outgoing voicemail message, hit 0#, then ask the receptionist to put you through to someone in the department who can track down your prospect.
The three techniques I mentioned under item #5 are especially important when you have a proposal in front of the prospect. If you do, using the above techniques will rarely result in the prospect being upset with you, and will enable you to manage the sales process more effectively.
6) Not checking in at least once a quarter with good-prospect, no current opportunity people. We talk to these people every day. They are ideal for our solutions, but have valid reasons for not moving forward. You've done your ROI questioning, you're at a high level, but there's no traction. I ask these folks when they'd like me to call them back. If it's beyond 90 days, I'll call them at the 90 day period, as anything can change, and I want them thinking about me. These are the prospects I don't want slipping by, and they're always on my radar screen.
So those are the six "staying in touch" mistakes I most frequently encounter, but I could add a whole lot more to the list. To keep things positive, there are great things you can do too, that your competitors may not do. One of my prospects is a big baseball fan of a particular team. I found a fascinating article written on the other coast about his team, so I emailed it to him. I don't do this kind of stuff to sell them anything, I do it because I genuinely like my prospects, and try to brighten their days when they hear from me. There's a little bit of that element in #3 above.
So try to avoid the poor contact skils "deal killers" I've listed above, and add the solutions to your Best Practices Playbook. Now how about you? What follow-on call errors have you heard or experienced yourself?