Why Your Pitch Doesn’t End When the Meeting Is Over
You did your homework in preparing for that initial sales pitch (see my post here), and knocked that sales pitch meeting out of the park (see my posts on tips to pitch and demo effectively), now it is time for follow-up. It is vital to have proper follow-up with your prospects because this is often where the real sales cycle starts. The pitch doesn’t end when you leave the prospect’s office; it ends after you’ve successfully secured a follow-up meeting. Here are some best practices that I’ve learned and seen over the years:
Send a hand-written thank you card to each one of your prospects after the meeting. At times, I’ve written and left thank you cards with receptionists after the meetings and other times, I’ve mailed the cards the same day of the meeting. Personalize each note with an anecdote from the meeting so it helps you stand out from your competition. At minimum, follow-up with a personalized email and a catchy subject line.
Before you forget any details, update your CRM system with detailed notes, including any anecdotes you learned about each individual (i.e., personality type, family, kids, favorites, key pain points). You should always be diligent about recording all of your interactions (e.g., phone calls, meetings, emails) with a prospect or customer in your CRM. Over time, this will prove to be an extremely valuable knowledge base that you can leverage as your startup grows and salespeople change territories. Be religious about this!
Continue to add value. If your meeting went well, your prospect should be eager to hear from you. In your email for a follow-up meeting, be sure to include something of value and interest to your prospect. This may be an interesting industry article, an answer to a question he posed, or better yet, something personal that came up during the meeting. One of my direct reports at E la Carte, Zach Jones, did a superb job of this on his very first sales call with me. During our discussion, he learned that the CIO’s (key decision-maker) daughter was applying to his alma mater. Aside from spending time during the meeting talking about the school, he followed-up with an email offering to talk to his daughter and review her application. He ended up investing several hours of his time to help her without once talking about our product. Not surprisingly, the CIO became a staunch supporter of our product, even though the CEO was against it.
Develop parallel threads of communication. In any business relationship, you want to develop parallel threads of communication so that you can keep the relationship moving forward and build trust even if one of the threads turns cold. For example, in the prospect relationship above with Zach, we quickly got to a pause on pilot timing due to several factors. Therefore, it was very helpful to have another thing to keep communicating about and working on together. This prevented Zach from being “just another sales guy”, who only picks up the phone and keeps banging away at a single, frozen idea: hitting his quarterly quota!
As you’re trying to build a relationship, remember to personalize your approach to the specific personality type you’re dealing with. As Rod Nichols said, “If you deal with every customer in the same way, you will only close 25 to 30 percent of your contacts, because you will only close one personality type. But if you learn how to effectively work with all four personality types, you can conceivably close 100 percent of your contacts.”
As you finalize your follow-up meetings, be sure to go back and prepare and review the tips on how to pitch effectively. Remember, you’re pitching until the prospect has signed that MSA!
I would love to hear any other tips and tricks that you’ve learned in your sales journey. Please also share your comments and thoughts, especially if you’ve read all four of my posts in this series.
