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Newsletter: Feb 18th Issue
For sales professionals, spending time with qualified prospects is job #1. But timely follow-up with the right materials in the correct order is a close second. In this newsletter issue, we describe tools that make the job easier, and more effective.
If you’re not in a sales meeting, chances are you’re following up
on one. It’s a constant struggle to balance the time spent
meeting with prospects with the time spent following up.
Often, the amount of time spent following up with a prospect is many more times greater than the time spent in front of a prospect. If we can flip that ratio around and spend more time with prospects than we do following up, it will get us one big step closer to closing more sales.
There are three elements to effective sales follow-up:
- Creating follow-up documents
- Delivering follow-up documents
- Getting prospects to act on the follow-up.
3 Elements of Effective Follow-up
Sales Follow-up Tools Resource List
Getting prospects to act on your follow-up
Often prospects won’t act on your follow-up. It usually has to do with busy schedules, a lack of urgency, or the ease or difficulty of responding.
If your follow-up isn’t timely, than the prospect is likely to lose their sense of urgency having forgotten the details of your conversation. Therefore, it’s imperative that follow-up materials are sent quickly.
If your prospect has asked for information because they’re too busy to participate in a discussion now, your follow-up has to be intriguing enough to capture their attention.
If your follow-up requires your prospect take action, you need the right tools.
Sales Follow-up Tools: Resource List
Product Configurators:
Contract and Proposal tools:
Creating follow-up documents
The first thing to look for is tools to help sales professionals
generate quotes, create proposals, get signed contracts faster,
manage outstanding quotes and close more deals.
Creating proposals and contracts can require enormous
amounts of time. These tools fall into the following categories:
- Sales configuration tools enable users to quickly and accurately
customize products and services based on the buyer’s needs.
- Contract generation and compliance tools enable reps to quickly create contracts that are legally and financially compliant with your companies rules and regulations.
- Marketing Compliant proposal tools make it easy for reps to reinforce themes that are core competitive advantages.
Delivering follow-up documents
Follow-up materials can be brochures, letters, presentations, tutorials or testimonials/referrals. Furthermore,they can be delivered through the mail, through a delivery service, or by email.
Delivery through the mail:
Printing follow-up letters; pulling the right collateral; stuffing, addressing, and stamping the packets all take a considerable amount of time. And if your reps have remote offices, or home offices, there’s an extra element with regard to ordering and stocking collateral and mailing supplies. This is not the case with the right tools.
Delivering documents via registered delivery services:
When your documents require proof of delivery or are time sensitive, you’ll likely need to pay for a 3rd party delivery service. This requires additional steps that eat up precious selling time - unless you have the right tools.
Follow-up Through the Mail or Delivery Service:
Tools to Motivate Your Prospects to Respond
Misc Sales Follow-up Tools
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