The Power of a Follow-Up Email Process

The Power of a Follow-Up Email Process

I may be old school but...

Set the date for the next meeting and send a good follow-up email!

Two basics that every sales person needs to execute well on.

Keith Roseland-Barnes shares his best practices for email follow-up's below!

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Join Randy for this weeks episode of Tech Sales Insights LIVE featuring Nadav Efraty & Roi Carmel , Co-Founders of Spotlight.ai

'How to Sell More in a Tough Economy'

This episode is sponsored by  Spotlight.ai , our Value Intelligence sponsor.  Spotlight.ai  provides a Value Intelligence AI-driven platform to transform sales discovery, auto build differentiated business cases, and optimize value positioning for field and remote teams.

“When I was in a meeting one time with all the second-line managers, third-line managers, and even the top VPs, they never talked about what's going on with the sales reps, like how do we make them more productive? What are the issues they're facing? Who's the competition? How do we get better?” 

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Four Critical GTM Execution Priorities to Help You Build a Great GTM and Company

'Top Talent is Critical to Your GTM Success'

Blog post number 3 in an awesome series by Mark Stephenson on Fundamentals to Thrive in This or Any Market

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CAN YOU SKIP TO PRICING?

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Randy's Tips to Sell More 👉 Excerpts from Your Go-To Sales Advisor

The Power of a Follow-Up Email Process

By Keith Roseland-Barnes

What the Idea Is: Harnessing the power of a follow-up email process.

Why It Is Valuable: This process accomplishes multiple things:

1. External: This process shows the customers you are hearing them. It provides them with a documented history of your interactions, agreements, commitments, timing, value, pricing, etc., which may help with their approvals. This process is designed to allow them to read and react to your summary—and correct you so you are always on the same page and there are no surprises on either side. It also gives them an easy way to bring additional people or new people involved from their side up to speed, allows them to share details with procurement once at that stage (speeds process), and helps with the creation of internal briefing documents for executive awareness or approvals.
2. Internal: It’s a great way to provide detailed documentation of the entire sales cycle, which helps with reviewing successful sales cycles to share within your organization or with a post mortem (a loss), meeting prep, account pass off, commitments made, etc. It provides a way to go back and review/adjust toward alternative objectives to solidify a deal. It also keeps everyone honest with all details, “asks,” limitations, and timing. Each email is “assumed correct” unless corrections are sent.
3. Mutual: These notes keep you both on the same page and ensure you are at the same point in the journey. It also allows you to refer back and understand changes in requirements or expectations and people, and it helps with detailed deal reviews. Finally, it serves as a great way to inject a mutual close plan that is built throughout the sales process.

How It Works:

• After your introductory call, send an email summarizing the call and listing key findings and actions. This is an opportunity to set expectations for future steps as well as ask for information. It also allows you to set up the next meeting, when you will go deeper into their objectives.
• After your first meeting, send an email listing requirements, the solution use case, and technical limitations. This is one of the most valuable places to leverage this tactic. You have the ability to clearly articulate the “pain” you are solving, with potential impact. If you do this right, it will be an opportunity to get your champion and others to agree to the impact your solution can have (and start to set up your pricing and negotiation).
• After POC planning, send an email summarizing and keeping every- one on the same page with measurable success criteria, responsibilities, and expectations around timing, work, and level of effort.
• After the negotiation phase, send an email listing concrete “asks,” barriers, and “non-starters” as a way to document and gain agreement on a full set of “asks” from your customer. By summarizing the “asks” properly, you gain agreement early on what you are working toward.
• The customer chose you or your competitor for a reason. After a closed sale, call him or her to express gratitude, understand why, and dis- cover what the expectations are (that were communicated internally as ‘the reason’ for the decision). Or, if you did not win the sale, call to understand where you missed it on requirements or expectations and why you lost. This is a great way to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

By deploying this process, you will see an increased closure rate. You will also begin eliminating errors, develop stronger sales strategies to work with clients, and see increased accountability among the team to ensure everything stays on task for a project.

The added benefit to this whole process is that when you are at the end of your deal cycle, your customer has everything they need to justify the process they went through, the conversations that happened, details shared, objectives given and expected impact your offering will have on their business. This should help them speed up the internal approval process.