If you’re in sales, it’s the best feeling to walk out of a meeting knowing that you’ve impressed the client with your pitch as well as your product. If the client has not actually signed, however, there is work still to be done — namely, follow-up.
Follow-up isn’t something you do only a month later when the deal still is not signed. It is something of an ongoing process of engagement with the client, to make sure that there are no hidden problems, or areas where the client seems to feel better served by one of your competitors.
Whether the challenge you face is that you keep forgetting to follow up or that you don’t have the tech that’ll make your job simpler, here are tips that can help.
First, make sure that you have the right information
A call recorder is one of the most important pieces of tech in any sales situation. You should have something like the call recorder app by Apalon Apps on your business phone, and it should record every word that you exchange with your contacts.
You may not remember everything that’s said over a phone call, or you may miss nuances that could give you clues to how to proceed. You want a professional app remembering every word for you so that you can revisit everything later for ideas.
Use sales-specific customer-relationship management software
Regular customer-relationship management software is for the management at sales departments or service departments at businesses. It is not something that sales professionals can use on their own. Yet, it would be wonderful if you did have something akin to the functionality that CRM offers — something that was easy to use and update, easy to add new contacts to, to attach emails to, something that let you keep an eye on what other fellow sales team members did. Luckily, there is software that does this. Nimble, by Goldmine, is CRM built for the way salespeople work, and it addresses every area of shortcoming that regular CRM usually comes with.
With sales-specific CRM, you should have your follow-up roadmap completely laid out for you to follow, with the right kind of reminders built in.
Find apps that can help with follow-up
Meeting Mapper for iOS and Conga Composer for Windows are apps that help with follow-up in a variety of sales situations. Meeting Mapper allows you to sync information to Salesforce and automatically schedules a follow-up for each action. Conga Composer lets you create custom templates, logs your sales activities, updates all fields and also creates follow-up timetables.
If you haven’t been exploring all possibilities when it comes to automating your sales actions, you’re missing out. Your competition certainly is using every scrap of tech available. Investing in the right tech to ensure timely follow-up can mean the difference between a sale and a fail.
