1. When your customer is in the decision stage of the buying process.

Perhaps your customer did not buy at the time you showed them your product. This could be for many reasons – maybe they needed to talk it over with a spouse, or maybe they needed to save up some money. Maybe they went on vacation and forgot about you. There are many reasons why your customer may not buy from you the first time you show them your product. You owe it to that customer to remind them that you are still there ready to help them.

2. After your customer has purchased a product from you, it is imperative that you follow-up with that customer to see how the product is working out for them.

Perhaps you would eventually want to show them some additional features that they may have overlooked or forgotten about. You need to assess their satisfaction with your product for two reasons. If they are unhappy with the product, you want to make sure you find a way to make it right. Either they should receive a full refund, or another product, or something so that the last experience the customer has with you is a positive one.

If the customer is happy with your product, you need to ask for a referral to other people they know who might like your product. You also want to ask for a testimonial from your happy customers. Testimonials are valuable to add to your marketing materials.

3. Finally, if a customer has purchased from you before, and they were happy with the experience, they are likely to purchase from you again if you have additional products or services that match their needs.

It is up to you to continue to follow-up with information and relevant suggestions for products that will help your customer.

You Need a Customer Follow Up System

Have you developed a plan for customer follow-up yet? If not, this section will help you get organized. Is the desk in your small business office overrun with business cards to search through every time you need a phone number? Perhaps you are using a day timer or on-line calendar. Perhaps you are using a contact manager. These are good tools but you need a better follow-up strategy.

If your customer follow-up system consists of boxes of business cards or names scribbled on writing pads I have a plan for you.

How to create your customer follow up system

You will want to select several tools to reach out and touch your customers periodically. You will need to balance the timing of your follow-up and maintain professionalism. You do not want your prospect to be turned off or irritated because you contact them too often. You do not want to appear desperate to sell something else. You also do not want to leave your customer’s remembering you up to chance.

Remember, the purpose of your customer follow-up is to help your customer solve a problem. If you don’t follow up periodically, your customer will forget you and move onto your competitor the next time they need a product or service like yours.

Several tools you must have in your customer follow-up system

- The telephone

In today’s online and high-tech world, people forget about the phone. This is still a great way to reach out and touch your customers. It is especially effective after the sale to ask how it is going and to see if they are happy with your product. The phone is a very personal way to interact with your customers.

- Email with auto responder

An email drip system with an auto responder will let you automate email contact with your customer to continue to feed them information and to keep your name in front of them. This is a low cost way to keep in touch with your list of contacts. With an email drip system, you set up your series of messages and then forget about them.

- Newsletter

A newsletter is a value-added way to provide information to your customer. Your customer can subscribe to the newsletter giving you permission to continue to contact them with relevant valuable information.

- Post Card or letter

Guess what? These days, people still love to get something in the mail with their name on it. They especially like to get a personal card or letter. Do you remember the last time you received an unexpected personal card or letter in the mail from someone you know? It really is exciting to tear open the envelope to see what is inside. You can really set yourself apart in the online world by sending a personal greeting card or letter.

Believe me, your competitors are not doing this. This is an excellent way to differentiate your business from the thousands of others out there. Sending a personal card or letter is a very effective way to do customer follow-up, but it can be time consuming.

What are the chances that you will really go to the store, buy the cards, write them out, address them, stamp them, and drop them in the mail? Not likely, right? I mean after all, we are all busy with our families and our business. Sending a card can be used for thank-you, to follow-up with contacts, or just to wish your customer a happy birthday.

Joe Girard, who is listed in the Guiness Book of World Records as the World’s Greatest Car Sales Person used greeting cards to stay in contact with his customers. His customers got a greeting card every month. This helped foster repeat business for him. When they were ready to buy another car, they always remembered Joe.

Another successful salesperson whose secret was greeting cards, was Tom Hopkins. Tom was the World’s Greatest Real Estate Sales Person. At the time he retired from real estate sales, he had sold a house everyday for 365 days. You can see from these two examples how powerful the personal touch of a greeting card can be.

These two successful gentlemen both attribute their success to the power of a greeting card and the effectiveness of a consistent customer follow-up system. But, in their day, they sent hand-written cards that they hand wrote, addressed and stamped to send. They dropped stacks of cards in the mail every day. Lucky for you, today this process can be automated.

- Setting up a tickler file

In order to follow-up with your prospective customers, you need a system that organizes them in a way so that you will know what method and message of follow-up they need. You should set up a hanging file system that is divided into sections for prospects, consultations, and customer. Organize your system so that it mirrors where you are in the sales funnel.

Prospects

* Phone Call
* Email
* Newsletter
* Card/Letter

Consultation

* Product walk through
* Follow up call
* Thank you card
* Newsletter
* Phone Call

Customers

* Thank you card
* Phone Call
* Consultation
* Referral
* Email List
* Newsletter

Adding your contacts to the system

In addition to adding your contacts to your contact manager, you will also want to do the following to work them through your system. Take a normal file folder, and staple your prospective customer’s business card to it. If you don’t have a card, just create a label. You can use the folder to write notes, or to store other paperwork from the contact like sales receipts, records, or anything else related to that customer.

The contact’s folder gets moved through the filing system in the same order as the sales funnel. If you have already completed a product walk through, you would move them into the follow-up section. They remain in that section, until you actually follow-up.

Once they complete one event, you move them to the next event. When they become a customer, they go straight into the thank you card file. Keep this filing system in your office and make sure you have time scheduled each day to go through it. This will help keep you focused on what needs to be done for each customer each day.

This is an excellent organized way of improving your customer follow-up. Your sales success will improve significantly with implementation of these few tips.

Becky Lynn Smith is passionate about internet marketing and her goal is to help you leverage the power of the internet to help your small business. Becky obtained her BBA in Management Information Systems at Texas Tech University. She took a job after college in the IT department at a major oil company in Houston, TX. After 8 years, she went back to school and obtained her MBA at the University of Houston. Becky obtained her Project Management Professional (PMP) designation from the Project Management Institute in 1999.

After leaving big oil, she took a job as the eTechnology Manager for a major mutual fund investment company. Becky’s team had responsibility for over 40 different websites. She learned a lot about developing websites, developing and managing content, and optimizing for search engines. Becky is a lifetime learner and is a voracious reader of anything she can find about Sales and Marketing. She has successfully managed many large IT and web development projects to completion.

Becky’s secret weapon for automating your customer follow-up system can be found at http://www.mysupersecretweapon.com

Her website, located at http://www.revolutionary-internet-marketing-strategies.com specializes in helping small business professionals and home businesses with strategies for marketing on the Internet.

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The sales process is designed with sequential steps that, if followed, should lead to qualification of an opportunity either “in” or “out”. If qualified “in” the next steps should lead to the sale. The sales person should have multiple deals working at the same time each following the steps of the sales process. That sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?

Sales people rely on the support of their entire organization to allow them to achieve the customer satisfaction that will ultimately result in the ’sale’. And, yes you guessed it, the ’sale’ will lead to the achievement of company revenue and profit targets.

If there are obstacles preventing the ’sale’, the true nature of the sales person will mean that s/he will try and fix the issue which in turn will take them away from spending time with the customer OR if the sales person is a top performer you will lose them if you make life too difficult for them.

Complectus was founded to help companies understand what these obstacles are and help them deploy the fixes. Complectus is Latin for ‘Embrace’… i.e. Embrace your sales organization and it will love you back. It’s not rocket science and it’s not just sales training.

There’s no point training your sales people in sales skills, product knowledge or how to get that appointment with the CXO if, when they leave the classroom and return to the field you’re not supporting them effectively. Maximum sales productivity is IMPOSSIBLE without internal alignment.

It’s like organizing the deck chairs on the Titanic or, my favorite, for those of you that know me….. it’s like putting lipstick on a pig! I think I have a pretty good idea what the common obstacles are which inhibit a sales person from selling. But I never cease to be amazed by some of the stories I hear. They come in all shapes and sizes:

· You know the deal is qualified, why is it a harder sell internally than to the customer?
· Why doesn’t my CRM system help to drive sales?
· Why is my technical support person great with Visio, but terrible in front of the customer?
· I thought you said we could deliver it 2 days?
· How can I be strategic when I have all this day-to-day BS to deal with?
· etc, etc, etc

My subsequent articles will be discussing how you can refocus your sales organization to help you drive revenue, profit and customer satisfaction. The answer to the question, why do sales people waste 63% of their time? Lack of internal alignment.

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EAS LeadGen posted the question: “As a professional, what is the most effective way to gain new clients?” The respondents were given a choice of five categories to choose from, on activities that would help them gain new clients. The following is a list of activities that they chose from: Meet Prospects in Person, Talk to them via Phone, Email Prospects, Follow-up with Prospects over Time, and Speak to Groups at Conferences/Trade Shows. In the era of unpersonalized media, emails, texting, Twittering and voice mails, the activity that surpassed the others by far was meeting the prospect in person. This is the number one choice by professionals in the Business Development, Sales, Marketing and Accounting industries. Human Resources chose to Follow-up with Prospects over Time and the Academic sector chose to Speak to Groups at Conferences.

Looking at the survey as a whole – 52% chose to Meet with Prospects in Person, 26% chose to Speak to Prospects at a Conference, 15% chose to Follow-up with Prospects over Time, and 5% chose to Contact Prospect by Phone. The survey was also segmented by gender, which females split in thirds between Meeting in Person, Talking on the Phone and Following-up over time. However, 71% of male respondents chose to Meet Prospects in Person, with 29% of the respondents choosing to Speak at a Conference.

After reviewing the results, the value of a face-to-face meeting outweighs other activities to gain new clients. Getting those face-to-face meetings can be a challenge – and that is where professionals, such as EAS LeadGen come in – making the appointments for the meetings. A team of professionals that work directly with your sales, marketing or business development team to schedule appointments to help boost sales. The EAS LeadGen team speaks your company lingo and is a seamless extension to your organization.

EAS LeadGen is an executive appointment setting and lead generation company. LeadGen was founded in 2006 by a group of professionals, with over 200 combined years of executive appointment setting experience, with all of the professionals based in the United States. LeadGen’s primary objectives are to increase the flow of qualified prospects through face-to-face appointment setting, act as key sales support to sales professionals, facilitate the “leg work” of the business development process, and support marketing campaigns by adding a measurable follow-up element to every campaign. For more information about EAS LeadGen, please visit http://www.easleadgen.com/ or call 732-982-8514.

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