Why you should perfect the art of the follow-up

Rachel Klaver is a marketing strategist, specialising in lead generation and content marketing.

OPINION: It doesn’t matter how good your marketing is, how much kudos you’ve built with contacts and past clients that leads to them referring you to everyone, or how much advertising you are doing if you’re unable to close a sale.

I’ve been working with a group of small business owners over the last month to help them improve the conversion rate of their sales meetings. Although they’re all experts in the work they do, anyone can run into issues closing a sale.

Here are some of the most common:

Allowing your own mindset issues to impact your meeting

We often focus on the need to sort out our money mindset before we sell in a meeting, but there can be other issues at play too. For example, one of my clients was worried one of the offers she was approached about didn’t have a flash proposal designed for it yet. She was worried the meeting would go well and she would have to design the proposal, even though she could do the actual work it would outline in a flash.

Our solution? We created a very simple and straightforward proposal that could work as an email rather than a complicated document. And it worked.

Another client had some money mindset issues. Things were a little slow for her, so she had been feeling the pinch. When it came to sharing the price for her work, she would speed up when delivering it, with a higher pitched voice. She knew that she wasn’t in a position to spend that money herself, so had to remind herself before each meeting that “my budget is not your budget.”

Leaving things up in the air

One of the worst things to say to someone at the end of a sales meeting is “I look forward to hearing from you”. We want to make sure we can pick up the conversation at any point after that initial time together. When we put all the onus on the potential client to get back in touch, we can get stuck trying to work out how to check in with them.

At the end of a meeting, I like using the “I will, you will, we will” framework. It might look a little like this. “Thank you so much for your time today. I will send you a quote via email within the next twenty-four hours, along with a suggested start time. You will have a look, come back with any questions, and if you are ready, confirm we can get started. Then we will book in a time and start the work.”

If you, like several of my clients, prefer to present your proposal during a meeting, tell them you will send them a digital copy after the meeting and end with the “I will, you will, we will” framework.

Not setting the expectation

The first email after a meeting is incredibly important. Along with supplying a quote or sending the proposal, you also want to reuse the “I will, you will, we will” next steps. In your “I will” steps you might say “I know you are very busy, so if I haven’t heard from you by next Thursday, I’ll send you a follow-up email.”

This gives you an opening to follow up without feeling you are overstepping some sort of hidden boundary. It’s a good idea to pop an action in your CRM.

I personally don’t like to send auto reminders even though I love marketing automation. Sales is person-to-person, and an impersonal auto-reminder often won’t convert nearly as well as one that’s written by you.

Not wanting to annoy people

Of course, we don’t want to annoy potential (or current) clients. We don’t want to start demanding they work with us or harass them. However, it’s really important to make three assumptions, unless told otherwise. The first is that they made time to speak with you because they wanted to work with you. If we assume that someone wants to work with us, we talk in a more confident manner, and find it easier to keep following up.

The second is that they are likely very busy, and they haven’t yet replied with a yes or a no because they are swamped, and need you to remind them to get to the next step. They might have other things that are more pressing, or be waiting for someone else before making a final decision.

The third is that until you get a firm no, the answer could be yes, so assume they are still thinking about it.

Losing confidence after a few “no” replies

If you are getting a “yes” to every single proposal, unless they are coming solely from referrals or a strong content marketing relationship that you’ve built over time, it’s likely your pricing is too low. If your aim is a one-in-three or one-in-four conversion rate, and you’ve had a run of “yes” replies, statistically, you’ll eventually see a run of “no” responses at some stage.

It’s so important to take each meeting as a new opportunity to make the sale, and not come into it already feeling like it’s going to lead to another “no”.

I do like to see sales meetings as a two-way street in working out if you’re going to work together. Sometimes we get so focussed on the drive to get them to want us, and then make the sale that we don’t take the time to check if the person we’re meeting is the right client for us. Sometimes the real reason we don’t want to follow up is that we don’t actually want the sale. That, of course, is a very good reason not to.

For everyone else you meet, however, it’s key to remember sales meetings aren’t where most decisions are made. That is more often done in the follow-up. If you need more sales in 2024, it’s time to get better in the art of the follow-up.