Customer Follow-Up – A Missed Sales Opportunity

Quite often on this blog I focus on writing about how to find new clients and make the sale. Both of those are of course extremely important aspects of running a small business. Today though I want to talk about a completely different aspect of it. A one that can make a real difference to the amount of sales you make and one that is quite often completely overlooked by small business owners. A customer follow-up.

I often refer to a follow up as a missed opportunity. Many small business owners I know never even use it in their sales process. And those who do, quite often focus only on the act of following up and completely miss the sales opportunity.

A customer follow-up is to remind the client or prospect about your business, true. Many businesses use it so that their name simply pops up in the prospects email every now and then. They do so in hope that if a prospect or a client needs the services they offer, their contact details will be right there in front of them.

There is nothing wrong with that approach of course, I do the same. However, a well conducted customer follow up can also be used to increase your income without waiting for the prospect to need you.

You can use a customer follow-up to successfully turn your first time buyers into a repeat customers. Or to regain those prospects who have made an inquiry but haven’t purchased as of yet.

Many statistics say that a lot of small business’ lose a lot of their potential income by simply not following up with the people who have only made an inquiry about their products and services.

A customer follow-up however is your best tool to change that.

3 KEYS TO A SUCCESSFUL CUSTOMER FOLLOW-UP

There are different forms of a follow up that you can use in your sales process. Most business people, me included, prefer an email first and then a phone call, if the email didn’t bring any results.

However a snail mail letter, a sales package with an offer or even a call in into the prospects office work equally well. The key is to simply use the customer follow-up and in this article I will focus on what you should include in your message, rather than the method you will use to deliver it.

Thank for choosing your company.

If the client has purchased from you, thank them for that. If the prospect decided to do not go ahead with you, or what’s more probable, haven’t made the decision yet, thank them for considering you. You don’t have to spend much time on this part, just thank them in one or two lines. That’s it.

Reinforce your original sales promise.

Your client has bought because of the promise that you have made. It may have been your USP or something very specific you arranged during a sales call. Reinforce that in the follow up.

In a case of a prospect that you want to turn into a client, they have contacted you based on your marketing too. Reinforce the promise you make to every client to make them feel more comfortable when choosing you.

Include an offer or recommend another of your products or services that compliment their order (or what they inquired about)

Usually clients purchase only what they feel they need, however you probably offer more services they could avail of. Your customer follow-up is a great opportunity to present those to the client. Same with prospects that didn’t buy. It may be a good idea to send them an offer to entice them into a sale.

It is also a good idea to build to intensify the offer and create a sense of urgency to delicately “push” your prospect into a sale.

FEW OTHER THINGS I WANT YOU TO REMEMBER WHILE YOU FOLLOW UP

Follow the 10 day rule.

There is a rule in sales which states that you should follow up with your customer or a prospect in ten days intervals. It simply means that you should first follow up 10 days after the purchase, then 10 days after that and 10 days after that again.

I am usually not a fan of rules so strict, however in this case I surrendered to it. Why? Because it simply works. Ten days is just about enough for a prospect to find the time to act on your information but not long enough for them to forget about you.

Keep Your Offer Consistent.

When you are sending your customer follow-up with an offer or a recommendation to a client or a prospect, keep it consistent throughout the entire follow up process. Don’t change it every time you send a customer follow-up. This will only confuse the people you send it to.

Try to Always Ask for a Permission to Follow Up.

This is a little trick I learned very early in my sales career and it works really well. Everytime you talk to a client or a prospect, before you go, and no matter what the outcome is, ask them if you could follow up in ten days. In most cases they will agree but what it means to you is that now you have a permission to follow up. This is especially important when it comes to your prospects, people still in the sales process. With their permission to follow up you are no longer a stranger who is trying to get through to them.

Image by Flickr user, Johan Koolwaij distributed under creative commons license.