The Lost "Science" of Following-Up with Clients

Following up with clients should “absolutely” not be an art. It is a science. What I mean by that statement is that you should define how often you should follow-up with clients.

We do it pretty simply.  We break down the clients into three different categories. “Ye Olde” Platinum, Gold and Silver. Our clients can change the names if they want, but guess how many stay that way? 

Once you define the categories typically by Sales Revenues (we will discuss potential sales in next post) you need to decide how often to follow-up. We believe follow-up activities are broken down into two categories Proactive and Passive. 

Proactive follow-up activities can be defined as client visits, facility tours, lunches, quote review, tour of your facility, food drop, significant phone calls and lunch & Learns. What does not qualify is left a voicemail.

Passive follow-up activities can be defined as marketing emails that are sent once per month educating your clients with “Great Information,” or a personal email with link to a great post. We don’t expect responses from these activities, but if they do great. In larger Companies these are sent out by the marketing department. Your salesforce should have some input on these emails and should be shown them prior to being sent out.

How often and how you follow-up depends on your sales cycle and frequency of purchases. We define sales cycle as how long does it typically take from “needs defined” to” closing the sales.” Frequency of purchases is simply how often they buy. I do not want salespeople to bug the heck out of the clients, but we need to stay in front of them with significant meetings and not just to drop off food. Significant meetings build relationships. 

Companies with a long sales cycle need to be extremely disciplined in staying in front of their clients. Management needs to watch these activities. Salespeople typically focus on sales in the pipeline and forget that they must plant seeds with your clients or someone else will.

If you would like a simple excel template email me or if you would like to discuss this post email a few times you are available and your number.

My next two posts will be discussing:

• Prospect Follow-Up
• Sales Process without Disciple is “Worthless”