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This is part of an in depth review of  The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies, by Chet Holmes.  We will focus on 1 section at at time and distill the best information to help your business now.  This should not be considered a replacement for the actual book, which will usually have a lot more in depth information as well as stories, which are an important way to communicate the essentials.  If you find the information in these posts helpful, I recommend buying the book or borrowing it from your library.

Chapter Eleven: Follow-up and Client Bonding Skills

Follow-up to Build Solid Relationships

If there is one thing that wins or loses more sales, it is follow-up. Good follow up can increase your sales quite a lot. Bad follow-up leaves a trail of “could-have-beens” behind you. Follow-up isn’t just for those sales you haven’t closed yet either. Good follow-up with a customer can get that customer to buy more, buy again, and to tell other people about your business. You should really build a follow-up procedure into your business.

Follow-up is all about staying on the front burner with a prospect or a client. If they don’t keep hearing from you, they will very quickly forget about you. So you need to keep on reminding them. Don’t worry about being annoying. If you are a nice person with a true intent to help, you won’t be. If you are a bad person, you probably don’t care if you annoy people anyway.

A prospect is never closer to the sale as when you are right there talking to him or her. The moment you leave, she begins to cool off. Mostly because she has a lot on her plate. If you want to keep the prospect warmed up to your product or service, you need to work hard to keep it in front of them.

Its not just putting them on a mailing list either. A salesperson makes a personal connection with each customer and prospect. So the follow-up should be personal as well. Some of it should be driven by the salesperson. Keep the relationship going.

Of course, good follow-up happens best after a good sales effort. Throughout the rest of The Ultimate Sales Machine, Chet Holmes talks about how you can change your business and how you can communicate real value to prospects. Your follow-up procedure should spring from that, so that you are continuing a value-based conversation that you have already started through your marketing and sales process.

Holmes gives 10 steps to great follow-up in this chapter. These can be used whether you are still trying to close the sale, or if you have won the customer already.

10 Steps to Great Follow-up

Step One: Send the First Follow-Up Letter

Sending a personal letter immediately after your meeting with the client can help solidify your bond or drive home the importance that the client choose your company. Holmes advises not to make the letter about you and your product. Here are four parts to a good follow-up letter:

1. Include a personal anecdote that you remember from the meeting.
2. Include a compliment.
3. Focus on their stated needs and the benefits of your product or service as they apply to these needs.
4. Be personal in your close.

The letter should focus on the customer, not the sale. Remember, it is about building the relationship. It is okay, even recommended, to add personal touches to the letter.

Step Two: Make the First Follow-up Call

Make this call right after you send the first letter. Think of this as a personal call. You have already done the selling recently at the meeting. You may want to offer something of value, like a piece of advice or something else you thought of that might help the client. The goal here is to increase the bond. If you make this call after the sales pitch and have a somewhat personal conversation, it will be easier in the future for you to connect with this prospect/customer.

Step Three: Share Something

It is a nice gesture to send something along that is humorous or useful. No, don’t forward the latest internet email prank. But if you find an article that may be of interest to the client, cut it out and send it along. If you found out that the client loves bass fishing, and you come across a fishing joke or cartoon, send that along. This is about bonding and letting the client know that you are thinking about him or her.

Step Four: Party

Through a client party and invite everyone to attend. This could be a great time to bond. On a more personal level, invite the client out for lunch. Maybe you will even have something new or interesting to share with them.

Step Five: Send Another Letter

One of the major goals of follow-up is to just keep doing it. Follow-up any additional meetings you have with another letter. Keep it short, interesting, and personal. Sending a follow-up letter shows that you care and that you enjoyed spending time with the client.

Step Six: Plan a Family Event

This usually works best for bigger businesses and big clients. If you are in that position, you can do something extravagant, like a hot air balloon ride. For smaller businesses, you can do something like a picnic and invite the client and his or her family. When the family is involved, it shows a higher level of trust and respect.

Step Seven: Offer Some Help

Can you offer any value, or are you just about getting the sale? Commit to being helpful to your clients. This includes sending them useful information, but it may also include helping them find the people they need for a certain job. You can also help bring two of your clients together so that they can collaborate and both benefit.

There is really no end to the ammount of help you can be if you get your mind around the concept that you are not just a salesperson, but an adviser and friend.

Step Eight: Send Another Letter

Yes, you need to keep this up. It doesn’t have to be a letter in the mail. It could be a fax or an email. But you need to make it personal. This is above and beyond any company newsletter or marketing efforts.

Step Nine: Offer Even More Help

If you can help your client succeed, both through the use of your product or service, and through your advice, you will be establishing a long-lasting and beneficial relationship.  Provide educational opportunities for your client. Send along a book that you know will help them. Always be on the look out for things you can do that will help your client be a success, even if they do not directly relate to your product or service.

Step Ten: Invite Them Over

Having a client to your home, or getting invited to theirs, is the ultimate sign that you have built a relationship that goes beyond sales. This is not a step you will get to, or need to get to, with every client. But when you do get there, it will be because of the relationship you have built, which is turning into a friendship. This is good for both of your businesses, as well as being personally rewarding.

Become a Friend

Your ultimate goal should be that your best clients also become your best friends. Become involved in their personal and business success, and you will succeed along with them. If you do your follow-up with friendship in mind, you will have stunning results. You won’t always become friends, but your follow-up will always be friendly, personal, and helpful.

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Coming next: Chapter 12 – All Systems Go

Buy or Not: This book is a buy.  It can be used as a manual for reshaping your business which you will refer to time and again.  Buy this book at Amazon.

Bradford Shimp helps small business owners and entrepreneurs build successful businesses.  Read his blog at www.allbizanswers.com.  Follow Bradford on Twitter.