In today’s post I want to talk about something that very few sales people do well which is phone call follow up. Too often I hear sales people kill a good prospect in their pipeline by calling them without a clear objective and then rambling until their prospect finally says, “No.” The secret to effective phone call follow up is making an excuse for the call and then moving forward deliberately towards your objective.
In most cases, your objective is simply to get another face to face meeting so you can close the deals. If that is your goal, all you need is an excuse to stop back by. Here is an example follow up phone call. You can design your own script but make sure to use words like, “drop off” “carefully consider” and “swing by” to make it impossible for your prospect to say “no.”
Me: “Hello Susan?”
Customer: “This is she.”
Me: “This is James Shepherd, I met you last week on Tuesday, how are you doing today?”
Customer: “Good”
Me: “Real quick the reason for my call is that I know you had expressed an interest in our tablet point of sale system and I completely forgot to drop off the brochure on that technology solution.
Sorry for dropping the ball on that, are you going to be available tomorrow around 4pm if I came by to drop that off so you can carefully consider the options that we have available.”
Have a great day!
James Shepherd
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