Completing Sales Calls
You’ve made the call. Perhaps it was a big prospective client or a new one, and it was nerve-wracking. Perhaps it was an easy way to touch base with an existing client regarding an account.
Whenever one of your team members makes a sales call, the call doesn’t end when they hang up the phone. Make sure that your employees complete these steps after finishing a sales call.
1. Make a Plan
After a sales call is complete, your sales team member needs some space to take some quick notes on the opportunity. What happened during the call? Is the lead still interested in your products? Is there anything that needs to happen next? You can provide your team members with a form to guide their thoughts or leave this note-taking up to them.
2. Note Any Future Appointments
After the sales call, it’s particularly important to note any specific appointments or items for follow up. For instance, if a sales lead had questions about a particular feature of a product or the possibility of combining two different services at a discount, your team member should note this, contact the necessary people, and communicate with the lead again to keep the momentum going.
3. Send a Confirmation
If a team member has made an agreement during the call or decided to connect further at a later date, that person should contact the lead to confirm the commitment. It’s best to do this through proper communication that summarises the commitment and thanks the lead for the connection with your company. Confirming recommits the lead to your business contact and establishes that you’re a responsible company that follows through on commitments.
4. Schedule Follow Ups
If your team has made an appointment with the client in the future, these need to go into the salesperson’s agenda, complete with appropriate reminders to ensure that your team member collects the documents and information necessary for that meeting. If a lead is about to leave your business, establish a protocol for follow-ups to work with that lead and draw him back into the business sooner rather than later.
If your team member has discovered that the lead isn’t the person who makes decisions about your type of product, your salesperson may decide to start the sales call process again, working on a referral to the right individual within the company.
Use the time after a sales call to take notes on your experience and your lead.
5. Add Information to Your Database
Based on the experience during the call, your team members should make notes about your lead. These will include pain points or specific requests as well as general observations. This will help you shape your conversations with that individual or company in the future. After the sales call, your salesperson should make notes about the needs of the business, the preferred communication style of the individual, and any specific timelines that the lead has mentioned.
6. Develop Your Personas
Using the information that your team collects during sales calls, you need to inform your work on the various personas who are interested in your products. For example, you might determine that your particular contact at many companies is a mid-level manager who is concerned about the efficiency of their business’s software products and is looking for products that are simple, relatively low cost, and will increase the efficiency of their employees. Schedule time to connect with sales staff to ensure that you can compile your data from sales calls and better understand the needs of your leads as a whole.
7. Learn From Your Experience
When your team is trying out a new sales script, ask them to make notes based on their experience. Note any questions that came up that were valuable, any bumpy or awkward parts, and spontaneous changes you made that worked particularly well. Discuss these changes to your team’s sales strategies during your next meeting.
When you’re working with businesses, your sales team needs to be excellent on the phone and exceptional when they’ve finished the call as well. Follow up and data gathering are a key part of your sales process. Looking for assistance as you develop your B2B business tools? Talk to us today.
