After finalizing the sale and meeting all of the agreed upon terms, you’re ready to sit back and enjoy the success. Unfortunately, in sales and every business out there, it’s necessary to go the extra step and make sure your customer is satisfied with your product or service.
Keeping your relationship going with your customers past the point of commitment will tell a lot about your company and its long-term strategic thinking. Developing a process to streamline the time spent on following up will give you time to work on other sales and help guarantee that your customer is happy with your company.
Keep in mind the main ideas that are necessary for a follow up: product delivery, billing issues, promotional opportunities, and customer support. I believe this process can be broken down into the following steps.
Initial follow-up
After you’ve finalized on the sale and it’s been delivered, it’s time to give your customer a call and make sure their happy with the product delivery. Even if you know there were no issues, your call shows how important each customer is to your business no matter the project size. An additional benefit to you may be determining areas in which you excel that you can later use to better market yourself.
Promotional opportunities
Follow-ups are a great way to further the time your company’s interacts with its customers. With a follow-up, you now have a good excuse to send promotional material like introducing new products, or even customer discounts. This is also a great opportunity to give more information or links to information on products that interested your customer but they had opted not to purchase with your previous sale.
Customer support
Lastly, you should send an email to your customers on customer support services or changes in your products or services that you have sold them. This is also an excellent time to be a source of information on recent developments your company has been looking into, or new usages other customers have found for your products. Depending on your product or service you may also be able to lead them to new information on getting the most out of your company’s product.
Remember follow-ups are more than customer satisfaction but are a way to build stronger relationships with your customers. By providing your customers with valuable information and customer support your credibility will skyrocket and your company’s long-term strategic focus will shine through.
