How To Win At Sales Follow-Up

If you’ve ever watched poker on TV, or even if you just saw the movie Rounders, you’ll learn something about the game.

It’s not “gambling” in the traditional sense. Yes, there’s definitely an element of luck in it. But really great players know that it’s much more about strategy than chance.

No professional player sits at a table and just hopes the cards are great. They know how to make the most of EVERY hand, good or bad.

Do you have a strategy for making the most of EVERY follow-up opportunity?

Take it from the poker pros: to win, you need a good strategy.

Here’s a recap of everything in this episode of 5 Minute Sales Training:

Sales is just like poker.

Not because you’re trying to take someone else’s money, but because it’s all about the read.

You don’t play the cards, you play the opponent.

Now to be clear, the objective in sales is very different than poker.

We’re looking for a win-win, not a win-lose, but the reading of the customer is critical.

You must read your customer.

But reading your customer can be difficult because we get stuck on what we think we need to say that we miss the cues that our customer is giving to us.

We miss valuable information that will really help us in our follow up.

Just that little pause, that interesting look, the raised eyebrow.

All of these things speak volumes.

Far too often, salespeople get frustrated in their own follow-up efforts because they don’t know what to say.

They get on a call and they stumble and they fumble.

Why does this happen? How do we suddenly become ineloquent?

It’s not that we don’t know how to speak.

It’s because we are lacking in connection points.

And you will always lack in connection points when you don’t truly listen in the first place.

Attentiveness to the small details is critical to learning about your customer.

You need to pay careful attention, but then you need to dive even deeper.

And then, and this is very important, you need to write down what you learn.

Customers drop unsubtle hints all the time.

Many sales people aren’t good at follow up because they were never listening in the first place.

They’re just not paying attention.

Step number one, listen with your eyes.

Your visual acuity is critical to your ability to read a customer.

When we think about how we perceive things with our brain, of all of the senses that we have, 50% of our brain power goes to the visual sense.

We’ve got to be able to listen with our eyes.

We need to see what our customer is saying and not just hear it.

The second thing is, you got to go deeper with the follow up questions.

That’s great advice for a sales person who wants to be good at follow up because those small little details are going to be the gems that will help you win.

And then number three, take notes.

The notes actually cause you to ask more questions because as you’re jotting something down you will notice there are things that are incomplete.

That will lead you to those questions that are going to give you those gems of information that will help you in the follow up.

This is a great opportunity to learn more so that you can earn more.


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About the Author: Jeff Shore

Jeff Shore is the Founder and CEO of Shore Consulting, Inc. a company specializing in psychology-based sales training programs. Using these modern, game-changing techniques, Jeff Shore’s clients delivered over 145,000 new homes generating $54 billion in revenue last year.