Is Your Follow Up Effective?

– Posted in: Buying Facilitation, How Buyers Buy

Do you attempt to follow up with prospective buyers because they haven’t contacted you when you thought they should? Do you know what is stopping them from contacting you? Or where they are along their decision path – their steps from idea to consensus, from change to choice, that buyers must address – while we sit and wait, hoping they’ll close?

With a focus on understanding need and placing solutions, you may have no idea what stage they are at: did you originally connect when they were first considering possibly fixing something? Or when they were comparing your solution to an internal workaround or their favorite vendor? Were they just seeking information to share at a planning session?

The very last thing buyers seek is your solution, regardless of whether they have a need or not: they seek to solve a problem, and will purchase your solution only if their known vendors and internal workarounds won’t work, and if there is consensus.

Price is not the issue. Competition with other providers is not the problem. The problem is how they will manage the internal change your solution incurs (separate from the benefits of your solution). If you want to facilitate their decision making, call with these questions:

What would you and your decision team need to know to understand and manage the types of change that would be required by purchasing our solution?

How will you and the decision team know that an external solution might be more effective and efficient than an internal workaround?

We tend to think buyers merely need to choose a solution, yet they need buy in and change management before they can make proper use of our solution information. Have they assembled all of the right players? Are they first attempting an internal workaround? Assume when you haven’t heard from them they are still figuring things out. Use your follow up contact to help them figure out what they need to resolve so they can buy. Or even better, begin your connection with them by helping them first facilitate their systemic change, and then sell.

I can help you facilitate the decision path with Buying Facilitation® that works with sales to manage the hidden factors we’ve not been privy to until now. Sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com or www.buyingfacilitation.com

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