You may keep your quotes organized in your CRM, but you don’t systematically link a follow-up action to them. If so, you run the risk of some opportunities remaining open for weeks or even months without any action being taken. You lose twice: On the one hand, you’re letting an order slip away; on the other, you’re disappointing your potential customer. You unintentionally give the impression that you don’t really care. If a customer gets that feeling, they certainly won’t do business with you. To quote a well-known saying: “They don't care how much you know until they know how much you care!”.
As a CRM partner, it’s not uncommon for us to discover during the analysis phase with a client that they don’t systematically plan follow-up actions after a quote has been sent. Valuable time and resources are lost this way. A lot of time is invested in preparing quotes, but if little else happens afterward, the potential goes unrealized.
So here's a golden tip: always plan a follow-up for every opportunity. Always think about the ‘best next step‘: in-person meeting, follow-up by phone, a friendly reminder via email, sending additional information, … . Because if there are pending quotes that aren’t being followed up on, you might as well consider them lost.
How Alistar Does It
With CRM, you can easily plan and track follow-up actions within the sales process. For example, the sales staff at Alistar use a custom playlist (view) to track all pending quotes. Whenever the opportunity arises, they record a next step as a task and assign a due date to it. At the start of their workday, they open their personalized to-do list in CRM and work on the activities scheduled for that day. This way, they never lose track of a single quote.
Stay top-of-mind and build trust
1. Your customers are busy and juggling all sorts of tasks at once. Sometimes they request a quote with the intention of moving forward right away, but then another task comes up and they forget to respond. Your quote gets pushed to the back burner.
Sometimes customers just need a little nudge to move forward with their purchase. That’s why it’s a good idea to schedule a follow-up after a few days. A quick phone call or a simple email may be all it takes to convince them to accept the quote.
2. Customer service begins even before a product or service is purchased. When you send a quote, your customer may have also received quotes from your competitors. Naturally, you want to stand out from your competitors. In such cases, it’s often not just the quote itself that tips the scales, but also the way you, as the seller, follow up on it. If you invest time in follow-up, you demonstrate a commitment to service and build more trust.
3. It's hard to attract new customers. You have to spend a lot of time and money on it. So it's a shame to let all that time go to waste by not scheduling follow-ups.
