How many times have you had a great conversation with a prospect, discussed next steps and hung up the phone or left the meeting feeling on top of the world?
And how many times did that feeling disappear when you found out the prospect went with another supplier?
That problem is exactly the issue we discussed with Matt Tolbert, a sales leader in the bitcoin industry. His salespeople also struggled with prospect attrition until he realized the system that keeps prospects in play is simple and yet has a massive impact on ensuring prospects stay in play.
Because we’re trimming hope from our sales strategy, we’ll use the acronym TRIM to guide us through creating a system with a trigger, ensuring it’s repeatable, building in ways to improve it and of course, ensuring it’s measurable and getting us results.
T-Trigger: The trigger for follow-up comes after every prospect interaction, even if it’s just an email sent or a voicemail the salesperson left. After contacting a prospect, Matt recommends salespeople immediately get into their CRM and log the interaction and owning the next step for the salesperson.
That part is critical, according to Matt (and I concur). If we reach out and expect our prospects to be the next person to respond, then we’re not owning the next step of the sale.
R – Repeatable: This is a simple system in practice: After every outbound contact, tag the account to come back in front of you after days, weeks or month and ensure you list the information you need to in order to quickly know what method to use in your next outreach, such as phone, email, etc.
I – Improvable: To ensure prospects don’t slip through the cracks and orphan themselves within our pipelines with no next step, Matt says to improve this system, find an accountability partner like a fellow salesperson or sales leaders and ask them to ensure you have next steps across all the accounts you touched this week. Combining this with a team meeting allows salespeople to share the types of follow-up that are converting conversations in your industry.
M – Measurable: While measuring implementation of follow up is easily done by checking tasks within a CRM, improving the type of follow-up that’s converting may be more valuable. For instance, measuring the salespeople who are converting sales on what they’re doing differently in their outreach, questions and cadence will ensure follow-up achieves its purpose of converting prospects to customers.