The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [121]
Follow-up Step 8: Send Another Fax/Email/Letter/Card
Your client needs to hear from you often so that you become permanently bonded. Keep sending follow-up notes and jokes. If you become best friends with your clients, it will be natural to keep doing these things.
Exercise
What is going to be your standard eighth follow-up? Write another letter that you could send after you’ve helped them improve their business in some way.
Follow-up Step 9: Offer More Help to Succeed
What else can you do to help your clients succeed? Perhaps you could take them to a seminar or give a seminar at their location. You could give them a training course on some topic they are having trouble with or that would help their business. You could help them find new personnel or alert them to important trends in their market. We are working with a restaurant chain that is offering business owners lunch and learns as a way to bond better with companies in their area. This gives them an excuse to call business owners and invite them to something cool. If you feel that sales training, marketing training, or management training would be valuable to your client, and you can get a good group together or even offer something over the Web, you will find many training companies willing to provide you with their content as a way to gain more exposure. (Mine certainly can.)
By this ninth follow-up step, you are becoming a valuable asset and trusted confidant to your clients. This breeds remarkable customer loyalty so that customers will feel like they are engaging in a personal betrayal if they buy from a competitor. Loyalty gives you unequaled control over market share and the inside track on every thing your customer is thinking. Since it’s so expensive to gain new clients today, what can you do to establish an unbreakable bond?
Exercise
What’s your ninth follow-up procedure? Write down the types of seminars or training courses that you could give them. What could you do that would lock you in as a valuable asset and trusted confidant?
Follow-up Step 10: The Ultimate Follow-Up; Invite Them to Your Home or Be Invited to Theirs
When you have them in your home or they have you in theirs, you know you have done fantastic follow-up. Here are some revealing quotes from top producers on the importance of this step:
“Every important client I have has dined in my home.”
“Half the people at my wedding were my clients.”
“From their dreams to their hobbies, to their children’s hobbies, I know every thing about my top clients.”
Exercise
What is going to be your standard 10th follow-up procedure? How will you invite clients to your home? What can you do at your home that sounds too irresistible to refuse? Can you put on an art show and get a local gallery to come and put its artwork all over your house? Can you challenge a local restaurant to prepare a gourmet feast for your private dinner party? Write a letter or a phone script that would be appropriate for your top client.
Conclusion
Bonding is every thing. Your ultimate goal is that all of your biggest clients also become your best friends. Become involved in their lives and in the success of their businesses. Make it your personal mission to help them succeed. The bottom line is that you need to do follow-up or you will be mediocre. With a fantastic, structured follow-up, you will propel yourself so far above your competitors that they won’t be able to touch you or your clients.
All Systems Go
Setting Goals, Measuring Effectiveness, and Activating Your Master Plan
Goal setting and measuring effectiveness is the 12th core skill area of the Ultimate Sales Machine, and it’s designed to soup up all 11 that come before it. According to the Ultimate Sales Machine mind-set, setting goals is not simply about writing them down periodically, although that is a part of it, but about mastering your focus so that achieving those goals happens quickly and automatically. This chapter will help you to not only