Building Trust & Follow-Up Tips

We want to ensure that you’re getting the very best out of the BANT Appointments we generate for you, so we created this blog to share with you our experience of selling ourselves. We want to provide you with a consistent source of income through:

• Providing you with good quality BANT Appointments that give you a lot of insight into a customer’s current situation
• Helping you to make the most out of these opportunities by sharing with you a method of closing deals that we use ourselves

Customers pick the company that’s best suited to them

What is it that usually makes a customer say yes to you over someone else? Is it the cheapest price? The features you provide? Your brand image?

The short answer is: it’s not one thing that will make them say yes to you over someone else. There are so many different things that could make them say yes, so how do you know how to position yourself?

What’s the biggest mistake that salespeople make?

The biggest mistake that salespeople make is blabbing on, telling the customer everything about their company, most of which is completely irrelevant to the customer’s situation.

The result? The customer gets bored with your droning sales pitch, moves on to someone else and you lose the sale.

There’s a lot of mini-yes’ that a customer needs to go through before they can say the big ‘yes’ to a specific company. Who do they choose? The one that’s most relevant to their situation.

Outline of our sales process

This sales process isn’t about specific sales techniques, it’s about helping the customer to see that your company ticks all the right boxes for them:

1. Find out – Asking the right questions to arm yourself with key bits of information
2. Match needs – Making it incredibly easy for them to know what they need to know about you
3. Be helpful – Being proactive and super helpful when it comes to helping the customer answer all of the questions they need to answer
4. Hold them to timescales – Structuring the conversation in such a way that you can get an answer from them sooner, rather than later

Nothing to it, eh? Like I said, we’re not here to tell you what to do, this is about showing you ways that we’ve found has worked for us.

What they know about you

It’s likely that we’ll have spoken with them several times, including sending a several emails about you. Sometimes this can be over the course of a year or so before we actually secure the BANT appointments, so they’ll have an established dialogue with your company.

If they wanted to, they may have also subscribed to the ongoing email marketing that we have set up for you.

BANT Appointments – What you know about them 

You’ll have all the information that we include in the BANT Appointments. This is always worked out prior to the campaign, but to give you an idea of what we include it’s usually:

• That you have BANT Appointments booked with this company and they’re expecting a quote from you
• An idea of their decision making process after the quote
• That you’re speaking to the right person
• An idea of the reasons behind their drive to change
• That the site is in a specific area and of the right size for you 
• An idea of when they wanted to change 
• An idea of their opinion of flex in their budget
• The fact that they aren’t happy with their current supplier and why

Make sure that you review this information and anticipate what things they’ll ask about so that you’re prepared

Questions, questions, questions

I’m sure you’ve gotten this already, but the method behind the approach is “arm yourself with information at every stage”. The more you know, the easier it is for you to be the most relevant company to their needs

Your BANT Appointments are a chance to ask great questions to find out even more about 

• Their current supplier’s misdeeds (let them vent, but it’s generally best for you not to add to criticisms as you don’t want it to seem like you’re bagging on your competitors. It’s always better to take the high road)
• Even ask their current budget (it’s not too difficult to get this, as long as you precede asking with ‘if you don’t mind me asking….’. That seems to be enough of a softener)
• You can even get more information on bits of the info we supplied you with the BANT Appointments by phrasing it in a ‘confirming’ manner e.g. “So you mentioned to my colleague that you haven’t heard from the Area Manager in a while?”

The stages of following up 

There seems to be a few stages and things to check to following up on sales;

1. Do they like the proposal and what we’re suggesting? Are there any changes that need to be made?
2. Is our contact they happy with the price? Are we changing the proposal?
3. Does the Area Manager/Finance/CEO also like what we have to offer?
4. Are we happy to go ahead in principle?
5. Payment terms/agreement/notice to current supplier
6. Alleviating customer concerns 

You may have more or less stages, but from our experience these seem to be ones that companies usually go through. As the sales person, it’s your job to ensure that all of this goes through without incident. That’s no easy task! 

As you know, the great thing is this can all be handled with persistence and a little creativity