The Best Way to Follow Up With Clients (Without Being a Pest)

Working with clients can be a tricky process at times, especially when you're trying to sell them on something. You need to keep your client engaged and communicating to move forward with ideas and projects, and sometimes it feels like you're constantly chasing them for the simplest of answers. So in this episode, we're talking about the best ways to follow up with clients without being annoying or desperate so you can develop a trusted, responsive relationship. Sit tight. I will be right back. Hello heroes, and welcome to the Chem Club podcast, a show that is on mission to help busy key account managers get results. I'm your host, Warwick Brown, and together we'll explore tips, tricks and trends to help you grow client revenue, crush customer retention, and build a successful career in key account management. Now, in an ideal world, everyone would get everything they needed in a single interaction. That's just not how it works. No matter what the scenario, there's always lots of backwards and forwards between stakeholders. Now we need to follow up with clients for lots of reasons. Not just to close a sale, but to ask a question, to get a decision, to share information, or just reminders. So think of follow up as an extended series of conversations and not a single event. Your goal is to build on the trust that you've already established by serving the client. Just ask yourself, what does my client need from me? It's honestly the best filter through which to view whether or not you should be reaching out to your client and what you're going to say when you do. So let's think about before you decide to follow up with a client. Before you write that email, before you pick up that phone call, before you schedule that meeting. Think about what questions and objections might remain related to the topic at hand. Think about how you'll refine your solution or your message. And think about how you're going to continue to follow up and maintain contact and exert influence with that stakeholder or multiple stakeholders. Because follow up is rarely one and done, think about the next few steps ahead. So you're always on the front foot. So what will you say? I mean, typically when you follow up, you're trying to either re emphasize the value, you're going to share insights and ideas, or you're going to continue to educate. Typically the three forms of follow up, I guess reminders are in there too, but you've got to be really cautious about being an chasing and chasing and chasing, asking people to take action, reminding them. As per my previous email, there's a time and place for that for sure, but we just don't Always need to be so heavy handed or blunt with our interactions when we follow up. So when you're thinking about follow up, there's a few tips and tricks that I wanted to talk about that can really help get your client to respond. I should say when we're talking about follow up here, not just talking about, hey, you said you'd send me this copy of an invoice. I'm still waiting. Very low level transactional tasks. I'm talking about follow up in the context of getting a decision on a big idea, trying to close a deal, getting a client to renew, discussing contractual terms and conditions issue, major issue resolution. So big rocks, you know, that's what I'm talking about in the context of this conversation today. Not gentle reminders to get clients to do something that they promised. That's sort of standard operational procedure stuff that's out of scope for this. So in the context of a much bigger project or a much bigger deal or anything else that needs consistent follow up to get the project to close, to get the decision made, that's what we're exploring. So before you do that follow up, there's a few things I want you to think about as you review your previous interactions and plan your next interactions. First is to know your client. Ask deeper questions to uncover needs. You may be jumping to solution mode too quickly and perhaps you need to invest a little bit more time in the discovery stage. I've got an article called 45 Best Questions to ask your client to get to know them. I will post a link to those in the show notes which you can catch@tkcpodcast.com 0112 speed counts. Follow up shortens the decision cycle, so don't wait. The longer you leave it, the more likely your client's going to forget. They're going to lose interest or they'll be bogged down in analysis paralysis. Make it easy. Simplify. Help your client to make decisions or to engage. Set goals. Think about, well, who do you want to connect with? What are you going to say and how long do you need? Plan out the whole timeline. Speaking of planning, have a plan. Each follow up is not an isolated event, you know, it's a connected series of conversations. So you want to plan each interaction from the start and you want to pace yourself so you don't look desperate or come across as pushy. This is really important when you're talking about nurturing leads, when you're talking about closing deals, you want to give them enough time to read and absorb the information that you've shared to engage with their internal stakeholders. But you also want to make sure you maintain momentum. So you might plan out a series of interactions over, you know, the course of 28 days. Days, whatever your nurture cycle looks like. But definitely very valuable to think about the planning of your whole conversation. Set Follow up during the initial contact. This is so important. During your first email or your meeting, establish the follow up deadlines and processes. Follow up should be scheduled and intentional, not random and out of the blue. If you lay out from the very beginning, this is what I'm expecting with this project. Here's a project plan. Here are the milestones, here are the key dates, here are the go no go times. Same with the here's where I intend to submit the proposal. Here's when we should review the proposal. Here's when you should be making a decision. Here's when we do the contracting. Whatever it is, lay it all out up front so it gives you a plan, it gives you time frames and you're much more in control. Make follow up a habit. Commit dedicated time for follow up and review outstanding items daily. You might have a separate folder. That's how I do it. I have a hold folder where I store everything that's pending. Or you might use features like Outlook has the follow up feature and Gmail Email has nudges and snooze so that pending emails can surface to the top of your inbox. But regardless of the system that you use, when you review your outstanding items, you want to ask yourself, how can I move the conversation along? Or remove barriers. Next tip is to be direct. Ask for what you want and be clear about next steps, decisions, needed outcomes, etc. Etc. I guess that's along the same lines as make it easy, my earlier recommendation. And finally to summarize, follow up should be focused. Recap your main points and any decisions or discussions. Especially if you've already had a ton of email exchanges, the original request could get lost. And I talk about this in an episode six, which is how to write emails. Your clients will actually read the importance when you start to get into this forward, on forward, on forward that you pause, recalibrate, re summarize and you know, get the attention on the items that are outstanding. All right, well, there's just a few tips on, you know, effective follow up. One thing I wanted to talk about though is do you avoid follow up? I know that's something that I have been guilty of very much in the past for a lot of reasons, and here's some of them that you might be feeling. Maybe you're shy or you lack some confidence. Maybe you're worried your client's going to feel obligated. Maybe it just feels salesy or cheesy. Maybe you feel like you're begging. Maybe you just don't like to ask for help, or you just don't want to feel like a pest, or you're intimidated by the person that you're asking. You might feel out of your depth, you know, your comfort zone or your expertise. You could be disorganized or you could be procrastinating or which is quite a new thing. And something that I'm really alert to now is fear of the telephone. We don't use it anywhere near as much as we used to and getting on a call can actually make me break out in a sweat sometimes. Your client needs you to follow up. Just remember that it's not about being a pain in the ass. They want you to help them make decisions and reduce overwhelm. You have your client's best interests at heart, right? Remember that. So whatever your reservations are about following up, keep a positive mindset and remember that it's for the best of reasons. It's because you care. That is the reason you're chasing them. That's the reason why you want to keep this conversation going. And of course practice makes perfect. Now look, there may come a time when it's appropriate to give up. At some point in the follow up conversation you may end up hitting that wall of silence. But before you let go, make sure that you can look yourself in the mirror and say I gave it my best shot. I tried every avenue possible and every type of communication I could to get in touch. I didn't rely just on email. And I still have a good relationship with my client because if there is a lack of response, it may be symptomatic of a wider relationship issue. And that's what we want to make sure is not the case. You know that they're not responding because they're not interested in whatever you're discussing. Not that they hate you if I'm being blunt. And I explore this in a lot more detail in my video why clients ghost you and what to do about it. So I'll pop a link to that in the show notes as well. Reminder. Catch those@tkcpodcast.com 012 inside the show notes I've also got a list of the forms of communication from most effective to least effective because I don't want you relying on email alone. Use the communication channels your clients prefer. If you're not sure what they are, ask them. And if you're not getting an answer, mix it up. Some forms of communication are more suited for certain types of follow ups. So I talk about face to face, voice to voice, but video, email and text messaging and you know what they're what kind of follow up they're best for. So check that out in the Show Notes as well. I'm not going to go through here because it's just a list and it's very simple for you to read it and apply it as required. Now would you like to have your say on the future of key account management? Well, now you can demand Pharma publishing a report on the future of key account management. This report is going to cover how organizations can achieve key account excellence in this decade. They're reaching out to sales and key account management leaders to help them know their predictions about key account management and you can be a part of this study. I'll pop a link in the Show Notes, but it's a really exciting opportunity to share your thoughts about where account management is headed. And that's not all. As a thank you for your time for every individual response, they'll be donating $10 to the Malala Fund to support the fight for girls education around the world. And if you're not sure who Demand Farm are or what they do, they are all about making account planning effortless, scalable, collaborative and data driven by digitizing key account management best practices so you can be more effective. So check them out@demandfarm.com I have a couple of resources I thought I'd share with you related to Follow Up. The first is a fantastic book called Follow up and Close the Sale. Make easy and effective Follow up your winning habit. I love this book because it addresses follow up mindset, it addresses follow up strategy and it has useful templates as well as examples of what to say, what not to say to make sure that your follow up is effective and it gets you the results you're looking for. I highly recommend this book. Links to Follow up and Close the Sale are in the Show Notes. And another useful tool is followupthen.com it promises free and easy email reminders. Now I've used this myself. You can very quickly clear out your inbox by sending your pending emails to their email servers. There's nothing to install, there's no software or the way that it works is that you send the email using a structured email address. So for example, you might say 3dayshollowupthen.com your email will be returned back to you in exactly 72 hours. Or you might say tomorrow 4pm@followup then.com so it's a really simple email convention to remember and if you do find yourself using a lot of follow up and constantly chasing people and you have an enormous appending folder which is what I used to have, I'd be constantly firing out emails and people would never reply to me. I'd be constantly chasing them. Having this system where you just bcc the time you want to remind yourself to chase and see if you've got an answer is brilliant. So check it out followup then.com all right heroes, that is a wrap on this episode of the Cam Club podcast all about how to follow up with your clients without being a pest. Check out the show notes tkcpodcast.com don't forget about the Demand Farm Future of Key Account Management Study. Would love you to be a part of that. And until next time, bye for now.