Follow-up and Service After the Sale

You have made the sale. Now what? Some sales people believe that follow-up after the sale is just as important as making the sale. That's when your relationship with a customer can mature and develop into loyalty to your product.

However, I’ve seen many Sales Professional moving on to other prospects, and no longer paying attention to the customer he had won over. Why is that so? Maybe he thinks the job is done once the prospect is converted into a customer. It will be a big mistake, because the customer can always switch to buying from others if the service is not forth-coming.

The trick here is to make the customer your best friend. Lunch with him, talk to him or her about family, hobbies, events, personalities, etc. Get close him in a way you know best. Spend time with the customer. Do not ignore him after the sale is made. I know of colleagues playing mahjong and football with their customers. Some went for movies together, while other share their stories on financial investments.

Building long-term relationships with customers allows you to leverage or make additional use of your initial investment of time and money spent selling to that customer. In other words, you don't have to spend time prospecting, qualifying and conducting other pre-sales activities for that particular customer again. You save lots of time!

There is no better advertising than a satisfied customer. Good follow-up and service after the sale will:

·         establish and maintain your good reputation,

·         build goodwill between you customers and your business,

·         and generate repeat and referral business.

One example I witnessed involved this Sales Professional marketing Cable Tray to Offshore Rigs. He made such good efforts winning over the customer (and even playing mahjong together) that every time the customer (it is big shipbuilder in Singapore) win a rig building contract, he gets the cable tray contract. Many competitors wanted that piece of the business, but they don’t stand a chance.

Many Sales Professionals develop a system of getting clients the easy way and using relationship marketing to generate easy sales. I will discuss this in my next post.