Demo Follow Up and Further Meetings

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Depending on the cost and complexity of your solution, your prospects probably won’t be purchasing directly from you at the point of demo, or immediately thereafter. There will likely be some sort of follow-up required. In the best-case scenario, that might be sending the prospect a contract that she can e-sign immediately. Fantastic! It might be sending a proposal with pricing options as discussed in your demo. It might be the delivery of some key information to help with the decision-making process and to address objections that arose in the demo, like ROI proofs, and so on. Or it might be a further demo or meeting with another stakeholder whose agreement is required to progress to a sale. There are many permutations.

However, regardless of which variety of follow-up item is required, the approach to executing them all is largely the same. Firstly, you must directly and concretely state what the next action is. Remember our discussion above about contracting for each next step? This is where it becomes very important to guard against spending your time on useless opportunities and to hold your prospect accountable with those micro-contracts. Don’t resort to, “Well, I’ll send you some information. Let me know what you think!” Instead, you should concretely articulate the state of the deal, what you will do, and what the prospect will do in return.

If there is a further meeting required, calendar it. If another decision-maker needs to be involved, propose getting a meeting on the calendar with all three of you. If your prospect is going to consume some information that you have delivered or discuss the solution with his team or simply consider the information you’ve shared, that’s fine. But set a specific follow-up appointment to discuss the outcome of those actions. By doing this, you’re making it clear that you won’t be chasing him around via unresponded-to emails or phone calls, and that if he’s going to promise to do it, you’re going to hold him accountable. Partly this is to dissuade him from faking interest. If he’s not actually interested, or only partially so, putting a call on the calendar where you will jointly review follow-up materials will make him think twice about asking for a proposal just so he doesn’t have to say no. So if you get, “Let’s touch base in a month or so,” the response to that is, “Fantastic, let’s get that calendared right now and set the agenda that we’ll be reviewing—namely, what’s keeping us from progressing right now, and whether it has changed.”

By setting these meetings, you are minimizing the risk that open-ended tasks will derail your opportunity. Meetings are a great way of doing this, but you can also use methods like setting a CRM task for yourself as a reminder to note whether the prospect executed on their commitment (“Did Jeff get back to me about pricing?”). If the micro-contract was articulated in an email (which I recommend, even if it was already made over the phone or in person—better to memorialize it in text), then there are helpful tools like Boomerang, Yesware, and Tout that let you bring an email thread back into your inbox at an appointed time, depending on whether or not the recipient responded. In the case of these micro-contracts, I like to set the backstop to bring the thread back into my inbox regardless of whether the prospect responded to it, because I would hate to forget about it just because he responded with a quick, “Yep!”

Then, once a micro-contract for the next action is concretely agreed, execute on it as quickly as possible. This is one of the reasons why in Prospect Outreach and Demo Appointment Setting we discussed the importance of having time blocked directly after a demo to allow for immediate execution of follow-up actions. If you have to jump right into another demo, you will be less likely to immediately execute on your part of the micro-contract, which puts you at risk of forgetting about it. I have found that prospect commitments have a time decay rate. The faster you deliver on the part that you owe them, the faster and more likely they are to execute on their commitment. So in addition to being clear about who owes whom what, be quick in the delivery of what you promised.

​important​While there are different permutations of follow-up based on what was discussed in the call, there is a set of actions that I feel should always be included. You need to always follow up a demo with a summary email, ideally in the thread that set the appointment (or perhaps in your demo reminder email) to provide continuity. By systematizing this, you’ll always have a virtual venue where you can deliver on the commitments you made in your call, and provide a digital trail for your prospect to refer back to. In addition to whatever items you committed to deliver in that follow-up email, I am a big fan of including the version of the sales presentation you used in the call, as we discussed in the Early-Stage Sales Materials Basics chapter. You may have had an amazing demo, and blown their socks off, but human memory is a fickle thing. If you send a deck, with any appendix slides that were particularly important, you’re guarding yourself against lapses in recollection.

And like the generic objection loop that we discussed above, this post-meeting follow-up loop continues after every meeting, unless the opportunity is either closed-won, or closed-lost.