It’s Never Over Until The Fat Lady Sings

The after sale reality check is where you confirm the sale and manage future expectations as to how you will effectively implement or execute your solution. Most salespeople have been wrongly schooled to evacuate immediately before the door hits them in the behind and the newly minted customer changes their mind.

In the after sale reality check you want to ask your customer if they have any questions or reservations about moving forward. Always allow the customer the freedom to change their mind. What kind of salesperson would do something as silly as that? The answer is, a confident salesperson who believes in their solution and one who honors their customer’s independent thought process. If someone is going to back out on you, now is the time to find that out since you have a chance to salvage the deal. What you want to avoid at all costs is the email message when you return to the office that says they’ve changed their mind and they’re going to put your order on hold. You also want to avoid the frustration of all the inconvenient follow-ups that will naturally happen as you try to salvage the deal to no avail.

Here are some specific questions to ask to post-sell your new customer, and do damage control on potential buyers’ remorse, second thoughts, and hidden objections.

• “Knowing that XYZ is a fierce competitor, what will happen when they come back to you with a counter offer that is 20% lower than my price?”
• “I know you have had a long standing relationship with your rep at XYZ. When they call you next week and beg you to reconsider, how are you going to handle that? When they patiently outline all the time they‘ve spent, the dinners they’ve provided you over the years and all the times they’ve gotten you out of some tight spots, how will you answer them?”
• “Can you think of anything that would have you change your mind or anything that could possibly derail this order?”

Another form of future damage control is to prepare your customer for how the execution of your solution will specifically go down. Since any execution of your solution can’t always be 100% perfect, you should specifically go over all the possible problems, trouble areas, or sensitive areas where issues can arise that will require close communication and detailed project management. This also includes all the down and dirty details, all the potential difficulties that might arise, and the new behaviors or beliefs that will be necessitated to implement something new. You need to have a constructive dialogue on how to project manage the change and decide when to have progress reviews on all the key milestones of the implementation. You decide in advance what success looks like and what constitutes failure. You will need to get feedback from your customer on such things as logistics, working arrangements, how hands-on the customer wants to be, how often they want to be brought up to date and what will be the preferred line of communication.

This is the initial juncture where you start to build a future relationship on trust, confidence and your ability to project manage and service your customer’s future needs. Because the customer's state of satisfaction is at its height, this is an excellent time to ask for introductions or to set the stage that if you do a good job of managing and servicing their account you will be asking them for introductions in the future. Introductions from your customer will be a way to reward you for a job well done and to allow the time to closely manage their account since you won’t have to spend time away from their account prospecting for new business.

This is also a good time to audit and research your new customer as to what you did right or wrong in your pursuit to win their trust and business.