Do you write thank-you notes? If not, you should!
The bane of every child’s gift-giving experience is a necessity in today’s selling evironment. What does it say about you as a salesperson if you send a customer a hand-written note thanking them for their business? Or a hand-written note thanking them for a meeting? It says that you value them as a person and they are not just another customer or commission source.
But how do your thank-you notes read? Usually they are pretty bland and fairly boilerplate. To really connect with the person you are sending them to, they need to be personalized. I came accross this article recently from Ilise Benum with some tips on writing follow-up or thank-you notes. Her main tips include:
1. Set the foundation for follow up while you’re talking. Follow up starts when the conversation starts. As you’re talking, be looking for something to say in your follow up. As soon as it hits you, make a note of it on the back of their card. You can find something in common — a topic of interest, whether personal or professional – or listen for what they may need help with. Then, in your follow up, you offer an idea, a contact or some other resource.
2. Follow up right away to build on the momentum of the conversation, of your freshness in their mind. If too much time passes before you follow up, the conversation may slip into the recesses of their mind or blur with that of someone else they met recently. If you wait, it won’t have as strong of an impact. Do it the next day if possible, or at the very least, sometime before the week is out.
3. Use persuasive copywriting in your follow up. Strive to incorporate persuasion in ALL of your communications. That includes your follow up because follow up is about promoting your services to anyone and everyone you come into contact with.
I’m a big fan of the hand-written note. There’s just something a bit more personal and thoughtful about putting pen to paper/cardstock. I remember getting a hand-written note from one of my local congressmen. The fact that he took the time to write it all out on his own said something about him as an individual and how he approached his job. The same applies for sales people. When your customer sees that you took the time to write a note, it sets you apart from your competitors and helps to enhance your relationship with your customer.
Of course, if you are a really lazy sales person you can fake a handwritten note. Under the “cool but not really useful” section, Fontifier.com can take a handwriting sample and turn your handwriting into a font that you can use in your word processing program.
So what results have you seen from writing notes to your customers?
