Who Should Send Meeting Follow-up E-mails and Letters?
Of we have sent your clients introductory letters and emails to get meetings. We have reminded the clients that you will see them in meeting confirmation letters and e-mails. Once you have held meeting, someone must send a follow-up letter. An earlier post described how to prepare follow-up e-mails and letters. Who on your team should send them?
After a team from a professional firm has a sales meeting with a client, someone often asks who should send follow-up e-mails to whom. Sometimes that follow-up note is the last communication you have with a member of the client team before the company decides whom to hire. You want that last communication to be powerful.
Of course, every member of the team can send a note to every person on the client team. But that isn’t always best. If the teams are large, the client may feel overwhelmed. Key members of the client team may also pay more attention to one well drafted follow-up note than to a flurry of paper which will inevitably included many redundancies.
There is no answer to that is right for every occasion, but here are some things to consider when assigning follow-up responsibilities:
- Identify relationships you want to build. Usually, you want the senior person on the client team to feel close to the client partner or other senior person your team. So, too, with technical experts from both organizations. If there is an engagement manager on your team, you want the client’s engagement manager to feel that this is someone he wants to work with. In short, the members of your team should each, at the very least, send a follow-up note their counterparts in the client organization.
- Respond to concerns and questions with authority. If a member of the client team has expressed concern or raised a question, she should get a response from the person on your team most suited to address that concern. If it is a technical question, your technical person should follow-up. If it is a question about the commitment of the firm, the senior person on your team should follow-up.
- Maintain and reinforce personal relationships. Anyone on your team who has a business or personal relationship that predates the meeting with a member of the client team should send a personal note to that person afterwards.
- Don’t leave anyone out. Every member of the client team should get a follow-up note from at least one person on yours.
Don’t let a competitor have the last word. Send those follow-up letters and emails.