Recap Emails: Better Follow-Up for More Wins

 

You’ve just had a great discovery call with a qualified prospect.

You’ve both agreed to meet next week for a demo, and your champion has agreed to invite the economic buyer to the call. You need to ensure that they follow through and show up to the demo, while also setting yourself apart from the other vendors that they’re evaluating. A tight recap email is a great way to do this.

Related: How I Closed 50% More by Systematizing My Sales Follow-Up Process

What’s the purpose of a recap email?

A recap email serves several purposes. It creates accountability, it provides value to your prospect by providing a clear roadmap for their evaluation, it gives you the opportunity to update key stakeholders on both sides, and it adds a crispness to your process that will set you apart from the reps at competing companies that your prospect is surely talking to.

We’ll look at each point below, and then provide a post-call email template that you can use after your discovery calls. Your prospects will love it!

Create accountability with your recap email

When composing the recap email, you’re boiling down all of your discovery into two to four key points that you and your prospect need to solve with your solution. You should be summarizing this with your prospect on the call, but you’ll also want to reinforce this via your recap email, making it clear as to why you’re both agreeing to move forward with a formal evaluation.

Additionally, you’re confirming the date, time, purpose, and agenda of your next call, as well as who should be in attendance. Making all of this clear creates accountability on both sides. Everyone knows what’s expected and why.

Provide value with a clear evaluation roadmap

Chances are this is a big decision for your prospect. We’ve all been on the other side of this whether in our professional lives, or personally when buying a house, or a car, or planning a vacation. With big decisions, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. By clearly laying out the key points of your conversation, next steps, why those next steps, as well as who should be involved, you’re making this easy on your prospect, and you’re eliminating friction that may stall or kill a deal.

Give you the opportunity to pull in key stakeholders

It’s increasingly rare to have a perfectly linear sales process with a sole decision-maker. What’s more typical is that the economic buyer will task a department head with evaluations. The department head, your champion, will often pull in end-users who will become either influences, coaches, or blockers, as well as technical evaluators. You need to bring everyone to the table early to facilitate deal velocity.

The recap email is a great way to loop in the economic buyer and clearly state what challenges you’re solving, and how. The same goes for influencers, blockers, coaches, and technical evaluators.

Last but not least, the recap email is an awesome way to set up some executive alignment between your economic buyer and your VP, or even better, someone in your C-suite. For larger deals, there’s going to be some sort of negotiation. By having the economic buyer and a VP/exec from your side CC’d on the recap email, you’ve established a communication channel early that you’ll be able to leverage come negotiation time.

Run a crisp process to set you apart from competing sales reps

You’re most likely in this deal against at least two other reps at competing companies. People don’t buy solely on features and price. Running a crisp process is an awesome way to build value with the prospect. The recap email does this by showing the prospect that you’ve really listened to them, and have taken the time to learn their business, while also mapping out what’s next. This also reads as responsiveness to the prospect.

Recap email template

We’ve laid out the most common things you should include in your recap email.

Include the following:

  • Subject line referencing your call
  • A recap of the contents of the call
  • Resources to answer any questions
  • Next steps to take leading up to the follow-up call
  • Closing with your name

Subject: Bluebird Sales: recap, resources, next steps

It was great talking with you today, Sarah! For visibility, I’ve CC’d Sharon to get them up to speed on our talks, as well as my VP Ben to help with any questions you may have.

To recap:

  • You’ve invested considerably in a sales engagement platform, but the implementation was botched and as a result, you have several foundational applications that aren’t talking to each other
  • Rep adoption of your sales engagement platform has been poor, and the team needs hands on onboarding to fully realize the value of the platform
  • Your SKO is in January, and you need your SEP to be optimized, integrated, and fully operational in order to onboard your reps during SKO week

Resources:

  • Here’s a case study from a recent client who came to us with the same challenges that you’re up against
  • This link will take you to our services and pricing page, and will serve as a good primer for our next call
  • Lastly, I’m sending along an article from Sales Hacker that provides some great guidelines for best practices when implementing and deploying a sales engagement platform

Next steps:

  • We’ve scheduled a 1-hour solution alignment call for Thursday at 2:00. The Zoom link is in the invite, and I’ve added Sharon to the invite per your recommendation. On the call, we’ll look at our proposed implementation and onboarding plan, how that aligns to your goals and challenges, and we’ll be able to revise where necessary before settling on pricing. If anything comes up between now and then that I’m able to help you with, please reach out.

All the best,

Chris

Related: 11 Must-Follow Rules for B2B Email Introductions

Conclusion

I’m pretty analog with some things, and take my call notes with pen and paper. I punch those notes into my sales engagement platform after the call, set a task to send a follow-up email at 4 p.m., and then I’m right back to work within 10 minutes. The last hour of the day is inbox triage, and sending my post call emails. I leverage a template to get me part of the way there, and then refer back to my notes to bullet out the rest.

After your next discovery call, set yourself up for success by sending a nice succinct recap email. Your prospect will love it because it makes their life easier, you’ll look great against the competition, and you’ll greatly reduce any friction further down in your sales cycle. Happy selling!

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