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Sales Proposal Follow-Up and Close Plan
A sequence built backward from the dates the buyer gave you, where every touch carries something they do not have yet.
River returns a document and a sheet. The document is the sequence: each touch dated, addressed to one named person, and carrying one thing that person does not have yet. The sheet is the timeline, built from the dates the buyer stated rather than from the day you pressed send, with every decision gate marked and every stretch each individual is unreachable blocked out. A touch with nothing attached to it never gets scheduled, and the sequence comes out shorter than a cadence for exactly that reason.
Two ledgers get joined, which is the part nobody does. One holds every date the buyer said out loud, with a note on who said it and where you heard it. The other holds every piece of information you could put in front of them that they do not already hold. A touch is one date crossed with one reason, so the number of defensible touches falls out of the model rather than being a cadence setting somebody chose once and nobody has revisited.
Written for the account executive whose proposal has gone quiet, the manager reviewing a stage that has not moved in three weeks, and anybody who has typed the words just checking in. Run it the week the proposal goes out, since the dates worth anchoring to usually get mentioned before it and forgotten afterwards. The proposal itself is the proposal pack, and the signature mechanics at the far end are the close plan.
Why an empty follow-up costs you something
A reason that carries no information works on a small request and stops working on a large one. Langer, Blank and Chanowitz asked strangers to skip the copier queue, and on the small favour a content-free because performed as well as a real one. On the large favour the no-information and placebic-information groups were identical, both at 0.24 compliance, while a real reason reached 0.42. A signature is a large request, and nothing you send about a proposal is a small one.
Buyer deadlines are also harder than they sound when repeated back to you. The Local Government Act says an item of business may not be considered at a meeting of a principal council unless a copy of the agenda including the item is published in advance. That is the statutory version of a rule most private committees keep informally. Miss the paper deadline and the next slot is a month out, whatever anybody in the room wants.
Ardenmoor Utilities, proposal sent 14 April, incumbent contract expiring 31 July on sixty days' notice. The rep is working to 1 June, which is 48 days. Only one procurement committee sits before that notice date, its paper closes 27 April, and the COO leaves for a conference that morning. The real deadline is 24 April, ten days out, and 79 percent of the runway on the forecast does not exist. Five of the six dates were nowhere in the CRM, living instead in a call recording, an email thread and an automatic reply.
How it works
Pull their dates
Every date the buyer mentioned, with who said it and which call or email it came from.
Find the real gate
The decision that has to clear first, and the paperwork deadline sitting behind it.
Inventory the reasons
Everything you hold or could produce that the buyer does not have in front of them.
Cross the two
One date against one reason per touch, and delete whatever is left without either.
What you get
- A timeline anchored to the buyer's stated dates, with the source recorded against each one
- The real deadline, worked backward through the decision gate that actually has to clear
- One named recipient and one piece of new information behind every touch on the sequence
- Unreachable stretches held per person, so a message waits for the reader who needs it
- A count of the touches you can justify against the touches a cadence would have fired
- The information you would need to create in order to earn one more touch
Common questions
How is this different from a follow-up cadence?
A cadence counts days forward from the day you sent something, using the only calendar it has, which is yours. This counts backward from the gate that has to clear. In the worked example the two produce almost no overlap: the cadence lands three of seven touches after the committee paper had already closed.
We genuinely have nothing new to send.
Then you have fewer defensible touches than your sequence wants, and the honest output is a shorter list plus the specific things that would create one. A reference willing to take a call, a written answer to the objection nobody addressed, a verdict from a sized pilot. Manufacture the reason rather than sending the message without it.
Won't waiting eight days between touches lose the deal?
The gaps in the worked example are 2, 5, 8 and 4 days, and they are set by their calendar rather than by patience. Volume has a cost too: Google asks senders to keep spam rates below 0.3% across a whole domain, which your team spends together on contentless messages.
The buyer has never told us a single date.
Then the first touch asks for three specific ones rather than for an update. When their approval body next meets, what has to be submitted before it, and when the incumbent agreement ends. Those three questions get answered far more often than any request for a status, because each has an easy factual reply.
Why does the auto-renewal date matter so much?
Because it is the deadline nobody puts on a forecast and the one that actually closes the window. At Ardenmoor the contract ends 31 July, notice is due 1 June, and the only committee that can decide before that sits on 5 May. Miss it and the incumbent renews for another year.
Half the sequence is aimed at people who are not our contact.
That is deliberate, because the paper closes on one person's desk and the objection sits in another's. Unreachable stretches are tracked per person, so the security pack goes out before the reviewer's leave and the reference call waits until the COO is back. Blockers of that kind are the blocker brief.
What if the committee says no?
Then you have the timeline that produced the answer, dated, with what was in front of whom on each date. That is a far better input to a review than anyone's recollection a month later. Reading it back is the post-mortem, and the price objection behind it is the three-year comparison.
Sales Proposal Follow-Up and Close Plan
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