How to Recontact Prospects to Get Your First 10 Customers in B2B

There’s always an excuse to get in front of a customer and show something. – Michael Wolfe, Vontu Co-Founder and Startup Advisor

It’s best to always keep the initiative with prospects. To land your first 10 customers, don’t expect to be called back to meet again.

If you’re tackling your prospects’ top two or three problems and you left a good impression when you met; getting another meeting shouldn’t be too difficult. Prospects like to see progress; they like to know that the information they shared had an impact.

Perhaps for the first solution meeting you’ll share your insights from the market to make them smarter in their job, and for the second meeting you’ll show more of the product (screenshots, prototype, demo, etc). There’s always a reason to get in front of a customer.

To avoid sounding like every salesperson in the world, the best thing to do is tell the prospect that you’re looking for advice or coaching. You value their perspective and you’re looking for mentoring. This is how you turn business stakeholders into coaches.

Script to Recontact Prospects

You should reach back to every prospect that shared the problem that your solution is solving regardless of your initial impressions. You can share your one-pager with a short message:

Good morning Mr. Smith, (Personalization – this message is from a real person)

Thank you again for taking the time to meet with us. We were able to make good progress on a solution to help you reach local customers more effectively. (Where we’re coming from, problem tackled – what came out of the last discussion)

We’d like to hear your perspective and advice on our solution. Would you be available for a quick 20-minute chat in the upcoming weeks? (Ask, call to action – what are the possible next steps)

We also collected a lot of market intelligence that I’m sure, would be useful in your work. We’d like to share those insights with you. (WIIFM – what’s in it for me)

Thank you, I look forward to catching up.

[Your Name]

If the prospect is not willing to meet to look at the solution or have a product sold to him, you can ask them to help validate the pitch. These prospects can often connect you to new leads.

However, if the prospect accepts the meeting, you move on to the pitch. Time to put your best foot forward…

More on Your First 10 Customers

• How to Find Your First Customers When Your Startup is Ready to Sell
• Why Startup Founders Shouldn’t Outsource Sales in Early Stage Startups