What to send after a sales call so it gets forwarded

The call went well. They asked good questions, you had good answers, and everyone agreed to talk again.

Then they hung up and had to explain you to people who were not on it.

Forrester's 2024 State of Business Buying report found that 13 people, on average, are involved in a business buying decision, and 89 percent of purchases involve two or more departments. It also found that 86 percent of B2B purchases stall at some point along the way.

So what you send after a sales call is not a thank you note. It is the version of you that gets forwarded into rooms you will never sit in.

Send it the same day

Same day, while they still remember the conversation the way you do. By next week they will remember it the way somebody else summarized it.

Write it to the person you talked to, but assume it will be read by someone who has never heard your name. The engineer forwards it to purchasing. Purchasing forwards it to the plant manager. Each of them gives it a few lines before deciding whether to keep reading.

What goes in it

The reason they called, in their words. If they said the current supplier keeps missing ship dates, write that. Their own sentence shows you listened, and it reminds everyone downstream why this conversation is happening at all.

The one answer they asked for. A lead time, a tolerance, a material, a rough range. If you promised to find out, find out before you hit send. That answer is worth more than everything else in the email.

One piece of proof that matches. Not the whole capabilities deck. The one part, project or customer closest to what they described.

Something they can forward. A short piece that explains who you are without you in the room. More on that below.

The next step, with a date. "Send drawings by Thursday and we will quote by the 15th" is a next step. "Let me know if you have questions" is not.

What to leave out

Most of what usually gets attached.

In 2019, Gartner surveyed more than 1,000 B2B customers and found 89 percent rated the information they came across during their purchase as high quality. Quality was not the issue. Gartner found that when good information piled up and contradicted itself, buyers were 153 percent more likely to settle for something smaller and less disruptive than they had planned.

That is what a stack of attachments does to a buyer. Six PDFs, three of them overlapping, one of them out of date. The person forwarding it has to sort it out first, and usually they will not.

A year earlier, Gartner reported the other side of it. Customers who received helpful information that made the purchase easier were three times as likely to buy the bigger, more expensive option, with less regret.

Helpful means it answers their next question. Not every question you can think of.

The piece that does the explaining

Aspen Irrigation runs almost entirely on referrals. Before the video, every lead got the same thing: twenty minutes on the phone with the owner, explaining who he is, how he works and why he is worth hiring. Every time, before any work was scheduled.

We spent one shoot day at a full irrigation install, three or four hours filming him and his crew trenching and running lines. Then we sat down with him in the yard for his founder story. The finished film runs two minutes.

Now when someone reaches out, he sends the link. By the time they talk, the prospect already knows who they are dealing with. He has used it for years, and he never built a website or posted much on social.

Aspen sends it before the first conversation. For a manufacturer, the same kind of piece earns its place right after the first call, because the people who most need it were not on the call. Your contact heard you explain it. The CFO did not.

Other clients use theirs the same way. Carlos at JD Paint Pros sends his case study video, which runs under two minutes, to nearly everyone who reaches out. Shield Security Doors sends its highlight video out in sales conversations.

Where video does not help

If they asked for a number, send the number. A film is not a quote, and it does not answer a question about lead time or tolerance.

It also cannot save a call that did not land. If the conversation went nowhere, a video will not fix that.

What it can do is the explaining you would otherwise repeat on every call, in the same words every time, for people you will never meet.