How To Send A Summary Email After A Sales Call [TEMPLATE]

The only framework you'll need to create a perfect summary email.

Author

Daniel Hebert
March 28, 2024

Often founders don’t add the right details to a summary email after a sales call.

What I’ve seen most folks do is send a sales pitch outlining the features that were shown in the demo.

The problem with this is that the email is about you, not them. You’re flaunting your bells and whistles instead of putting your product in the context of their world.

Why send a detailed follow-up email

There’s really three reasons why you want to do this:

  1. You want a detailed summary so that everyone is on the same page and held accountable to what they said. No mutual mystification in sales. Verify that what you understood from the call is correct.

  2. Emails get forwarded around to other influencers and decision makers. If you don’t clearly outline what the conversation was about, then they cannot follow threads. Make it really easy for your champion to forward the details. Pretend you’re writing this email for folks who weren’t on the cal.

  3. When a prospect ghosts you, you have a detailed summary of why they were speaking to you in the first place. It makes it easier to get them back on track, because you can hold them accountable to what they’ve said.

What to include in your email

Here’s what you should include in the email after a call.

The email should focus on the Objectives & Pains you’ve uncovered. That’s what a sales call is really about.

If you’re deploying the FOUNDER framework in your sales cycles, then this should be fairly easy to do.

Your email should also touch on Uncovering Impact, Negative Consequences, and Driving Events if you’ve uncovered those.

Once you’ve outlined that, you quickly highlight the parts of your solution that are relevant to solving those pains.

You can answer a couple of their outstanding questions.

Then finish off the email with the next steps that were discussed. Add specific dates if those were already agreed upon.

I tend to do all of this in a bulleted list.

Summary Email Template

Here’s a template for the summary email:

Subject: [[Your Company Name]]: [[Call Step]] + Next Steps

Hi [[first_name]] - Appreciate your time on the call today. Was interesting learning about [[problem/workflow]].

So we're both on the same page, here were the highlights. Did I get it right?

-[[Facts, and Objectives and Pain]]

-[[Uncovering Impact and Negative Consequences]]

-[[capabilities gained from using your product]]

-[[Driving Events and Reaching a Decision]]

We agreed that you [[prospect action item after the call]] by [[date]], and that I [[rep action item after the call]] by [[date]]. We'll [[outline mutual next step agreed upon]] on [[date].

If I haven't heard back by [[date]], I'll give you a call at [[prospect number]].

Talk soon,

[[My.first_name]]

You can see that it includes a lot of details from the FOUNDER method. This is how you use the info from your discovery in different parts of your sales process, like the email summary.

Examples of Effective Summary Emails

Here are a few examples of summary emails I’ve sent after demo calls:

Subject: Savio: Demo + Next Steps

Hey Eddie - thanks for the call today. Was interesting learning about your customer feedback process.

Here's the summary, did I get it right?

-You're struggling to consolidate feedback from customers using Typeform and a spreadsheet. CS populates. Collecting feedback from support/Freshdesk as well. No real feedback loop with Sales.

-CTO is running a moneyball approach to dev allocation. Good process after features get decided, not a great process for prioritizing features.

-Revenue focused org. Lots of recency bias. What's going to close the latest deal now. Not always best decision for business as a whole.

-You meet with execs and CTO on Thursdays for in-flight reviews. Often no visibility into what's being worked on. You also have regular meeting where you share feedback on what's important to customers. Met with pushback around "where's the evidence, I never heard of that." Have to scramble in Slack and Gong to find it.

-Savio creates a central repository of feature requests. Collect feedback through the chrome extension from anywhere and attach to hubspot data. Do filtering on ARR + vertical segments. Tie to JIRA for status updates.

-There's also a slack integration that works the same as the chrome extension that we didn't cover, can do that on next demo. You can push feature updates or feedback in there as well for better visibility.

-Pricing for 5 seats = USD$5340/y + $801 implementation = USD$6,141 first year cost

For next steps, you're meeting with your Chief of Staff and Head of Support on Friday to pitch the idea of Savio. If they agree, we'll do a demo with them on March 21st after you're back from vacation.

Talk soon,

Daniel Hebert

Head of GTM

Savio.io - organize and prioritize feature requests linked to revenue metrics in your CRM

Subject: Savio: Demo + Next Steps

Hey guys, thanks for the call today. Was interesting learning more about your feature request process.

Here's the summary, did I get it right?

-Right now, Support is manually adding tickets to JIRA. CS is getting feedback in Hubspot, emails, meetings, and spreadsheets. Sales mostly uses hubspot. Feedback is scattered.

-Stuff only makes its way to JIRA when you have time. Which means there's feedback living everywhere.

-JIRA is becoming unmanageable. There's no way to filter and sort through the feedback by customers.

-Roadmap ends up going to "who argues best"

-Savio gives a single workflow to everyone for submitting feature requests. You get a central repository of all requests linked to customer data so you can segment and prioritize what matters most to your different customers.

-I checked with our team around contacts living in both Intercom and Hubspot. If contacts are rolling up to a company, and the company names are the same in both system, then it should be able to match the properties.

-For Google Sheets - my question would be if it's a one time update? Or are you updating the values there regularly? We can help you create a zapier workflow if the spreadsheet is updated frequently. Recommendation would always be to have the data live in Hubspot because then it exists throughout all integrations and it's up-to-date.

-Pricing for 3 users is USD $4,164 annual + $624 implementation fee = $4,788 first year

For next steps, you need to float this internally. The CEO is the product owner and budget holder so you will need buy-in from them. If I haven't heard back from you in the next few weeks, I'll reach out on progress.

Talk soon,

Daniel Hebert

Head of GTM

Savio.io - organize and prioritize feature requests linked to revenue metrics in your CRM

Subject: Savio: Demo + Next Steps

Hey Emily. Thanks for the call today. Was interesting learning about your feedback process.

Here's what I understood from the call. Did I get it right?

-Product lives in Aha and Jira, CS/Sales/Support lives in Hubspot. You're looking to connect the two worlds to better prioritize feature requests.

-You're deep into the process now. Using Aha to collect customer feedback on voting boards.

-You're still looking because you don't feel you've really landed on the right process yet.

-You want to be able to prioritize features based on prospect dependencies and customer data. You also want frontline teams to have visibility into the roadmap and what's being worked on.

-Savio gives both your frontline and product teams the ability to collect feedback, organize, then manage feature requests tied to Hubpost revenue metrics.

-Closing the loop on the Account/Company object in Hubspot seemed like it would be powerful for your frontline teams.

For next steps, you'll circulate the call recording (pass: kk5oFxP) and let me know when it's a good time to dig deeper on a team demo. If I haven't heard back from you by mid-day Monday Feb 12, I'll reach out.

Talk soon,

Daniel Hebert

Head of GTM

Savio.io - organize and prioritize feature requests linked to revenue metrics in your CRM

A Few Notes

You can see in the examples that none of them are perfect. That’s normal - in sales nothing is ever perfect.

If you use the FOUNDER framework, you’ll get better information from the prospect which makes the summary emails easier to write.

These emails are written so if they’re forwarded around, others would understand the context of the conversation. As you can see, I didn’t just send information about Savio in these emails. I outlined the pains/objectives to add context to why we were demoing Savio.

Summarize the information you have. Sometimes you don’t BAMFAM (book a meeting from a meeting) - that’s OK. Just add a suggested next step in the email. And say you’ll reach out.

These emails are great at creating checkpoints in a sales cycle. Do them after every call.

**EXPERT MOVE: At the end of your call, mention that you will send a summary email. Ask them to review the email and reply that you got everything right. It helps with accountability.

Use this email template after your next call.

For more practical early-stage sales tips, connect with me on LinkedIn.

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