Where deals actually die
Not in the call. In the ninety minutes after it, when you go straight into the next call, and then the one after that, and by six o'clock you have four sets of half-remembered notes and no idea who promised to send what.
Two weeks later you are reading the line spoke to Dave, seemed positive, and you have absolutely no idea what happens next. Neither does Dave.
Follow-up is the least glamorous part of selling and the part where AI saves you the most time, because turning mess into structure is exactly what it is built for.
In plain English
- Next step:
- A specific action with a name and a date attached. Will circle back soon is not a next step.
- Action item:
- Something one named person committed to doing, from either side of the call.
- Recap email:
- The short message you send after a call confirming what was agreed, in writing.
- Pipeline:
- All the deals you are currently working on, and roughly how likely each one is.
Dump the mess, get the structure
Do not try to write neat notes during the call. Writing neatly is a second job and it stops you listening. Type fragments, or talk into your phone for ninety seconds afterwards while it is fresh, and then let AI do the tidying.
Below are my rough notes from a sales call. They are fragmentary and
out of order. Turn them into:
- SUMMARY: five bullets on what was discussed
- WHAT THEY CARE ABOUT: what seemed to matter most to them
- ACTIONS: who committed to what, by when. Use their name or mine.
- OPEN QUESTIONS: things left unresolved
- MISSING: anything a colleague reading this would need that is not here
Use only what is in my notes. If something is unclear, put it under
MISSING rather than filling it in yourself.
MY NOTES:
[paste the mess]
That MISSING section is the useful one. It tells you what you failed to ask while there is still time to ask it, which is a gift you cannot give yourself any other way.
Before you paste anything from a call into a chatbot, strip out the customer's full name, company name if it is sensitive, contract values, account numbers and anything covered by a confidentiality agreement. Describe them as the finance director at a mid-size retailer. The structure you get back is identical, and the customer's details never leave your control.
About recording and transcripts
If you use a tool that records or transcribes calls, two rules. Tell people you are recording, every time, before you start. And check what your company allows, because in a lot of places consent is a legal requirement rather than a courtesy.
A transcript pasted into an AI assistant is a large amount of somebody else's words sitting in a third party system. That is fine when your company has approved the tool and the customer knows. It is not fine as a personal shortcut you decided on quietly.
Checkpoint
Strip names, account numbers and contract values before pasting call notes anywhere, and describe the customer by role and company type instead.
The follow-up that does not nag
The recap email has one job: to make the agreement real. Written down, with names and dates on it, so that in three weeks nobody has to remember anything.
Write a short follow-up email after a call, based on the summary below.
Structure:
- One line on what we agreed, no preamble
- The actions as a short list, with who and by when
- One question I still need answered
- A clear next step with a proposed date
Rules: under 130 words. No thanking them for their time twice.
Do not use great to connect or as discussed. Plain and useful.
SUMMARY:
[paste the structured summary]
Now the harder one. The second and third follow-up, when they have gone quiet.
The instinct is to apply gentle pressure, which reads as pressure and produces silence. The better move is to make replying nearly effortless and to give them a graceful way out. Counter-intuitively, offering the out is what gets the reply.
Write a follow-up to someone who has not replied in [12] days.
Context: we spoke about [topic] and they said they needed [the thing].
Rules:
- Under 60 words
- Do not use: just checking in, circling back, bumping this,
touching base, wanted to see if
- Add one genuinely useful thing: an answer to their open question,
a relevant example, or a change on our side
- End by making a no easy: give them a one line reply option
The best follow-up carries something new. A message that only says are you still interested asks the reader to do all the work, which is why it gets ignored. A message that answers the question they raised is worth opening.
Writing to the CRM without hating your life
Whatever your CRM asks for, it wants the same handful of fields, and your structured summary already contains them. Ask for the summary reformatted to fit, once, then save that prompt and reuse it forever.
The whole loop takes about four minutes: ninety seconds of voice notes, one summary prompt, one recap email prompt, one paste into the CRM. The alternative is remembering. Remembering is where deals go quiet.
Keep your judgement in the loop
AI will happily summarise a call into confident bullet points that flatten the important thing. It cannot hear the pause before they answered the question about budget, or the fact that the person who mattered said almost nothing.
So after you read the summary, add one line of your own at the bottom: what you actually think is going on. That line will be worth more in three weeks than everything above it.
๐ Quiz
Question 1 of 4Why is the MISSING section the most useful part of a call summary prompt?