Good Morning. If you’re trying to get more reach on LinkedIn, its editor-in-chief has some advice: stop outsourcing your personality to ChatGPT. Dan Roth said in an interview that “what works is being human.” So open up that post editor, and use your keyboard to write your post like it’s 2019. We’ll survive without another perfectly bulleted list of ways to “crush your quota.” Now, let’s get into today’s Follow Up. (:

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It’s Halloween night, and Kelley Thompson just learned that a hotel has canceled her client’s booking while their employees are already on the plane.

Her company, Workgrounds, has arranged the rooms for a corporate trip and has a signed contract with the hotel. 

Now, she needs to make sure the employees have somewhere to sleep when they land.

To make things worse, a convention has filled all the other hotels in town, so moving everyone to another property won’t be easy. Kelley and her four teammates jump on the phones and try to get the original hotel to honor its agreement.

We’ll come back to how they pull it off in a sec. 

But first, we sat down with Kelley last week to learn how she stays on her customers’ radar between trips and gives them a reason to book with her again.

Here’s what she told us.

Kelley is the Head of Growth at Workgrounds, which helps companies book blocks of hotel rooms for team trips and events.

Some customers only organize those trips a few times a year. So between bookings, they might go months without needing the service.

That leaves her team with a sales problem: how do you stay in touch when the customer has nothing to buy?

Kelley described a few ways she handles it, starting with something you probably already have sitting in your CRM. 

Kelley revisits old call transcripts to find problems customers mentioned. Then she checks whether the product team has since solved them.

When there’s a match, she has a reason to reach out.

I like this because the reason for the follow up comes straight from the customer. You already know the problem matters to them because they told you.

You can use the same approach before your next follow up. Read your last conversation, find the unresolved issue, and check whether you have anything useful to add.

If you do, lead with that. Explain what changed and how it addresses the problem they raised.

Some of the people arranging these trips have never planned an event before. They’re doing it alongside their actual job.

That makes it easy to miss costs an experienced planner would spot.

Kelley gives the example of a CEO ordering breakfast for a team. In the situation she described, a 24% service charge goes on top of the food bill. Taxes add more, and whether the service charge itself is taxable depends on the market.

Workgrounds walks customers through those charges before they book. The team also helps them understand hotel contracts and the risks they’re agreeing to.

That’s useful help at a moment when the buyer may not even know what to ask.

Think about the surprises your own customers run into. If there’s an extra cost or a condition they tend to overlook, explain it while they can still do something about it.

Kelley also looks for opportunities to see customers in person. On a trip to Philadelphia, she visited a client and took her to lunch. She mentioned sending a note when a client’s dog died, too.

These are small details, but they make her approach easier to understand. She pays attention to people’s lives and makes time for them between transactions.

Which brings us back to that canceled hotel booking.

Back on Halloween night, Kelley’s team has very few options.

Finding another property for the whole group would be nearly impossible. Their best chance is to get the original hotel to reverse its decision.

So five people work the phones and keep emailing. The team also knows there’s a specific clause in the contract they can leverage: canceling the booking would cost the hotel a big breakup fee.

That clause matters because the hotel has already shown it’s willing to walk away from the agreement. Kelley’s team keeps pushing, backed by a financial consequence for doing so.

Eventually, the hotel agrees to honor the booking. By the time the group lands, they have rooms.

The frantic calls get the immediate problem solved. But the team’s work on the contract, well before anyone boards a plane, gives them the ammo they need to get the hotel to reverse their decision. 

You probably won’t spend your Halloween chasing down hotel rooms. But you can look ahead for the costs, conditions, or unresolved problems that could catch your customers off guard. 

Those are useful reasons to follow up with them, even when their next purchase is still months away.

Today’s newsletter was written by Nic Conley