So you’ve just finished a great meeting with a new client or prospect. But as you walk out the door you think to yourself – what do I do now to deepen the relationship and not fall into sales pitch mode?

Most people will head back to their desk and write a thank you note, maybe send some minutes. If there were actions that came out of the meeting, you might spend some time doing those and sending them through. These are all OK things to do, but the problem is it’s not engaging in any way for the other person – in fact, you’ll probably be lucky to get much of a response, if you get one at all. It just won’t help you advance the relationship in any meaningful way.

Some may even feel compelled to send a brochure of some sort, which could destroy all the hard work you put into building the relationship with one press of a button.

So what’s the answer? To me, it’s using a CC (Clarify & Confirm) Note.

A CC Note is one of the most basic tools we’ve built into our smarter selling toolkit, but also one of the most effective. Of all the tools we use ourselves in our own selling efforts, it would be the CC Note we get the most frequent positive response to. In fact, recently I sent a CC Note to a prospective client after a first meeting and his response (within a few hours) was “Either you have an amazing memory, or your phone was recording. Very impressive. You really captured the essence of our conversation.”

You won’t get that kind of feedback from a regular follow up note or set of minutes.

The other benefit of a CC Note is it allows others who weren’t in the meeting to get a great snapshot of what was discussed – and particularly who raised what points. Often when I’m asked to review a CC Note, I’ll look at it and say ‘Great CC Note. Terrible meeting.’ A CC Note is a window into the soul of your meeting. If you spent the entire meeting talking all about you, your product/service or only sticking to topics in your world, this will be evident in the CC Note. You can then work on how you prevent that from happening again in the next meeting.

Here is my number one rule around CC Notes. They must be sent the same day. Every hour you wait means more detail from the meeting you’re simply going to forget. Send it as quickly as you can – it’s shows you’re reliable and responsive.

If you’d like to have a crack at a CC Note, take a look at the video and use this TEMPLATE.