Resources / Glossary / Follow-up and workflows
Next step
The single specific action agreed at the end of a conversation, with an owner, a time and something the customer is expecting.
A next step is what happens after the call ends. Written properly it names one action, one person and one time: call Maria Thursday morning with the payoff figure, or meet the customer Saturday at ten to drive the blue one. Anything vaguer than that is a note, not a next step.
Every conversation should end with one, including the ones that did not go well. A customer who declined an appointment still has a next step, even if it is a text in three days carrying the one piece of information they were missing.
Why it matters for a sales manager
You cannot manage a pipeline of conversations that ended in nothing. When every opportunity carries a named next step with a date, a manager can look at a list and see what is actually scheduled to happen this week, instead of asking each rep what they are working on and getting a summary shaped by whatever they remember.