Follow Up

from Jeff Garrison:

Follow Up Failure

Posted: 26 Oct 2009 09:19 AM PDT

There are many opportunities for follow up failure. For example ...

• Do you have business cards from people you recently met sitting in a pile waiting for you to take some action?
• Do you have a list of people that you considered good prospects at one time but after the first couple of follow ups, you moved on?
• Do you have customers who bought from you once, but you have not touched base with in some time?

Me too.

But I have had prospects that for whatever reason I maintained good follow up practices. Many of them have been converted to clients. So what have I learned?

Prospects and customers buy when they are ready to buy, not when we are ready to sell!

In fact, many prospects need to be followed up with anywhere from seven to twelve times to be converted to customers. So, this begs the question ...

How many times do you follow up with a prospect (or a past customer) before giving up?

The average is probably between two and three times if we were honest.

Why?

We focus on making sales now! We have to meet monthly or quarterly quotas and nurturing a sale that may or may not happen several months from now is irrelevant if we can't produce now. Additionally, even if we wanted to maintain disciplined follow up and lead nurturing practices, there is just too much to stay on top of.

I get it. But what if you could increase your sales by 25%, 50%, or 100% over the next twelve months? Would you make changes?

This is what inbound marketing and sales 2.0 are all about and these things should be implemented into every business. If you don't have the resources to hire a sales coach or consultant who has expertise in these things, start small.

For example, schedule an hour per week just to make follow-up calls or send e-mails to past prospects. Find ways to provide information to them over time so that when they are ready to buy, they will buy from you.

Encourage others to follow up. Share your follow up stories in the comments section below.

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