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 Do you follow up your prospects? Suspects? Customers who may re-purchase? No? How often do you here “I don’t have the sales staff to chase down all our leads", or "We’re usually too busy to do a lot of follow up."
A follow-up sales system will help boost your closing rate resulting in more sales with less effort and dramatically increase your customer satisfaction.
Don’t give up – follow up
The key issue in most cases is not the lack of capacity to follow-up prospects, but the lack of a successful system of follow-up. If you’re a small business owner and you’re only doing one or two follow-ups imagine all the business you’re losing. Not following up with your prospects and customers is the same as filling up your bathtub without first putting the stopper in the drain!
Consistent follow-up can create a predictable and profitable stream of prospects and customers that buy. Small businesses that capture leads and follow-up with them enjoy higher conversion rates and a higher percentage of referrals than those that don’t.
Three things you need to know
A good follow-up sales system needs to include the following three attributes:
- It should be systematic, meaning that the follow up process is done the same way every time.
- It should generate consistent, predictable results.
- It should be automated, thereby requiring minimal physical interaction to make it run
The secret to "follow-up sales" is to make it automatic so that you don’t have to lift a finger but the job still gets done. With today’s technology it’s simpler than ever. Automating your follow-up processes gives you more time to work "on" your business rather than "in" your business.
Three Types of Follow Ups
Each type of follow-up requires a different approach or message
Suspects : people in your target marketplace - you’ll want to entice them to call you or visit your store / office.
Prospects : people who have responded to your marketing but have not purchased - you need to persuade them to make their first purchase , and
Customers: people who have purchased something from you – you want to convince them to come back and do more business with you and give your referrals.
Your Follow Up Tools
Your principal follow up sales tools are:
- The telephone
- Direct mail, and
- Email
If you already have prospect or customer contact details, develop the relationship with your prospect by sending information and updates on your product or service with an “offer” before you make a phone call.
Your Follow Up Sequence
The power of your follow up will lie in your follow up sequence. Your follow up sequence is a series of communications with your prospect/customer that are "linked" together, with each communication building on the previous message.
Usually, when doing direct mail you should include three to five mailings spaced out about seven days apart. When using a sequential autoresponder you can have as many follow ups as you want because using email is basically free (that’s why you always want to get a prospects email address).
Each sequence should follow a logical argument and you might consider bolstering the offer with each communication using a deadline as a motivator to act now. Always link the previous communication and increase the boldness of the offer using the same type of conversation you might have in a regular sales call.
Autopilot – the key to follow up sales success
Automating your customer response system is the key to developing a powerful follow up sales system because it overcomes the number one reason most businesses don’t follow up. It’s the required physical interactions (i.e. printing letters, sending emails, inputting leads etc.) where 99% of all the breakdowns happen in well-intentioned follow up sales systems.
To automate your follow-ups you can use robotic sales systems or outsource any manual interactions to a dedicated service for example:
- Capture your leads using a free-call automated recorded message system that captures your prospects contact information and automatically sends your leads to you in a spreadsheet via email.
- Or for a direct mail follow up system, find a fulfillment house to do the mailings for you.
- Use an email autoresponder system. Your prospect will not only be receiving your direct mail messages, but you can insert your email messages in between your mailings.
Don’t Call Them, They’ll Call You
You don’t need to call your prospect because they will have already received your information and have most of their questions answered before they call you. An educated prospect is your best prospect.
They already know
In essence, they’ve pre-qualified themselves before you ever have to spend time physically speaking to them. This drastically reduces the sales cycle and increases your conversion rate because you have positioned your small business to be their only logical choice.
Source: David Frey, Marketing Best Practices
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