How long do you follow up, really depends on the stages of your relationship and sales cycle is.
Following up has many degrees of following up when you are doing sales calls, or perhaps you haven’t gotten to doing the first call. How do we overcome or continue to follow up and how many times should we continue to follow up? My colleagues on Alignable answered my question about following up. There were 17 answers, I just selected 4 of them.
If you have a goal of developing relationships with people, then you keep following up, until you can reach a decision or get the business.
1. Bob Hayward says “He develops a personal relationship with my clients and treat them as friends. I “touch” them multiple times over the course of a year by putting them in a “drip” campaign. I can do this because of the system I use. It allows me to create multi card campaigns then all I do is add each new client into a campaign. The system then will automatically send them a card at predetermined times. I use the 80/20 rule when “touching” my clients. That means I am not ALWAYS selling or asking for business but celebrating their life with gratitude and acknowledgements.”
2. Anna Weber says” It kind of depends on the conversation we have had – or commitments I may have made. I know it takes from 7-12 connections before any kind of trust or relationship is built so I switch out the nature of my follow-up based on where I felt the potential “relationship” was developing.”
I follow the Pareto Rule on all of my connectivity efforts. Out of ten touches I make, eight of them have some benefit or merit to the receiver; two of them will include some type of softer sale.
Unless I get the “message” that my materials aren’t valued, I never remove a possible connection, believing if I have done my homework and my follow up, the result isn’t what, but when.
3. Loretta Huff, says
48% of all salespeople give up after the 1st contact
25% give up after the 2nd contact
17% give up after the 3rd or 4th contact
The sad truth is 90% of the salespeople give up before 80% of the sales will ever be made!”
The key is EFFECTIVELY, consistently and relevantly following up. You can call, email, text, message, snail mail. I actually tell people it’s OK to say “no”. Often prospects ignore you because they want to say “no” or “not now” but they’re afraid or embarrassed, so they dodge you and say nothing. When you put ‘no’ on the table, they’re somehow freed up to either say “no”, which frees YOU up to move on or frees them up to tell you the truth about why they’re delaying. That opens the door to a discussion that could lead to you making an offer that’s more relevant to them or one that reveals their true objections, which again, you might be able to respond to or solve for them.
4. Mark Mehling says “There is a difference between sales people driven systems and automated marketing systems.
For automated marketing systems, you need an auto responder series of at least 5-7 touches. If they take action during that time, the series changes. If they do not, they fall down a notch to a series that is less frequent. If they still fail, they fall into a ‘light contact’ that may be once a quarter to as little as yearly.
You can use the same methodology with sales people, but there are many other factors before just choosing this method. Why is a system important? Because only 3%, on average, of people who are interested are READY to buy at any given time. And I know of people who waited more than a year to make the decision to buy. Our American attitude of ‘Buy now or I move on’ is short sighted.
5. Lauren Curtis says, “I first wait several days if I don’t hear back right away after an initial contact. Then I follow up with an email and a day or 2 later, if no reply, a call (if a # is provided). If I continue to receive no reply, which I find rude & unprofessional, I’ll follow up again the following week, getting a bit more stern but polite. It’s good business to be prompt with follow ups, even when it means not working with or ordering from someone. When someone strings you along & wastes your time I find this very unfair so I never do that to my clients or potential clients/collectors.
Great suggestions about how to follow-up. May it help you! Keep following up, this is where the sales are. This is another great article to read.
