- You are here:
- Home »
- Blog »
- Sales Tips »
- 3 Secrets To Successful Follow Up
3 Secrets To Successful Follow Up
Did you know that according to recent research 49% of all leads are never followed up on?
Why do you think that is?
From the clients I’ve worked with it seems there are several reasons.
- Lack of automation – many people are still trying to do their follow up one at a time and when they don’t get to it right away they rationalize that it’s too late so they don’t bother at all.
- The problem is that a lot of people were specifically looking for what you had to offer and when you rationalize not following up all you’re doing is lying to yourself so you can avoid a perceived discomfort. You owe it to anyone that reaches out to you to follow up with them.
- Solution: Automate as much of your follow up as you can. Use an auto-responder to immediately reply with the most common information you know your prospects want and a strong call to action encouraging them to take the next step. Then follow that up with a phone call.
- Fear of rejection – this is one of the most common reasons I’ve found for failure to follow up. This is robbing you and your prospect in so many ways it is really a whole post all by itself.
- Solution – Change the way you think and the objective you have for the follow up. The fact is the prospect is asking for information. Now, you’re real job is to see if they are qualified for what you have to offer. You are not calling to make a sale so there is no way you can be rejected. If they are qualified, great, you can make an offer. If they aren’t qualified, great, you can help them out by pointing them in the right direction. Either way you win and either way you owe if to the prospect to help them out.
- Too busy to keep up – This is a great problem to have but only if you have it because you are dealing with more clients than you can handle. Most of the time the only reason this is an issue is because (if you will be honest with yourself) you’re too busy doing busy work or chasing prospects that keep putting you off but won’t say “No”.
- Solution – Learn to properly qualify prospects in or out and stop chasing the people that are never going to sign up. In fact don’t chase at all. Get them out of your pipeline to make room for people that are ready to do business now. Put everyone else in an automated drip to maintain top of mind awareness and let them raise their hand and tell you when they are ready.
If you dig deep you will find that there are more reasons people don’t follow up on their leads but I have found these 3 to be the most common. If you aren’t following up on all of your leads figure out why and fix it. You will find that many of the leads you aren’t getting to are the ones just waiting to sign up.
Let me know what challenges you’ve had with following up on leads and while you’re at it tell me what you’re going to do to solve the problem.
