Not long ago, I gave you the six secrets for sales prospecting success, and gave you a break down of the first one, CONFIDENCE.
Now I’m looking closer at the another secret: Follow-through!
How good are you at following-up with your leads?
I would hope you’re following up on your leads, but the real problem with follow-up is not the follow-up — it’s what I refer to as the follow-through.
Unless you’re selling a lower-priced item that has a short sales cycle where most sales are closed on the first call, then you must become good at not just following-up but following-through.
What is your process for making the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th contact?
Do you even do that or are you like the vast majority of salespeople that after a couple of contacts, you start to write off the prospect as having little potential and not worth your time?
I encounter very few salespeople who have the discipline and the process to follow-through, but maybe that’s why there are so few truly successful sales hunters.
Don’t blame your lack of follow-through on your CRM system or lack of a CRM system. Sorry, that’s like telling the police officer who pulls you over for speeding that you didn’t know it’s illegal to drive at 100 mph in a school zone.
It’s your responsibility.
To make follow-through easier, set up templates you can use with key information and popular benefit statements you can use comfortably and quickly. Set aside time each day or each week to handle the follow-through contacts you need to make.
A quick way to determine how frequently your follow-throughs should be with a prospect is to view it in two ways.
First, what is the selling cycle of how long it typically takes to develop a new customer? Second, what is the purchase frequency.
If you’re selling something where a customer typically buys every 3 years and it can take them 90 days to make a decision, then following up every two weeks during the early phase of the selling cycle makes sense.
If what you’re selling is very expensive and they make the decision every 10 years, then I’m going to suggest you be willing to make upwards of 10 or more contacts with the person before deciding they may not be a potential customer.
Key is to have a plan and execute it. Worst thing you can do is to be thinking about following-through with a prospect and then never doing it.
Copyright 2012, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog.
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