How Many Follow-ups in Sales Strategy Should You Do?

In sales, the fortune is in the follow-up. There's more opportunity lost by salespeople not having a good follow up strategy than through anything else. I use the word strategy because that would assume you have a consistent protocol for following up. When it comes to prospecting, having a follow-up sales strategy consulting becomes especially important because your response rates are much lower reaching out cold to strangers. It's obvious that if you've built a relationship with a prospect, they're more likely to reply to your emails or return your phone calls than someone that you have absolutely no relationship with. To compensate for this fact, often your contact efforts may have to be more audacious in nature to grab attention and more 'touches' are required before you get a response.

If you were manually following up with different names on a list, making some calls here and sending some emails there, you would probably be distributing your efforts unevenly, with one prospect reached out to seven times and another one only contacted twice. What if the bigger opportunity was the one that you only reached out to twice, while the person you reached out to seven times had no ability to buy from you at all? This can easily happen because, until you speak to the prospect and qualify them, you don't actually know who is who. The goal is to systematically distribute your efforts, not evenly, but relative to the opportunity. The biggest opportunities should obviously be given more effort while limiting your efforts on the smaller opportunities.

When trying to get a meeting with a CEO of a large corporation, it's understandable you'd spend an enormous amount of time, energy, and money trying to get that appointment, as long as getting the sale would justify that expense. But what if you have an average size sale and you had the wrong contact information for this individual? A telephone number that goes straight to voicemail, an old email address where he never gets the message, or you're calling a gatekeeper that will never let you through? So much wasted time and energy.

When considering your follow-up strategy, consider the effort required and its relative effectiveness. If you reach out too little and give up too early, you lose the opportunity that prospect offers. If you reach out too much and put more effort than is worth doing business with that person, then the opportunity cost is in the time lost in not reaching out to other prospects that are more reachable. When it comes to email and automation, this doesn't necessarily apply. You can load 50 message templates in an automation software and let automation reach out to an empty mailbox for the next two years without you even having to think about it. It's when you are thinking about them, going through your notes in your CRM, and leaving voicemails that eat up your valuable time.

Best Practice:

There's no magic number to give you for the perfect number of follow up efforts. This must be custom to your campaign and calculated considering the opportunity and the effort required. Sometimes some executives with equal buying power are easier to reach than others. Therefore, I recommend reaching out to multiple contacts in the organization. With cold emailing campaigns, we send out a minimum of 8 touches to 3 different people. Remember when you're adding value as we spoke about earlier; more touches equal more benefit.

Change the vehicle so it doesn't get annoying and change the offer to add layers of value. This can be done by using email, direct mail, social media, and leaving voicemails, offering tools, information, free services, jokes, ideas, and more. The more people trying to get your prospect's attention, the more you're going to have to follow up to stand out. Also, it shows that you are committed to speaking to them, that what you have to say is important.

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