Follow-up Or Die – Your Accountant Will Really like You
It took me over three years to understand why I had been successful and also why I had been failing so negative in sales. It all boiled down to 1 issue: My capability and determination to Follow-up with prospects and with new clients and associates immediately after their initial introduction to my item line!
Why so extended to accomplish a “duh” you could ask? Quite easy! My trainers and mentors didn’t know to Follow-up either! This is part of the reason that salesmen have a really high failure rate. Men and women do not comprehend advertising and hence the strategic significance of following up on prospects.
Read this statistic about the significance of following up from an association of specialist salesmen. Their statistics show that the most sales by far are produced from the 5th via the 12th contact! Right here could be the information they’ve compiled about on which contact sales are created:
2% of sales are produced on the 1st speak to
3% of sales are produced on the 2nd make contact with
5% of sales are produced on the 3rd speak to
10% of sales are created on the 4th contact
80% of sales are created on the 5th-12th get in touch with
Realizing that, do not you believe it would be very good to go out and find out how you can be a superb salesman? Your mentors are delivering that for you at this time so listen up. (They may be aren’t they? If not, greater locate a good mentor as going it on your own in any sales company is suicide!) Like in any education process, it really is very good to go out and READ a lot more about what profitable individuals do within your chosen field to produce the success they have. Folks like Tom Hopkins, Zig Ziegler, Jim Rohn, A. L. Williams and others are all professional salesmen who’re now in the instruction mode of assisting others realize the methods that got them where they may be right now.
So, back towards the statistics. 80% of all sales are produced from the 5th through the 12th get in touch with! Wow! Are you currently starting to find out why your closing rate is so low?
Gil Cargill, a former VP Sales from IBM who now is a sales management consultant provided the following statistics from the Sales & Advertising Management Institute that are interesting relative to how all buyers identify and pursue buying plans:
(1) 87% of all leads are never pursued
(2) 45% – 63% from the all leads eventually buy the product or service from someone
(3) 48% of all sales leads that are pursued are dropped immediately after the first call/meeting
(4) 80% of all sales close immediately after the fifth contact/meeting (see above)
(5) 73% of sales people usually do not possess a growth plan for their top five accounts
His main point was that effective organization development methods ensure we are “in front of the customer” when he/she make the sales decision. Tenacity and planning are much more important than eloquence!
Here is another example of why repeated exposure is important. How many times a day do you see or hear about Coca-Cola or McDonalds or Pepsi? I know there is a statistic somewhere on this but I’m betting it’s within the dozens or higher per merchandiser. You hear Coke ads, you see them on billboards, you see them in magazines, on TV, on radio, and on and on.
Why? You already know you like Coke. You already know exactly where to buy it. You already know the cost or nearly so. Why does Coke pay millions per month in advertising costs? One particular cause and one reason only: To keep Coke in your mind as often as possible so you will be more likely to crave it and therefore buy it. They want you to think of Coke as often as humanly possible!
You should consider advertising your products or services to your buying prospects the same way. It’s war out there where everyone is vying for part of the consumers mind. You don’t have to play dirty to win but you MUST play the game HARD consistently, persistently and with the utmost determination to succeed.
That means getting your message in front with the prospect repeatedly more than the course of time from your initial introduction to him until he tells you to stop sending information. This may seem drastic, but who will be sending your prospect information if you are not? Guaranteed it will be someone else who will be there when the time is correct for the prospect and you will have lost a sale because you failed to continually stay within the prospects face.
“I do not have the time to complete that!” you say.
“YOU MUST” I say!
You can either do it manually with pencil and paper records. Or, you can do it with some sort of database reminder system. Or with a folder system either manual or electronic. Or, you can let technology do it for you personally!
I vote for letting technology do it for me! 1 system that I use takes my prospect from the initial “Send Info” request by way of infinite Follow-ups! All automatically. That’s right! Automatically, out of my hands. The system just lets me know who requested info and when and it does the rest for me.
(WARNING!!! The auto responder above has “Sales Letters” in it. “Oh my God! Not another write-up that markets someone else’s products!” YES! It HAS to promote something for you to determine what a good marketing and advertising system/campaign looks like. If you can not stomach seeing a marketing campaign for my item line or are afraid it may make you buy something, then do not click it. I have been accused of scamming folks when I put the above paragraphs in this write-up above so I wanted to warn you about what you are getting yourself indoctrinated ahead of time to let you opt out of learning how professional marketers do their advertising and marketing.)
The result from that a/r sequence:
Prospects call or email me; “I’m ready! Tell me what to do next!”
Read what 1 in the auto responder sites says about Follow-up:
Q. How much would you expect to increase your sales if you produced 4 or far more follow-up e-mail communications?
A. 173% (E-Marketing These days).
Q. If you doubled this communication rate, could you expect even greater returns?
A. Many customers are showing increases of more than 400%
My mentors assume I’m a master salesman. WRONG! I’m a master educator and use systems to complete it for me. I could never locate all the time and organization to Follow-up with hundreds of prospects like automated systems can. All I did was write the initial copy with the outgoing emails (actually, my mentors wrote some of them) and load them up into the system and told it how far apart to space the emails.
BUT! Don’t assume technology will do it all for you. You can close another 20% or much more of your contacts with personal get in touch with. Individuals buy “You” as much or much more than they buy a product or service. Personal get in touch with makes you into a real person instead of an easy email address or Fax-On-Demand piece of paper.
I most highly recommend calling your prospects. I do not care if you are good on the phone or not. Don’t try to “sell” anything on the phone, do not make up a canned pitch like some insurance salesman or mortgage broker. Just strike up a conversation and see what concerns they have. Answer their concern(s) if you can or promise to get back to them via phone, fax or email with an answer. Always be polite and honest and you will be amazed at how many folks respond positively to you. Use other people for three-ways until you get the hang of it. It will add an invaluable measure of success to your enterprise.
Finally, you MUST have a very good message, very good product, great prices and a far better deal than everyone else your consumer has seen. If you Follow-up religiously with crummy messages, poor grammar, writing that is not client-centered and benefit-focused, you will NOT see much more sales no matter how many times you Follow-up. A lot of that “better deal” is YOU too but your written message must be powerful and totally client-centered. If you are not a great writer, locate a seasoned copywriter to help you work up the hard-hitting pieces you will need.
So, what are the rules right here?
1. Follow-up from 5 to 12 times to get in that 80% bracket.
2. Let technology do the Follow-up for you.
3. Call your prospects on the phone and make a friend.
4. Use client-centered, benefit-focused copy to get your message across.
By the way, depending on what you are selling in products or services, almost everyone is really a potential customer most likely, if not now, then in the future. Do you think it makes sense to keep in make contact with with them? If you said YES, you are appropriate!
How can you do that without pitching them on your item they don’t want or need now?
a: Start a periodic ezine and Follow-up weekly with useful information!
b: Have them read some in the articles on my site to see if they’re potential candidates:
Remember; the fortune is within the Follow-up. Your accountant will adore you if you do Follow-up. You will be out of company if you don’t.
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