Make Follow-Up Your Superpower to Nail the Sale
Top Tips for Business Owners
Today, I'm going to dive into a crucial topic for your success: Follow -up.
On of the things which I constantly see in businesses with poor profit margins is a low conversion rate for their leads. Often that is because of poor follow-up.
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Transcript
Hey there! I'm Stuart Webb, your fellow businessman, entrepreneur, podcaster and CEO, with another one of my one-take video blogs, all the mistakes stay in.
Today, I'm going to dive into a crucial topic for your success: Follow -up.
On of the things which I constantly see in businesses with poor profit margins is a low conversion rate for their leads. Often that is because of poor follow-up.
It could be a lack of care, a lack of process, or a lack of structure. I think the lack of care is sort of something that comes through a lot in transactional selling because I guess there can be an order-taking aspect to the selling process, so they just continue to move to the next prospect. And by doing that, they are demonstrating a lack of care, but it just maybe they don't have the right processes in place and the process is really important., also follow-up means work.There's a work element to following up. So everyone likes to talk to red-hot customers who have their credit cards poised. But when you've got to do the work and you've got to follow up, and that might be five or six times, then that can be very time-consuming.
So they go and gravitate towards the low-hanging fruit. So you're having a structured process, but also using data at the same time is important to understand what works. And that's different in every business.
It’s not uncommon for us to go in and talk to a business and get an understanding of their process and customers and find that they just don't have time. They haven't called or followed up a key client in maybe 18 months, or two years, just because they are, in their own words, time-poor. But it's often just a symptom of a lack of process and structure.
Let's give an example of how following up through a process has worked for a business.
We radically transformed a business from 2 million to 18 million in revenue that had been in operation for seven years. The salespeople were just pumping out proposals and not following up. What we actually did was we contacted clients that we had identified that hadn't been converted to clients and asked them about their experience working with this company. And their overwhelming response was, I did meet with the salesperson, I thought their offer was quite good, but no one ever called me back. There was lots going in the front end of the sales process, but they weren't following up properly.
Let’s take a personal example
I spoke with a car salesman very briefly recently about a car. I didn't have an interest really and I said, thanks for that. And then she called me the next week and said, what do you think? Are you ready to buy? I said, oh, look, I'm still thinking about it. she said, okay, well, I'll give you a little bit more time.
she rang back the next week. she said you're still thinking where you're at with it? And I said, yeah, I'm sort of. I haven't really made a decision.
And then she started to negotiate. she offered me a reduced price, threw in all these extras, and then she followed me up for about the next month till I finally said yes. I didn't at the time really want the car, to be honest, but I developed a sort of relationship with her over those five, six weeks. she had quite a playful, quirky way that she went about things. I sort of wanted the car, but I didn't have the urgency to take action. But it was through his process of following up, reintroducing the benefits of the car, introducing new things, and she was prepared to put some skin in the game and offer this and offer that. So she really wanted to get the deal over the line. It was through that process that we sort of built a relationship. And then she got to the point where I said, yes,
So is there a particular timeframe to follow up?
Is it every second day? Is it the next week, is it the next day? Or just depends on what it is, what your business is selling? But I think there has to be an understanding of performance data. So you'll go through your performance data maybe over the last three years, and you'll be able to establish how long is the average buying cycle – say 12 weeks - so on average, it may take five follow ups to make that sale in that buying cycle.
But each business is different. If you have a ferocious appetite for follow up, you'll be vastly more successful. It shows you care, it shows professionalism, it creates efficiencies, and it's a really, really potent skill that's often undervalued and underutilized. But the ferocious nature in which you follow up has to be structured, and it's got to be done in the right way.
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This is Stuart Webb signing off; I'll be back with another episode packed with more insights to fuel your entrepreneurial journey.
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