Follow up
How many of your proposals are currently in the “pending” or “awaiting outcome” category? How many of your recent email marketing campaigns are a single, hit & hope email? At the last webinar/ in-person event you hosted, did you engage with every attendee post session to qualify them for a potential sales opportunity?
In our experience, across professional services, most of the time and effort in any sales or marketing campaign is focused on content creation and getting to launch. Relatively less thought is given to following up with those people that have shown interest (a qualified lead) in what you are pushing out. If follow up happens, it is haphazard, mainly manual, and rarely tracked.
At LINAR, we find this, how can I put it, BONKERS! The stats below show that, without follow up, the effort you put into your lead generation efforts are significantly diminished. Money is literally being left on the table.
Good news though! Add a little discipline to a healthy dose of resilience and you can watch your conversions skyrocket. This week’s Three Things provides simple and powerful ways to follow up effectively.
#1. Follow up is EXPECTED
“I don’t want to disturb them”.
“If they were interested, they would have responded already”.
“I don’t want to come across as desperate”.
The above quotes are regularly cited by professionals as reasons for not following up. What they represent are an inherent fear of failure – the “I’d rather not know than get bad news” mentality. If you’re in this category, or work with/for people that regularly use these excuses – here are some truths it would be useful to remember:
- According to Statista, the average professional receives 120 emails per day. Thinking that your elegantly crafted marketing email will instantly cut through their overcrowded inbox is wrong, it may be the case they have simply missed or forgotten to respond. Follow up is often required as a reminder to a missed action by your target customer.
- If you don’t follow up, your competitors will. The market for professional services is saturated. You’ve done an excellent job attracting interest through your marketing campaign – to not follow up is akin to watching potential revenue walk out of the door.
#2. Get into a routine
Notwithstanding the fear of failure point made above, the overwhelming reason for a lack of follow up is forgetfulness and workload. Follow up gets put on the bottom of the to do list or is lost in the inbox and never gets actioned. To ensure follow up happens, try the following:
- Set aside a regular time (15-20 mins) every day to follow up. Personally, this is a first thing in the morning thing for me but other people I know block time out at the end of each day to action the day’s follow ups.
- Use reminders: flag emails for action or create a “follow up required” folder in your inbox. For those of you lucky enough to have a PA, train them to conduct basic follow on your behalf to maintain momentum on opportunities. For larger campaigns, speak with your marketing colleagues/teams about automated follow up using marketing automation.
#3. Build yourself a follow up bank
A lot of follow up is repeatable, slightly monotonous and consistent. Whilst effective follow up needs to be personalised and tailored to the individual, creating baseplate text for the most common follow ups makes the follow up process much more efficient. I use Quick Parts in Microsoft Word to make things even quicker. Here’s a few examples to get your follow up bank started:
Hi xxxxx
Hope you’re well. I wanted to get in touch about the proposal we submitted on [insert topic] and understand where you are in your decision-making process. Happy to answer any questions you have on the proposal.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Xxxxx
Thanks for joining us yesterday at [insert event/webinar]. How did you find the session? Were there any points that particularly resonated? If there’s any further detail you need or other questions that have been raised following the session, I’d be very happy to setup a follow up call.
I look forward to hearing from you.
