We all want new leads, new prospects, and new conversations. Our sales pipelines need it! Salespeople always are looking for more “at-bats” and want to get a chance to bring in new business. 

For some reason, effective follow up is often overlooked or might be an afterthought of a vital piece of the sales puzzle. 

If you take a look at your contact strategy across the board, I want you to look for these things:

• Are your messages for you or for your prospect? Count the number of “I” vs “you” in the messages you’re sending.
• How many of your outreaches are the dreaded “just checking in”?
• Are you sending value at every stage of the process that helps the prospect, or are you simply going through the motions?
• Do all of your leads, prospects, or even active customers have an agreed-upon next step that is clearly defined?

Now that last one is most likely the one that you will say no to more often than not.

Actually, all of these things are quite common in sales.

What is an effective follow-up?

Have a look at our post on micro-conversions and see some examples of the small customer steps along the entire sales process. 

Effective follow up should be a well-defined sequence of actions and messages that have been tested and improved upon over time that is as specific to the customer journey stage as possible.

Follow up should be all about deploying the ideal timing and message for your prospect.

I would challenge you to look at your follow up or your teams follow up and see if it is meaningful or just a bunch of “stuff” to do that pads our activity reports. 

Not judging salespeople’s intention, just feeling bad about how overwhelming and disappointing sales can be when follow-up is not dialed-in. It’s the number one reason we blame the leads or always want fresh leads. 

We all know there’s GOLD in your database if only your follow up was on point...

Sell in a constant loop

When you look at a sales process, most likely, you will see things happen in chronological order. In reality, your customers don’t always keep moving forward—sometimes, they need to go backward. 

For example, if you do a great job moving someone through a sales call and identify them as a qualified prospect, you have advanced the sale well, and now it’s time to close. However, that prospect stops responding, they go dark, they start “ghosting” you. What do you do? If you’re like many reps, you keep chasing, trying to move them from qualified to closed. And you send them a message like this:

“Hey Mike, it’s Julie from ABC Company. I just wanted to check in with you and see how you are doing with the proposal I sent you. Do you have any questions I can answer at the moment? I know you wanted to get started a month ago, so I’m just curious where you’re at.”

Sound normal?

However, the landscape for your buyer may have changed, and they are no longer in your ideal BANT qualification criteria...because they’re human. If you took a step back and read their conversational body language, you may realize that a message like this would be more beneficial.

“Hey Mike, it’s Julie from ABC. Last time we were chatting, we were moving forward on a proposal for getting you started about a month ago. I’m assuming that since we aren’t taking action yet, something has changed on your end, which I can understand. I still think we can help you, but perhaps we should go back into brainstorming mode so we can get tighter on our offer. I’m happy to revisit the initial conversation and share new insights with you if things have changed. Let’s find some time to reconnect and explore some ideas again.”

The biggest difference is letting the customer know you’re on their agenda and not pushing through yours. By allowing yourself to move your customers forwards, backward, or out of your pipeline, you will have a much more accurate customer success forecast. 

 When you are following up with your potential customers, you should have a few goals in mind:

1. If they are set to move them forward, move them FORWARD
2. If they are exhausted or a bad fit, move them OUT
3. If they are stalling, you may need to move them BACKWARDS and re-engage

Most people don’t realize that this last thing you just looked at is a MASSIVE part of your lift. If you can do it consistently.

HOW THIS TRANSLATES

Follow up is all about “doing your future self a favor”

Every sales organization should have a well-defined pipeline with appropriate customer stages and a contact strategy that is designed (and constantly tested) that works to move prospects through each stage.

Ideally, you want to know where your prospect is at any given moment and what you should be doing to advance them. It should be as predictable and consistent as possible with the mantra from those old Ron Popeil infomercials that say, “set it and forget it!”

I’m not necessarily talking about automated follow-up, but rather a clear strategy that you use as often as possible and work to eliminate the “it depends” mentality. 

In each follow up you should do these things:

1. Have a predefined game plan and type of message you will send your prospect based on their segment and stage
2. Know from your pre-call planning and notes how you will personalize your follow up
3. Do your follow-up
4. Take notes
5. Set up your next follow up based on the next steps of your plan
6. Schedule that follow-up
7. Move to the next person on your list

This is what’s called “doing your future-self a favor.” Every active lead or prospect on your list should have a follow up that is set to win. They are not simply sitting in your sales “buckets” waiting for you to make a list, check it twice, then try to find out who’s naughty or nice (cherry-picking). 

Next week, you will open up that person on the day in your schedule where your notes and game plan are already laid out for you. You don’t have to go back into their contact history, make a plan, review old emails, or anything else that takes a lot of time to do right. 

You read your call plan and then make the call and think, “hey thanks last week ME!”

This is one of the easiest ways to get into and stay in “sales flow.”

basix.ai is built on doing yourself favors

We built our platform with salespeople in mind. We know they have way too much to do chasing leads, creating process, testing, reporting, you name it. We wanted to build a pseudo-personal-assistant that does more than just act as some tech tool. It is designed as a best practice system that helps move your leads and prospects forward the right way and continuously learns what works and what doesn’t.

Imagine if, as a sales rep, you could clone yourself. “YOU Version A,” act like your own personal assistant and do all of the work we just talked about in this post to set this follow up system. Then, “YOU Version B” has only one job, which is to do the selling. Think of basix.ai as your alter ego!

We also built basix.ai with managers in mind to feel confident that their teams have best practices baked into their activities and the manager can focus on coaching rather than chasing. 

And we also thought about the CEOs and other executives. What do you want? Well, you want to know that you have the sales division of your organization as predictable as possible. Imagine what’s possible if your salespeople just sold, and your managers could just help them sell better? And all the data you could ever ask for was at your fingertips…

Don’t you think it’s time to get back to basix?