Driving sales is the endgame for any business. All your marketing, all your product and service development—it all leads to sales, which is where the revenue is earned.
But when you make a sale, it doesn’t happen all at once—it’s a process. Even once a prospect expresses an avid interest in your company, you still have to make a sales pitch. And even once you’ve made your pitch, there’s no guarantee that your leads will buy immediately. Many of them take time to decide.
That’s why you need sales follow-up strategies. Sometimes people will take a long time to decide if they want to become a customer, often to the point that they forget about you altogether. You obviously don’t want that to happen, so it’s good to follow up periodically.
But what should following up on a sales pitch look like? What are the best follow-up sales methods? Don’t worry—we’ve got you covered. Below, we’ll go over seven of the best sales follow-up strategies out there. Keep reading to learn more!
Our first sales follow-up tip is to avoid badgering your prospects. You don’t want to send a follow-up email every day, or they’ll quickly become annoyed, choosing not to make a purchase. In short, an overly aggressive follow-up strategy can have the opposite of the intended effect.
Instead, carefully space out your contact attempts. How often you should follow up depends on the lead—for example, maybe someone tells you they need a week to decide, so you follow up after one week. Other times, they might not give an indication, in which case you’ll have to guess.
Use your best judgment when figuring out how often to contact leads. Just ensure that you don’t come off as pestering them.
There are a handful of different ways to follow up with prospects. The two most classic methods are phone calls and emails. You can harness both of those channels when following up on a sales pitch.
If one channel isn’t yielding results for you, you can try a different channel in the hopes that it will be better at reaching your prospects. Alternatively, your leads might indicate a preference for a particular channel, in which case that’s the one you should stick to.
There are other channels besides just phone and email. Depending on your relationship with your prospects, some of them might be okay with you using SMS. You can also consider messaging leads through social media.
Another sales follow-up tip is to keep your follow-up messages short and sweet. Don’t send a lengthy email giving your whole sales pitch again. Limit yourself to a few sentences of text that get right to the point without being pushy.
Bear in mind your prospects don’t need you to tell them about the product or service—you’ve already done that. All they need is a gentle reminder that you’re still there and that they haven’t yet made a decision. It won’t take much to do that, so don’t overdo it on length.
One surefire way to drive more engagement through your emails, follow-up or not, is to personalize them. Users always respond better to emails that seem personalized just for them, and follow-up emails are no exception.
How much personalization should you use? Well, that entirely depends on the number of clients you have. If you’re a business-to-business (B2B) company that only works with a small number of clients, you can manually type out each email to cater directly to the relevant client.
On the other hand, if you sell to tons of businesses or consumers each week, you don’t have time to individually type out each email. In that case, you can simply program your email campaigns to autofill certain fields with personalized info, such as the prospect’s name.
Building off the last point, you may have quite a large audience and not feel as though you have time to manually construct all your emails. In that case, the best thing to do is automate your campaigns.
When you automate your email campaigns, you basically create premade email templates that get automatically sent out at particular times or in response to a particular action. So, if you want to follow up with leads after one week, you can automate a particular email to go out to everyone one week after you give them a sales pitch.
There are a handful of tools out there that you can use for email automation. Some are built specifically for emails, but you can also find customer relationship management (CRM) software that contains email marketing automation features.
Another sales follow-up tip is to make it clear what action you want your prospects to take next. All bottom-of-funnel marketing should feature a call to action (CTA), and follow-up messaging is no different. Users can’t very well make a purchase if they don’t know that’s what you want them to do.
That doesn’t mean you should be pushy or aggressive about it. Even so, at least make it clear that you want your leads to buy your product or service. If you send out an email, it can be a good idea to include a CTA button with text like “Buy now” that users can click to go straight to the relevant page on your site.
The last of our sales follow-up strategies is something we’ve already indicated—don’t be pushy. More specifically, don’t keep pushing follow-ups at prospects who are clearly uninterested. If you’ve sent six follow-ups and still haven’t heard back, it’s time to quit.
Furthermore, if a prospect directly contacts you to tell you that they’re no longer interested in your product or service, you should obviously leave them alone. Sending follow-ups past that point is spammy.
Following up on a sales pitch can be a surprising amount of work, mainly because it takes time to craft and send out emails. But having the right tool to help you can make a huge difference, which is why you can benefit from using a CRM like Nutshell.
Nutshell does everything a normal CRM does, like helping you analyze your customer data. But it also boasts a killer set of email marketing automation features. You can easily create and send out email campaigns, with plenty of personalization options built in as well.
Interested in trying out Nutshell, but not sure if it’s for you? No worries. You can see what Nutshell’s capable of with our 14-day free trial!
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