5 Steps Follow-Up System

System Of Success

SOS - 5 Steps To An Effective Follow-Up System

for Small/Mirco Businesses

A Sad Fact; Despite spending a huge amount of money into their marketing to attract new customers in the first place, most businesses don’t follow up with their prospects or even first-time customers enough.

Over 80% of marketing leads never convert into sales due to a lack of follow up and effective communication. About 65% of B2B marketers have no follow-up system in place.

Over 50% of sales leads receive no follow-up what so ever, despite the fact that nurtured leads make about 50% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.

9 out of 10 (90%) of small businesses and about 6 out of 10 big businesses don’t have any kind of follow up the sales process.

Most companies fail to follow up – Despite spending a huge amount of money and energy drumming up new sales leads, only to let them slip through your fingers, even though it’s the most important part of your business, closing the sale.

Why Don’t Companies Follow Up?

Here are a few reasons why most businesses fail to follow up:

They don’t have the time to follow-up.
They don’t know what to do, say or how to say it.
They don’t have an effective follow-up sales system in place.
They are unaware they should even be following up with customers in the first place.
They are confidence for people to come and buy to them (soft sell), but they don’t have the confidence to go up to them, as they feel like it’s (hard selling).
They don’t understand the process.

Overlooking follow-up, for whatever reason, can be the most costly mistake for your business.

Day in and day out, your follow-up system should be working, bringing in contacts to your sites, creates and nurtures qualified leads, drives conversions, contributes to customer satisfaction, helps to build the relationship, and saves you and your business untold time, money and effort in the long run. It’s one of the most powerful systems in your marketing package that should be at your disposal and pretty much all your leads and customers should experience it regularly.

Use a simple strategy like this one to create follow-up processes that work for your business each, and every time, automatically.

The 5 Steps to an Effective Follow-Up System:

Once everyone in your business is on the same page, you are ready to collect quality leads and significantly improve the conversion to revenue rate and to take your business to the next level.

Here is a great 5 step process

1) Contact Management System: The way you collect leads can range from a simple Excel form to customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, either as offline software or online service. Google Docs also offers a FREE web-based spreadsheet that works as good as Excel. Aside from the basics (date, name, title, contact info, DOB, etc.) agree on what other data is important for you to collect - see the ‘Data Collection’ step below.

Have columns for your Leads Full Contact Details - and your Leads Follow Up, ‘by when and how’ - your Customers Full Contact Details - and your Customer Follow Up, ‘by when and how’ - Next Steps, ‘what to do next’ and Comments, ‘what they say or interested in’. Also, rate the lead - see the ‘Ready to Act Scale below’. Set a day and time every week to review this with your team. All of this will make certain that everyone is on the same page and the follow-up system is easy to use.

2) Data Collection: You can never have enough information about your leads. However, on the first contact, don’t overwhelm them with questions, particularly on your website contact form. Plan out the discovery process and be prepared to dig deeper when you can. The type of essential information will depend on your industry, products, and services.

Questions might center on their current problems and competitive products they use, who has the authority to make a purchase decision, when they plan to make a purchase, what criteria they use when purchasing a product like yours, and available budget – questions like these are critical in deterring if they are your ideal customer. Have a data collection form by every phone in your office;

3) Free Information and Content Products: Think about the different materials needed to attract a prospect’s attention, get them interested in your message, and move them along during the follow-up process. These are valuable and educational resources. Get visitors to your website to fill out the contact form by offering a free report and while speaking to someone for the first time offer to send them an article relevant to their problem and your solution - always ask permission to send it. Decide in advance what you have in your arsenal and when you would send it out. By the way, if you’re at a networking event don’t hand them anything other than your card and use the information product you mention as an opportunity to follow up.

You should always make your headings and titles stand out, ‘Make Your Marketing Accountable, and Pay For It Self’. This helps to catch the attention of people who know little or nothing about your company with what they want – information about how to solve their problem. Remember it’s not about you, it’s all about them!

4) Ready to Act Scale: Every time a connection is made with someone, determine where they are on the ready-to-act scale. This is the step where the greatest mistakes are made. - First, they may not be qualified, as you’ve defined your ideal customer. - Next, there are four quadrants on the Ready to Act Scale – Stranger, Awareness, Recognition, and Agreement.

The follow-up process moves people from being a stranger (the ‘who are you and why do I care’ faze) to awareness (the ‘I now know something about you and I see where you might be able to help me’ stage) and if you’re good enough, to where the prospect is willing to explore working with you, Recognition, and Agreement. By understanding the difference of each quadrant will determine how you interact with the prospect at each stage of readiness.

Use KISS, Keep It Stupidly Simple, by just using a simple 1 to 4 rating system to determine where they are on the ready-to-act scale.

5) Follow-up System: This is where the rubber meets the road. Follow up can be with an automated email marketing solution, handwritten follow-up letter, phone calls, newsletter or in person. Or even a combination. You have to decide what works best for you, your company and your brand, within the limitations of your time, resources, and budget. Certainly, the power of an automated system has benefits. There are great CRM systems that integrate an email marketing solution on the market today. To some degree, these can put your sales and marketing on autopilot and should be looked at. But don’t discount the power of personal contact by a phone call or handwritten follow-up letters and of course the power of the newsletter.

Now that you have a follow-up system in place, use it. And don’t forget that timeliness are very important. The chances of success drop rapidly if you don’t keep in contact whether they are ready to buy or not. Consistency is so important too. Sales are lost when you can’t be bothered to follow up and keep in regular contact.

Pace yourself. Take too long to get back to prospects and they may not remember you or already purchased from a competitor.

Practice being good at following-up, before and after the sale!

Here Are A Few Good Tools To Use In Your Follow Up System:

Email follow-up when done right can help to increase new sales and help retain existing customers. It’s an effective, yet simple tool. When new leads opt-in on one of your Landing Pages or website to request more information or an appointment. After you collect their name and email address, you send them a personalized follow-up email with the relevant requested content.

If you’re an eCommerce business or sell your product online using a shopping cart, a cart abandonment campaign is a proven way to reclaim seemingly lost sales.

It allows you to follow up via email with customers who placed items in their cart but didn’t complete their purchase. This sales tactic is triggered by someone leaving your website with items left in the shopping cart. Once someone abandons their shopping cart, they’ll receive a series of automated, strategic emails reminding them of their full cart and persuading them to complete their purchase.

To sweeten the deal, including a discount offer for finishing their purchase. According to Receiptful, 54% of shoppers will purchase products left in shopping carts if those products are offered at a lower price.

Printed Postcards makes you stand out in the crowded internet marketplace, a physical and personal touch goes a long, long way and it may be just enough to sway your leads to buy and encourage your existing clients to stick around. Incorporating a printed postcard follow-up sequence might be exactly how you can ensure your business stands out from everyone else and gets the attention of your leads and clients.

Postcards are a great follow-up tool because:

They’re cheap.
They’re eye-catching.
They’re nearly always read (99%).
Results are easily measurable.
You can automate and personalize them.
They are a physical form of communication that adds a real personal touch (which can help your business stand out, show that you really do care and appreciate them).

And they are a multitude of purposes when marketing to your leads and customers:

Anniversary reminders
Holiday promotions
Contract expiration reminders
Free birthday offers
Cross-sell and up-sell offers
Update contact info requests
Party invitations
Appointment reminders
Thank you cards
Proposal follow-up
Demo follow-up
New product announcements
Recurring service reminder

Don’t be scared off by sending your customers and leads postcards – they’re easy to implement into your follow-up processes, they will love you for it and they work, yes they do!

It’s better to send a personalized postcard with their name ‘ Hi Richard’ and any other details you have, like their anniversary date, just make sure you have their up-to-date address and of course other details correct.

It doesn’t look good if you spelled their name wrong, as you can see.

Newsletters are ultimately one of the best ways to follow up. Send them one of your regular newsletters, they work better than any brochure, when it comes to building relationships and trust. It shows a personal side of your business, allowing them to draw closer to you as a customer. It also has a 100% deliverability; your newsletter will get to every reader every time! It increases your customer lifetime value (LTV), it increased your referrals, and it has a very high pass-around value, it also helps to build your brand and message.

By regularly sending out a monthly customer newsletter to your prospects, you drastically increase the ability for your prospects to remember who you are, and when it is time for them to buy, they will remember you, and by then they will know, like and trust you. So always regularly send one of your monthly customer newsletters to all of your prospects

SMS is a personalized messaging service that allows you to send your communication directly to your prospects and customers by phone with a message that will almost always get read. How often do you have your phone with you? Pretty much most of the time.

It’s often overlooked in favor of social media or email marketing. However, SMS is a great tool to utilize in your business, especially for following up with customers.

In the latest surveys show that more than 70% of people prefer offers sent directly to their phone, and around 85% of people want businesses to make it easier to communicate with them. There are more mobile phones on the planet than TVs and 5 times as many than PCs. Almost 45% of people are more likely to make a purchase via their mobile, and the average user will look at their phone around 150 times per day.

Many businesses like dentists and appointment-based businesses also use SMS as appointment reminders, as well as introducing offers, invitations and other promotions. They are convenient and gets almost immediate attention.

Persistence is Everything:

There’s one other great point about continuing to follow up with prospects. The more persistent you have to be when you’re winning a client’s business, the more likely they are to stick with you when you finally succeed.

Few people buy from you on the first or second contact, most of them, a whopping 60% will take as long as 12 months or more to make a buying decision, they like to do their homework and avoid impulse decisions. Once they choose your business, you’ve got a customer who other businesses will have to work even harder to poach them away from you now — and remember, most businesses give up long before that, usually after their first or second try.

Prospects buy only when they’re ready. Think of all the reasons why a prospect would decide not to do business with you right now:

They’re too busy.
They don’t realize that they need your solution.
They’re concerned about their financial situation.
They’re thinking about more urgent things to worry about.
They are not in enough pain or discomfort for your solution yet.
They don’t fully understand what you can do for them.
They haven’t got to know, like or trust you enough yet.
Timing isn’t right.
They are scared of making the wrong decision.

These are just a few of the nearly infinite reasons why a prospect isn’t ready to buy. In reality, the only time a prospect can pull the trigger and make a purchase is when everything lines up They have the budget, they understand what they need, they can trust you and they’ve decided you’re the right solution for them. Understandably, it’s rare for the stars to align perfectly at the exact time you initiate contact with a prospect, so what happens to those leads who aren’t ready to buy straight away, which is most of them?

By continuing to reach out and follow up with prospects, you stay on their radar until they’re ready to buy. Whether that’s 3, 6 or 12 months, you tap into that 80% of those sales that most businesses never able to attract.