How persistent should you be in following up?

I've talked to hundreds if not thousands of business owners over the years about marketing and sales.

One thing they always ask me for are recommendations on how much follow up should they be doing on their incoming leads.

The key thing to remember about this is that there is a BIG difference between following up on leads who have asked you for help and trying to reach out to prospects who have never asked you for anything.

If someone fills out a form on your site, calls you or otherwise sends in a message, they are interested in your service and you need to get back to them immediately.

Ideally you have it set up to instantly respond to these and get them on the phone immediately. If it's a form or some other method that doesn't let you communicate right away, try to get a phone number as rapidly as possible so you can call them.

Essentially you want to follow up right away and then keep the follow up going rapidly until they answer and you can help them answer "yes" or "no" on whether or not they actually want your service or product.

A typical follow up sequence might look like this: They reach in, you follow up right away: As soon as that lead hits you up, reach back with a call, text, and email. You're telling them, "Hey, I'm on it!" Quick responses show you're serious about helping them out.

1. Day 2 – Round Two: Give it a day, then hit them up again. Maybe they didn't get your first follow up. Show them you are serious about helping them.

2. Day 4 – Round Three: Two more days have gone by, and it's time for another follow up. Maybe ask if your messages are actually going through, or ask them about their original request, keep working to get them in touch.

3. Day 6 – Round Four: By now, they're familiar with your name. You can share some success stories or spend a moment to describe the problems you help handle to remind them why they reached out in the first place.

4. Day 8 – Last Call: This is typically the end of your live follow-up. If they haven't responded by this time you can let them know you're archiving their inquiry and won't be following up any more. This will tend to sort out the ones who are just procrastinating and the ones who silently already decided not to talk to you. There will be a certain percentage that respond telling you to not give up on them, great! Now actually get them into a sales interview or consultation. The rest who don't respond, get them onto an email list and send it over to marketing to keep working them over until they reach out again.

Handling your incoming leads like this helps to make sure that your salespeople don't spend their whole day/week following up on an ever increasing number of cold leads. It lets you get the ones who are interested in touch right away and clear off the others until they are more interested.

Hopefully you are using a CRM and some sort of a sales pipeline to show your active deals. If so, the above should keep it pretty clean and give you good feedback on how many new leads you need in order to get into an actual interview.

If you measure how many interviews you need in order to get a sale then you have a pretty good handle on the numbers you'll need to be watching to make sure you control hitting your revenue quotas or not.

Should we call, text or email?

Yes!

You might wonder why bother with calling, texting, and emailing? Isn't that a bit much? Not at all! Some folks love the quick ping of a text, others want the nitty-gritty details in an email, and then there are those who appreciate the personal touch of a call. By mixing it up, you're making sure your message hits home no matter their communication style.

So there you go, some helpful tips on recommended follow up timing and methods. You can test this out and do a whole lot to optimize your process. Let me know if you want any help and I'd be happy to hop on a call.

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