Selling is like courtship but without effective follow-up strategies, your calls will not result in a closed deal. You have to keep courting your prospects with follow-ups to win business.
Research says 80% of your prospects need five courtship sequences to say ‘YES.’ And you know what? Just 8% of sales reps have a framework of more than five follow-ups. Treat this as a cheat code, but if you nail down your follow-up strategy, you have an undefeated advantage over your competitors.
This article gives you just that! Find the strategies you need to create the winning follow-up process.
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ToggleWhen Should You Follow Up With a Client?
It doesn’t matter what your sales strategy is or how good your sales calls are. You’re seriously missing out if you sit back and wait for your prospects to reach out.
Sure, you do not want to be clingy and annoy your clients. But have you ever forgotten to purchase a product you fell in love with? We both know the answer, don’t we? People have short attention spans and must be reminded to make a purchase. This is when they are convinced they need your product. When it’s a ‘NO,’ they need more convincing, aka follow-ups.
Either way, here’s what remains common – follow-up strategies can help you close deals.
So, let’s get to it straight. It doesn’t matter if you just got out of a killer sales call, impressed the client in the discovery call, or are simply unsure what to do with a prospect. Just follow up with them. Extensive follow-ups are a critical element of the sales process, and if you want to close more deals, you have to do more follow-ups.
Even from a financial perspective, following up with your existing list of potential clients makes more sense. According to Harvard Business Review, selling to new clients would cost you anywhere between 5x and 25x more. So put on your follow-up hat and grab yourself some closed deals.
7 Follow-up Strategies to Turn that ‘NO’ into A ‘YES’
First things first, don’t treat sales follow-ups quite literally. Craft your strategies to keep your prospect interested and the conversation on. And don’t just assist your prospects while closing the deal, assist them while they make the decision. These seven strategies would help you achieve it.
1. Personalization is the key to successful follow-up strategies
Master this first. Your prospects do not want the infamous templated email or phone call asking how they feel. You need to address their needs specifically and touch up their pain points. Luckily, Salesforce’s data enrichment integrations allow you to strengthen your understanding of ICPs with information on their preferences, interests, and past interactions. These work perfectly for customizing follow-ups!
For example – you can monitor their interaction with your website to find what they need. Send a customized follow-up explaining how your product can help and offer a free trial to close them.
Your follow-up strategies should reiterate how you can help them and give them a reason to pursue you.
Here’s a hack: Ask your prospects how they want to hear from you. At the end of your sales call, a simple question like ‘What would be the best time and way to reach you’ would work wonders.
2. Provide value in every step of the process
Never follow up for the sake of it. Design each follow-up to provide value. It is not how amazing your product features are but how you can help clients with their troubles. Include elements such as helpful resources, industry insights, or personalized recommendations.
Show your clients how your product can make their lives easier or much better. Make every follow-up so amazing that your client will look forward to hearing from you.
CMS platforms like HubSpot can help produce high-quality content pieces that you can readily share with your clients. This platform also lets you track their engagement.
3. Use sales automated workflow software
Losing track of your emails and calendars is so easy. An unorganized calendar & emails coupled with tons of tasks is the perfect recipe for feeling overwhelmed. So much that you can forget to follow up with a client.
If your client asks you to get back to them in a week or to send them some materials, you should be able to do it. You also need sales sequences to nurture your leads who showed interest in your product but are not ready to purchase yet. There’s more, and all of it is too much for any sales rep.
Match My Email can help, though! We can help you centralize all the data from your meetings and client interactions into one place – Salesforce. It stores your data for over six months, leaving enough room to gather data reports on clients, craft follow-up strategies, and win them.
4. Opt for omnichannel follow-up strategies
There are many more channels at your disposal than emails and phone calls. Try to incorporate an omnichannel approach and convert your follow-up into a reach-out. This means establishing multiple touchpoints via social media channels like LinkedIn and Twitter, webinars, industry events, roundtables, gatherings, dinners, SMS, WhatsApp, and so on.
In this way, you will enhance the customer experience across multiple channels and leave multiple doors open for customers to contact you.
5. Build automated email sequences with free advice and content
This works best for bulk targets and follow-ups. You can create and automate sales triggers based on their funnel stage. You can choose to automate and set triggers for your existing and new clients. Have automation do the job for you and close deals faster and more efficiently. Here are some examples of sales triggers that you can automate.
- Thank you email at the end of the call.
- Reminding prospects of a timeline
- Emails for confirmations
- Asking for referrals or testimonials
- Other asks like filling a survey, feedback, information, and so on.
Secondly, gated content is a marketing & sales strategy of yesterday. You can also include some advice and content assets in your sequences for free. This establishes trust and showcases your expertise.
6. Time your follow-ups to fit your prospect’s need
You must sell to your prospects when they want to be sold to. For this, you must find the equilibrium point, which is often too difficult to locate manually. You can always ask your client, but multiple tools are available to help you find the right timing.
For example, you can use HubSpot’s automation feature to set up a trigger every time someone downloads your ebook. Create a nurturing sequence that will offer additional insights on the ebook’s topic for the next couple of weeks or a month. This is an amazing method for timing your follow-up and keeping your prospect engaged and interested.
7. Experiment with templates and messaging in your follow-up strategies
What works for one of your clients might not work for the others.
But how do you know what would work?
Test multiple messaging and follow-up templates with all your user profiles. Evaluate what works for whom and what does not. Your analytics will give you the answer to the best way of approaching a specific client. Be open, find a creative angle of communication, and test them out. Remember to be mindful and not aggressive, and your clients do not owe you anything.
Out-of-The-Box Follow-up Strategy Ideas
When we hear sales follow-up, we hear phone calls or emails by default. But are digital mediums the only way to follow up with a client? Not really! Here are some unique yet innovative ways to follow up.
- Send a video message as part of your follow-up strategies – drop a video message thanking your clients and giving a recap of your conversation. Even better if it’s personalized to the client you are sending it to because it will get you noticed.
- Send goodies with handwritten notes – client gifts are common, and yours might get lost in the crowd. However, what will not get lost is a handwritten note. It will surely fetch some eyeballs and attention. Remember to walk your clients through the next steps here. P.S. Playlist makes a unique gifting idea.
- Share thought leadership content – sharing curated industry insights, customized infographics, hot takes, and industry trends- a great way to gain attention. Show them your expertise, and use it to close the deal.
- Gamify your follow-up strategies – make the follow-up process interactive and delight your clients. To gamify the process, you can include knowledge checkpoints, leaderboards, a scorecard, contests, and more.
- Offer unique experiences as a reward – take your client out for wine tasting, host virtual coffee sessions, or send a mystery package to offer unique experiences that leave a mark and close the deal.
The Right Time to Build Your Sales Follow-up Strategy Is ‘Now’
Sales is a long-term courtship, not a speed date. You need to nurture your clients if you want to put a ring…. we mean, contract on the table with them. That’s what follow-up does for you. It keeps you at the forefront for your clients to help you close deals faster.
Create that follow-up email sequence today and be that rep with a high closed won rate.