Only 2% of deals are closed in the first sales meeting. In fact, most sales transactions require more than 5 follow-up emails to get closer to a good next step. And only 8% of the salespersons get to that stage. These were the results of a study published by Marketing Donut.
Of course, there has been much written about the need to systematically follow up, don’t accept NO for an answer, and try to personalize, personalize, personalize!
But despite all of the available tips and tricks about testing different subject lines, advice on the style of writing, length of emails, etc., the underlying challenge is about meaningful personalization.
Salespersons run out of personalized material to share in their sales follow-up emails. Instead, they fall back to “just checking in”, or “just wanted to share an update that…”.
Sending multiple sales follow-up emails does result in you being top of the inbox. So it’s a great strategy to implement. But whether you like it or not, that strategy of “just send something with a call to action” is also being used by everyone else. It’s becoming easier by the day too – marketing automation tools can send emails automatically.
So, the real unmet challenge is to build a trust connection that engages your prospects. One way to do that is to include meaningful content in your sales follow-up emails.
Meaningful content is something that shows the customers that you are not just sending them content that you send to everyone else.
It’s useful AND personalized as much as possible.
Everyone sends product updates, the latest corporate announcements, helpful generic tips, and so on. That content is focused on the seller.
The important thing to do is to reflect those in terms of how they apply to your prospect. With the first sales follow-up, you can refer to your in-person interactions and position your product.
But with the second email or phone call onward, it is not easy to write something meaningful except the good old “I’m checking in to see if now is a good time to reconnect…” or “here are top 10 reasons why….”
Instead, what if you could say “I have an update on this specific goal of yours…” or “Here’s something that addresses the challenge you outlined with your….”?
That would surely be far more interesting to the prospect, and more likely to elicit a response while raising the trust index.
That kind of sales follow-up is possible only if you have discussed customer goals in the meeting. But that doesn’t happen too often. Most of the time, we are just keen to share how great our product or service is without getting to what the customer could actually be struggling with.
We know how difficult the catch-22 situation is with a “product first” presentation. After all, you don’t fully know what the customer’s problems are, and the customer is hesitant to share them without knowing more about you first. So it makes sense to build credibility right off the bat, and do your pitch.
That’s where a thoughtfully crafted interactive assessment comes in.
Most sellers do know who their buyers are, and what their general pain points are. So an interactive assessment that starts with validating those pain areas can begin the interaction on the right foot. Here’s how such an approach can be implemented:
Note that steps 3 and 5 are already executed by most salespersons. Its steps 1, 2, and 4 that are often difficult to carry out.
What we are doing with Evalinator is to help you formalize those icebreaker and exploratory conversations into an actionable model.
This model then leads to informed sales follow-up communications. And as you update the model with conversations with other prospects, the data set becomes richer, and you are then able to engage with meaningful statistics and insights.
If this approach sounds even remotely reasonable to you, then there is nothing better than testing it out! Get started for free and craft your first assessment. We are here to help you succeed.
I Want to Turbo-Charge My Sales Follow-ups
