Honing your sales follow-up techniques has become more important than ever, considering the economic upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Owing to the pandemic, around 50% of B2B buyers are holding off on purchases. Effectively following up with prospects plays a critical role in supporting sales growth and increases your chances of closing more deals even when things are not in your favor. Especially as the Covid situation changes next year.
Your job as a salesperson doesn’t end after you reach out to prospects a couple of times or close a deal. Following up with prospects is necessary both post-outreach and deal closure. It helps to convert prospects into buyers, make good on upselling opportunities, and maintain a strong rapport with customers.
5 Effective Ways to Follow Up with Prospects and Win New Business
Some salespeople are not trained to follow up with prospects properly or give up too early after one or two rejections. Other sales reps simply don’t have a result-oriented sales follow-up plan in place, so they miss out on opportunities.
With these five sales follow-up techniques, you’re likely to inject life into your dead sales pipeline and sales startegies and close more deals.
1. Stop annoying prospects by contacting them for no reason
Modern-day buyers are well-informed, busier, and value their time more than ever. If you open your sales follow-up with phrases like “just checking in” or “touching base,” your prospects would probably show disinterest right from the word go. It’ll make a lot of sense to them if you back your follow-up with a decent reason and present yourself as an asset.
For example, you could inform them about your recently published blog or ebook to educate them, explain new product updates, and give new ideas to improve their business.
Make sure your sales follow-up is focused on your prospects and not on your company. With that said, you can talk about how your products and services can push their business forward. Track your prospects by staying up-to-date with their business affairs and industry trends. This will help you find strong reasons to follow up with them.
Using tools like Google Alerts is a powerful way to know what your prospects are up to. Even better, you can leverage intent data to capture their buying signals, sales triggers, and online behavior.
2. Use email and phone call wisely and use a mix of follow-up channels
Email and phone calls are two primary channels salespeople use to follow up with prospects. Email is mostly used in sales follow-ups that are not intended to get a quick response from prospects. Email follow-ups need to be consistent over a certain time period and require salespeople to be patient enough to generate a positive outcome. Up to seven email follow-ups can be slowly sent out while waiting for a response.
Following up using a phone call could get prospects to quickly respond. However, the chances of getting turned down could be high if you call them more than necessary or at odd times and don’t follow a balanced sequence.
The frequency and intention of a sales follow-up email or call depend on various factors such as the industry, buyer’s journey stage, timing, type of follow-up campaign, how much you know the prospect, how many decision-makers are involved, etc.
It’s recommended to employ different sales follow-up channels apart from the traditional ones. Following up using social media, text, direct mail, fax, snail-mail with a gift, and even in-person can help you stand out from the crowd, stay top of mind with prospects, and increase your engagement rate.
3. Don’t hesitate to ask prospects for guidance on the next steps
Following up with prospects without being annoying is a tough task. You can easily avoid irritating prospects by proactively asking them how to go about the sales follow-up in the best way possible. Ask them how they’d like to stay in touch with you, if they need more information on your offerings, what will be their preferred communication channel, and what will the best time to connect with them.
Optimize your follow-up by maintaining a conversational tone throughout the process, personalizing the follow-up experience for prospects, and continuously adding value to win their trust. Remember to avoid excessive automation of your follow-up to keep the human touch alive in the process.
Don’t forget to share encouraging case studies, customer testimonials, and reviews with powerful anecdotes, statistics, and other data to add meaning to your sales follow-up conversations.
4. Summarize your conversation and confirm details or next activities
Summarizing meetings or conversations the next day gives you a strong reason to follow up with prospects. Besides, it allows you to assure prospects that you care about what they’re looking for and clearly understand their needs.
Summaries help you to clear any misunderstanding or confusion prospects may have. They also help you to professionally hold them accountable for what they’ve agreed to or said previously. Some salespeople use them as handy notes to quickly recollect the previous meeting or conversation with prospects and make sure they don’t miss out on anything important during the follow-up.
After you give prospects a summary of your previous meeting or conversation via email or phone call, you can ask for their confirmation or agreement on what you’ve summarized and the next steps. This helps you keep a written (email) or recorded (phone call) confirmation from prospects and also ensures they’re on the same page with you.
5. Identify where prospects are in the sales pipeline and accordingly follow up
Companies that master sales pipeline management have 28% higher revenue growth. The way you follow up with prospects should change depending on the pipeline stage they are at.
Take the lead generation stage as an example. Here, you’d want to strike while the iron is hot. Promptly following up with leads when they ask about your solutions, fill out a form, or take the initial action to connect with your brand will create a good chance to push them to the next stage.
At the lead nurturing stage, you could follow up with leads using lead nurturing programs, lead magnets, and marketing automation. This will help you to improve brand awareness, closely listen to the needs of potential buyers, and deepen your relationship with them until they become paying customers.
When qualifying leads, a sales team follows up via discovery call (or rarely via email), asking specific questions to determine whether a lead is worth pursuing further. Here, the sales follow-up includes the use of either BANT, GPCTBA/C&I, CHAMP, MEDDIC, or a combination of lead qualification frameworks, depending on the product, industry, or lead type.
At the discussion stage where you schedule a demo or proposal meeting, your sales follow-up will change again depending on who and why you’re following up. For instance, if you’ve scheduled a follow-up with the prospect’s tactical team, you’d want to focus on technical specifications whereas decision-makers would like to hear more strategic or ROI-related insights from you.
Conclusion
One of the secrets to increasing your sales close rate is improving the way you follow up with prospects. Even if prospects reject you straight away and signal a definite no, don’t lose hope. Follow up at a later date! The situation changes.
The five proven strategies explained above can help your sales team to follow up better and close more deals. But, your team will be even better at following up with prospects if they have access to accurate, authentic, and updated contact data.
We’re not just talking about using verified contact data to improve connection rates and avoid wasting time while searching for the right phone numbers or email addresses. Behavioral, firmographic, technographic, and demographic data are also crucial assets provided by SalesIntel for following up with prospects in a more effective and opportune way.
If you’re looking for a reliable and trustworthy B2B data partner, SalesIntel will perfectly meet your expectations. Our 95% accurate human-verified data is reverified every 90 days and will drastically enhance your sales follow-up performance. Sign up for a live demo today.
