How to efficiently manage sales follow-ups
The reality that salespeople have to deal with, is the fact that most of the time, clients don’t convert after the first meeting. It’s doing follow-ups that ultimately make the sale. According to IRC Sales Solutions, only a meager 2% of sales converts are made after the first contact, whereas 80% are made after the fifth to twelfth follow-up. Whether it’s an email, call, or text message, salespeople need to be adequately persistent in making follow-ups to their clients if they want more sales conversions.
However, the majority of salespeople don’t continue after the 4th attempt of reaching out, which means they’re missing out on the 80% chance of being able to sell. Additional statistics regarding salespeople not following through are simply insane. Data from invesp shows that 48% never do any follow-ups and they don’t even try to reach out. Another statistic reveals that 70% stop reaching out after the first email. It is apparent that many salespeople don’t seem to enjoy doing follow-ups, but the question is, why do they give up? What’s so wrong with making follow-ups, that salespeople barely do it?
Common reasons for the Lack or Absence of follow-ups:
- The salesperson isn’t fully committed to closing deals.
- The salesperson is afraid of rejection.
- The salesperson lacks persistence.
- The salesperson assumes that the prospect isn’t likely to convert.
- The salesperson is too busy to keep track of and manage multiple deals effectively.
The first 4 reasons are mostly about the salesperson’s character and mindset. They need to learn that rejection is normal, and persistence is the key. Salespeople also need to be optimistic, and even if the client says no, it simply means that they’re not ready yet. After all, according to statistics, more than half of clients say “no” four times before they finally give in and say “yes”. Lastly, it’s important to treat one’s prospects as real people and establish good customer relationships, they’re not just a number, or a cheque personified. These issues can be addressed through proper training.
However, the fifth reason on the list is where we can truly make things more efficient. One of the biggest technical reasons as to why salespeople don’t do enough follow-ups is simple: they take effort and are time-sensitive. In a real-life situation, this means that a follow-up needs to be done within an hour after the first contact with the client for higher chances of conversion. After that, further follow-ups such as emails and text messages need to be carefully crafted, depending on the type of lead, to generate a meaningful relationship with the client. This goes on until the client finally needs your service/product, which may take many months of sending emails and making calls. Imagine having to do this for every single prospect. That’s a lot of work.
Manually following up regularly, as well as coming up with creative ways to get your prospect’s attention each time, is not easy. The clients that need following-up start to accumulate, and because they’re doing it manually, things can get out of hand, and rejections are taken personally. Furthermore, with a salesperson’s whirlwind of meetings and tasks, it’s easy to lose track or to even completely forget to follow up even if they initially intended to.
How does one ensure that sales follow-ups are done in a timely, efficient, and effortless manner? This can be done with the help of your CRM.
CRM for Follow-ups
It’s time to ditch manually managing follow-ups and outsource that to the system that is primarily intended to strengthen customer relationships. Many useful functionalities in a CRM can help salespeople do follow-ups more efficiently. It’s only a matter of discovering and learning these intended features to truly make use of your CRM for sales.
Track and Manage Communications
CRM is technically a database that stores customer profiles, previous interactions, as well as contact information. This allows you to personalize, and track follow-up efforts. It makes communication between you and your prospects so much easier because everything you need to have meaningful conversations with a customer is stored in your CRM.
Email Marketing Automation
Emails are known to have higher chances for ROI, in comparison with cold calling and other methods, making it a very important tool for sales. Not to mention, it is one of the main mediums used in making follow-ups. Make use of email templates, and email sequences, to engage and nurture your leads. Automating emails can also save you and your team so much time, and this can be done within your CRM.
Lead Management
One of the basic functionalities of a CRM is to qualify leads. This is also known as lead scoring. By knowing the type of lead that you have, whether they are hot, warm, or cold leads, your team can identify which ones to focus on, and what approach to use in order to effectively tackle and follow up on each one.
Task Management and Calendar Integrations
In the case of call follow-ups, calendar schedules and task reminders are extremely useful. They help you keep track of when to do follow-up calls and other follow-up action items. Adding a calendar integration in your CRM takes things to a different level as it can capture follow-up prompts, and add them to your schedule. These are details that can easily be forgotten, so having a system that reminds you is important to ensure the timeliness of your follow-ups.
Voice to CRM
Salespeople are busy, and whenever they need to take note of a follow-up schedule, or a follow-up action item, they normally have to open their calendars, CRMs, or even their notebooks, whichever they prefer, and manually take note. With a voice to CRM, this step of having to manually enter data is eliminated, saving more time and effort. Salespeople only need to speak their follow-up tasks and the software will automatically plug it in the right data fields. It ensures that salespeople stay on top of their game by verbally entering data when it is still fresh in their minds, with just a click of a button.
In Conclusion, utilizing CRM features and integrating them into your follow-up strategies makes the entire process more efficient. It allows you to automate, and manage communications effectively, reducing manual data entry, and making sure that the right leads are followed up at the right time.
