Episode 9
In this episode, Gary dives deep into the critical importance of follow-up in the sales process. Gary breaks down follow-up strategies into three key stages: before the lead, after a lead comes in, and post-meeting follow-ups. Using real-life examples and personal anecdotes, he highlights the necessity of persistent and intelligent follow-up to close deals and build lasting business relationships. Gary also stresses the importance of using a CRM, leveraging various communication channels, and maintaining professionalism through gestures like handwritten thank-you notes. Whether in B2B or other sales arenas, this episode offers actionable insights to ensure no prospect falls through the cracks.
Discover:
00:00 Introduction to Pipelineology
00:50 Host Introduction and Episode Overview
00:57 The Importance of Follow-Up in Sales
05:06 Breaking Down Follow-Up Strategies
05:45 Outreach Follow-Up Techniques
10:30 Handling Incoming Leads
17:41 Post-Meeting Follow-Up
27:09 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Notify Gary if you want to have more conversations like this:
gary@pipelineology.com
Transcript:
[00:00:00] But it really is worth having somebody do up to 11 or 12. Follow ups by hand, whether that’s phone calls, text messages, emails, LinkedIn messages, Facebook messages. and don’t be afraid to use all of the above. Find out where they’re, where they hang out, and message them that way.
[00:00:21] Welcome to Pipelineology.
The Business to Business podcast for agencies, consultants, coaches, and businesses looking to build a pipeline of hot prospects ready to buy their products and services. Never wonder where your next client is coming from to learn more about our strategies, services, and for resources on building your sales pipeline.
Visit Pipelineology dot com. Now onto the show.
[00:00:50] Hey everybody, it is Gary Ruplinger, host of Pipelineology, and today my guest is me.
[00:00:57] I’m gonna be doing a solo episode today, and I’m gonna be talking about following up, and this is a critically important part of the sales process and one that is really easy to not have a good system in place to let, essentially things fall through the cracks and ultimately you lose deals and you’re not closing as much business as you could be.
If you just had a system in place, now I know sales processes can vary in length anywhere from, you know, the hours to weeks, to months to I’ve seen, I’ve seen years so. The more complex the offering, the larger the companies you’re targeting. Obviously that can play a lot, a large part in how long that sales process is, right?
If you’re selling airplanes, your sales process is much, much longer than, say, if you’re selling automobiles. And the other thing is that not everybody is ready to buy today. They might be interested, and I know there’s an old study out there that says. I think it’s a little over 50% of all leads that do come in across all, all different verticals.
50% of them ultimately end up buying and becoming a customer. They just might not become your customer, but if you had followed up you, they might have so. In the B2B space, especially follow up is, is absolutely critical, right? Everything’s kind of based on relationships and. It’s, it’s not so much just a transactional, type of one-time purchase.
In most cases, it’s usually we’re, we’re putting a system in place, we’re deploying a, a mainframe and it’s got a service agreement on it. You know, we’re running ads for you and it’s monthly. you know, even. You know, joining a mastermind or, or type of or coaching program where it’s, you know, many, it’s, it’s a, a more intimate type of transaction than a lot of consumer space things.
So I, I know that, I probably, I’ve, now I told some of my stories earlier on about kind of the automotive business, but I just wanted to share the story of a direct mail vendor that called on me regularly. This was when I was a marketing director. For a, for an auto group, and every month, I think it was usually the third or fourth of the month, he’d pick up the phone and he’d call me and, you know, he’d shoot the breeze for a minute or two.
He, he was actually very personable, very polite, and. What, what if, okay, do you, do you have some room this month? You wanna do, do one of our campaigns? And my answer was pretty much always, Nope, not interested, not this month. I don’t have any space. My budget’s already allocated and, but like clockwork, the very next month he’d call back again.
And same, same question. And for a while I, I tried to dodge his calls, but he was persistent and called anyway. You know, again, it was one of these people who was, was polite about everything and, and personable. So I didn’t just say, Hey, we’re never interested, never call me again. just because I was actually interested in this product, I just never had a place for it till finally one month I did, I got approval from one of the GMs to put a, put a campaign in place.
And, we had a big direct mail component to it. And when he called up, I said. Yeah. What, what do you got this month? What’s working? And he sent me his, his recommended pieces and I said, okay, let’s, let’s do it. And you know that all of a sudden, what, what? He spent months and months and months, like I said, 18 months of follow up, getting nowhere, finally one day.
The timing just happened to be right. And boom, he got the, he got the sale and we did business together many times after that. But to kind of get established and get his foot in the door and finally get that first transaction from us took a long time. Now that’s obviously an extreme example, but again, it does kinda show what.
[00:05:01 You can accomplish just by having a persistent system in place. So I’m gonna kind of break down, follow up today into three separate parts. One is gonna be kind of what I call before the lead. So this could still really be more of an ad ad strategy, more advertising based, prospecting based. But, I think it’s kind of important to talk about.
[00:05:21] And then we’re gonna talk about, probably the one where most people think about it is after a lead comes into your system, somebody raises their hand and says, Hey, I’m interested. That type of follow up. We’re going to take a close look at that. And then finally we’re gonna talk about what do you do after you’ve met with them but they aren’t ready to buy yet.
and we’ll kind of talk about some strategies there in terms of following up. So let’s jump in right away here with follow up when, what I like to call the outreach follow up. Essentially, if you’re still doing advertising, somebody’s on your website, you’re still retargeting them, display ads. What does that look like?
So I wanna share just a little story here since I’m in the process of still, getting my pi, my, podcast. This podcast up and running. This will be one of the, first 10 episodes that we release. And these past few weeks, getting this all going, I have been extremely busy. So I have not had any time personally to spend.
Prospecting between working with clients, launching new campaigns for new clients, coming on and launching the podcast, I, I really haven’t had time to sit and do any personal prospecting. However, I have a system in place that does it for me. and that’s probably the most critical thing, is that having something that’s gonna work for you, whether you are.
Doing it or not makes such a huge difference. we still have leads coming in. We still have sales calls going on because there’s a system in place. And even though I don’t have time to do it myself, it’s still going on in the background. And I only need to get involved now when it’s necessary for someone to talk to me.
Otherwise, everything else is, is going on. So when it comes to prospecting, the follow up is one of the. The things I think a lot of people don’t necessarily embrace, especially early on. for example, we’ve, we’ve done interviews now on, on cold email and cold calling. LinkedIn outreach, combinations thereof.
If you remember Matt Fabric’s interview, he mentioned needing, you know, just on the email side of it, you know, they, they would send out eight, eight messages. plus they’ve got cold calls going out. Essentially, they’re doing tons and tons of different touchpoint as they’re doing this. And when it comes to doing outreach, that’s probably, you know, the big cornerstone of the whole system is that people are busy if they don’t respond to your message right away.
Even though they might’ve been interested, they were thought, oh yeah, this is cool. I’ll do it later. Nobody thinks about it again. They forget about it and they don’t, they don’t come back to it. Every once in a while you’ll see an exception to that, but for the most part, if somebody doesn’t respond right away, they’re not going to.
But if you follow up again, you’ll say somebody, you’ll get responses back that say, Hey, thanks so much for following up. Appreciate you staying on top of this. And as, as long as you know, your message was, was relevant to them, it’s not uncommon for someone to thank you for being persistent and saying, yeah, let’s talk.
And even if they’re not interested you, you’ll find that a lot of people will actually still thank you for being persistent. They say, Hey, it’s not a good opportunity, not a good fit right now. But yeah, appreciate you reaching out and that’s cool too. And you just move on. And kind of the same type of thing works in the advertising side.
that’s kind of wanted, why I kind of wanted to roll this in here a little bit is that, let’s say on the display ads, banner ads, that type of thing through, you know, double click and all kinds of other providers. That you may need to get your impressions in front of somebody 70 times. I talked to an agency recently and they said that’s, that’s kind of the number they’re seeing is it takes some 70 times now of getting that message in front of somebody before they’re actually seeing people respond and convert and become leads.
So. I know, I know for me, as you know, kind of an old school Google AdWords person who, I think I opened my account back in 2001 where your, your process was literally you’d buy clicks, put them, send them to a, a landing page, and they, they either converted or they didn’t. And, and that was, that was the end of it.
You assume that, you know, one click was, was all it was going to take. And these, these days, you know, sales processes are, are vastly more complex and, and the things you’re doing just take a lot more time. So from an outreach perspective, you may take, it may, it’s probably gonna take multiple touchpoints across different types of media, whether that’s, you know, strictly outreach or whether that’s a combination of outreach and ads.
it, it doesn’t really matter. You just may need to make sure you do an
alright. So number two. Here’s the one that I think when people, people think about follow up, this is the part they really have in mind, and that is a lead comes into your system. Maybe, somebody sends a message to you from your website, they fill out a lead form online. They, respond to a message you sent them on LinkedIn.
They raise their hand and say, Hey, I’m interested in talking when, what’s a good time? This is, is probably one of the most critical, times when follow-up is, is of the absolute most importance. First of all, you’d be surprised how many, how many businesses don’t even respond to those messages. I, I think I’ve seen that.
[00:11:14] 25 to 30%. They just, they just don’t even respond to, to leads that come in from a website. And it’s crazy to me to think that that is the case. But I, I’ve seen examples where I’ve sent inquiries in or somebody’s, you know, asking about our services and we do a little bit of mystery shopping to, to find out what their, their process is like, so we can better present our, our pitch to them and find out they, they don’t even bother to respond.
And, you know, for those types of, cases, since we do outreach for them, if they’re not responding to the leads, we know they’re not gonna get good results. So we’ll politely decline because, well, if they’re not getting good results, they’re gonna be unhappy. They’re gonna say, Hey, something’s wrong with your prospecting.
Rather than playing the blame game with them, we just pass on those. So let’s talk about following up with a prospect when it comes in. So what first thing you wanna do is you want to get back to that person quickly with, with an intelligent response. I mean, there’s old studies out there now from I think 2008 or so saying maybe it’s 2010, something like that, that says you want to get back.
You have the best chance of getting somebody on the phone if you get back to them within five minutes. And we’ve tested things like that out. Over hundreds of thousands of leads and have found that by and large that holds true. The big one caveat I’ll give you is make sure that when you’re following up, you’ve taken the time to read what their request is so that you can speak intelligently about it.
I have seen some. Cool technology tricks that will say as soon as somebody submits a lead, it initiates a call right back to them immediately, and then connects, you know, one of your, your, business development representatives to them. And we actually found that while that was extremely fast and the connection rate was high, that it didn’t necessarily result in a lot in more appointments or sales that actually reduced them because the person on our side wasn’t.
Wasn’t prepared to take that call and speak intelligently about what they had inquired about. So if it takes you 10 minutes, it’s okay if that’s what it’s gonna take to get back to them with a, an actual response to what they asked about. And if the, the question is, you know, it’s gonna take me, you know, a couple hours to figure that out, shoot, just shoot him a quick message.
Say, Hey, I got your message. I need to look, you know, and check on the status of something, whatever that may be. But we’ll get back to you within two hours. So how often do you follow up? Again, this kind of depends. If somebody has raised their hand and said they’re interested, that might be every day.
that might be every other day. That might mean that the first week you follow up three times the first week, and then once a week thereafter. There’s lots of ways to do this, but when somebody’s brand new, you wanna get back to them as fast as possible. And it’s okay. Even, even if you follow up with them twice that first day, just to get that message going and start coordinating schedules and figure out when they want to come in, when they want to get a meeting, when they want to do a demo, whatever it is you’re offering.
And I know one of the big questions is, well, how often should I follow up? I remember a guy at a, at a, you know, dealership telling me that his process was. He got a lead, he’d call them on the first day once. He’d call them on the second day once, and he’d call them on the third day. Once, if he didn’t hear back from them, he would just kill the lead and move on.
and he was wrong because those leads, we, we actually took some of them and tested it out and got people, got appointments, got sales from just following up a little bit longer. Now, of course there’s a point of diminishing return somewhere around the 11 or 12th follow up, you’ll find that, yeah, you, you’re, you’re probably just wasting your time.
So if you’ve got a person manually doing that follow up, probably not worth it so much to have somebody kind of doing this every day. but. You know, if it’s, if it’s a high enough ticket price, perhaps it, perhaps it is, but usually in that case it makes sense to put in more into like an automated nurture sequence that can be sent from A-A-C-R-M or an autoresponder or something automatically and just send them follow ups once a month or something like that.
But it really is worth having somebody do up to 11 or 12. Follow ups by hand, whether that’s phone calls, text messages, emails, LinkedIn messages, Facebook messages. and don’t be afraid to use all of the above. Find out where they’re, where they hang out and message them. That way. If somebody never answers your call, but they respond to every text message, then you should just be texting them and vice versa if they don’t ever respond to your text, but.
Every time you email them, they get back to you and then do that. But initially, when you’re trying to figure out which way that is, don’t be afraid to use everything at your disposal to get in touch with them. And I would highly, highly, highly recommend having a CM in place. And I know CRMs can seem very tricky and complicated and with a very high learning curve, and fairly a, a lot of those things are true about CRMs.
They can be pretty complicated, but as you build up a, a pipeline of prospects, it’s really hard to keep track of everything in your head, right? If you’re a new salesperson and you’re a week or two on the job, you can probably remember all of your prospects by name and keep that in your head. Fast forward another two weeks and things are probably starting to get a little fuzzy and three months in.
Yeah, there’s no chance you’re remembering who everybody is unless you’ve got a system for keeping notes and just keeping track of who everybody is. Now, there’s old school systems, right? You talk about people who’ve got rolodexes and notepads and. Note cards and all those things to keep track of them. But, I mean, this is, this is 2020 when I’m recording this online.
CRM systems are, are absolutely gonna be, the best way to do it. There’s just so much, so much easier to do. But you know, what, do what works for you. I’m not here to tell you you’re wrong. I’m just here to tell you, you know, whatever, whatever works. But I’d highly recommend putting, putting everybody into a CRM.
[00:17:41] Finally, let’s talk about what’s gonna happen after the meeting if somebody doesn’t close. So you do your presentation, you do your demo with them, you ask for the sale, and they don’t say yes, and they don’t say no. So this. Could be one of those long, you know, conversations about closing and techniques and how to get a, a yes or a no, but we’re gonna save that, for a different t time.
We’ll bring in an expert on that as I’m probably not the best person. To talk about closing. Honestly, I do it more intuitively than anything, so I, I can’t really explain my technique for doing it, and I know there’s some other great people out there, so we’ll get an expert on there on the actual closing.
But let’s say you did your best to close them, but nonetheless you didn’t get a yes and you didn’t get to know you gotta. Send me some information. let’s talk next week. I need to speak to blank. Can we follow up? Hey, I’m interested in this, but I need to do blank and blank first, and so on and so forth.
So I know for some people they say I don’t have anybody to keep following up with after a meeting. because I, I, they either buy or they die. and I remember this a lot, especially back in the dealership world we’re, this was like the, the. The mod, modus app operandi of a sales manager where they’re either buying today or they’re, or they’re not gonna buy, and I’ll just go sit in front of them until they either tell me yes or no.
But I’ll tell you, I worked with a, I had a colleague back then in the, in the dealership world and. You know, what he would, he would say, and despite the fact that the sales managers didn’t really like it, but, keep in mind he was also there on average, the top guy in an, in the dealership in any given month.
And he would say, you know, I’d love to sell this car today, but I need sales next month too. So it’s okay. So, right. I mean, there’s, there’s all kinds of things you can do for urgency. But by taking that approach of not, not making it so that their only option is yes or no, he did get people to come back to him because they respected and felt like they respected him and felt like he was respecting their boundaries and their feelings as well.
So. When we get back to the B2B space, well, it becomes even critically more so again, remember this is, this is usually about long-term relationships. You’re looking for long-term engagements with people. Something where month after month, they’re gonna be working with you. So let’s talk about how to follow up after a meeting.
It’s one of my favorite things to do is I send a thank you card. Handwritten. I’ll actually write it out, put it in the mail, and. As long as, as, as long as I know that the decision isn’t likely coming tomorrow, and in, in my case, a lot of cases it, it’s not, it’s, it’s several days out. It might be next week, it might be two or three weeks from now.
So especially in those cases, I like to take that personal touch of sending out something tangible that they can hold. Just something that literally probably takes me 60 seconds to write out by hand, and then that may be another 60 seconds to address. But you’d be amazed how that little, little gesture makes a really big difference.
Because I’ll tell you, you start doing that. Nobody else does this. I can’t even tell you the last time, heck, I, I can’t tell you the last time I got a thank you letter for becoming a customer of a place. So by doing this little, little gesture. You’re gonna stand out. So maybe, maybe they would’ve forgotten about you.
Maybe they would’ve forgotten about your demo. And probably if they get your letter five days later, they probably already have it out of mind, unless they’re basically just waiting on one other thing and they’re ready to go. But this makes all the difference and really shows that you are different. You stand out, you are a cut above everybody else.
You’re a, you’re a true professional. Just because you sent that, but what else do you do to follow up? Well, first of all, find out when the decision is likely to come, right? If somebody tells you, well, you know, next quarter sometime, you know, they’re probably not that interested, so it’s okay to ask them, you know, Hey, if I don’t hear from you.
When, when should I check back in? Right? You, you do wanna get some timeframes on this type of thing? I, I love to ask somebody who says, you know, let me, you know, I think I, I, this all sounds good. I think we wanna do this, you know, I need to check with my partner on this. I’ll ask him. Great. do you plan on talking to your partner over the weekend or is this a, a, you know, two or three weeks in the future type of thing?
And they’ll say, oh, no, no, I, I have a meeting with him scheduled on Thursday. you know, I, I’ll let you know by Friday. And I’ll, I’ll ask him. Great. If I don’t hear from you on Friday, so do you mind if I follow up again on Friday afternoon or on Monday? And I know if you’re, if you’re not in sales, that seems really forward.
But I’ll tell you this is, this is something that you should just make a habit. Because you know what, you know what they’re gonna say? They’re gonna say, yeah, of course. I almost never get a no, just asking somebody that question again, it just demonstrates it’s, you’re a professional and essentially you’re just saying, Hey, you know, I know you might get busy and you might, you know, not, not check back with me.
And basically this, if they do say no, you know that that entire thing was just to blow you off. So. You know, you can get a, if you can get a no from them, when it saves you a whole lot of follow up, it’s worth getting. But let’s talk about the follow up after this process. So I will follow up with somebody who says, you know, okay, I’ll follow up when we’ve agreed to.
And you know what, A lot of times I don’t hear back. I know, I know. Shocking, right? Somebody says, Hey, you know, we’re thinking about it. Can you follow up at this time? And you know, they, they weren’t, they weren’t ready that day. They’re not ready in the day they’d said, so, so what do you do? Well, I, I generally like to, especially that first month, I’ll, I’ll continue to reach out to them every week and then maybe every other week, and then maybe once a month I’ll check back in and, you know, after three to six months, Hey, you know what, I’ll, I’ll just send them a quick one liner.
Hey, how’s everything going? I’ll either look him up on, on LinkedIn, I’ll just shoot them a quick message. But it’s, it’s interesting. I used to, essentially, anytime I needed a client, I would go back into my Facebook messenger. because I had a lot of prospects in there at one point, and I would just reach out and say hi to everybody.
Hey, how are things going? I just figured out. See how everything’s, you know, how’s business these days. And, you know, people would reply back, oh, yep, thanks for, thanks for checking in. Nope, we’re good, we’re good. But if I sent out 15, 20 messages like that, usually one person would respond back without me prompting them, oh, hey, you know what?
We are in the market for, you know, prospecting services, which was what I was selling. can we talk? So even long dead leads, if they didn’t say no and they didn’t respond, and they just kind of fell off the face of the earth. You can just rekindle them by just reaching out six months, nine months down the road and, and starting that conversation back up.
Even if you followed up with them again several times, you know that, that first time, that first week after they’ve responded, and maybe like I said, once a week after that, but you know, follow up gets slower and slower as you go along and. It, you don’t, you don’t, it’s not rocket science about what you say.
You can just, you know, check back. You can just say things like checking back in with you just wanna see if you made a decision yet. You can feel free to send, you know, case studies and results like that. but even just, just having a conversation, just, just talking to somebody goes a long, long way.
Doing something when it comes to follow up is better than doing nothing. So if you don’t know what to say, just reach out and say hello. How are things going? Maybe not the finest, most, you know, brilliant message ever, but if it starts the conversation up again, it’s worth it. So that’s my take on, on following up.
It’s, it’s one of the most critically important things for any sales pipeline because not everybody is gung-ho, ready to go right away today. They might not respond to your advertising right away, but if, or your messaging, your outreach right away. But if you keep messaging them, the timing might be right.
They might, you know, have said, Hey, yeah, I’m interested, let’s talk. But you know, they, life gets in the way. They get busy, you know, their kid breaks their arm and they go to the emergency room and they’re, they, they ghost you for the next three weeks and then all of a sudden they’re back. They’re back and they say, oh, yep, sorry about that.
You know, had some family issues. But yeah, I’m ready to talk now by following up. You’re, you’re there again. When, when they’re ready. If you didn’t follow up and you assumed, oh, I called them for three days and they didn’t answer, apparently these people are, are terrible. That person’s gonna buy from somebody else.
And then finally, after the meeting, if they’re, if they don’t say yes or no, continuing to just drip on them. Remember, send thank you notes after your meetings. It’s gonna help you stand out, especially if they’re not ready to make a decision right away, knowing that you’re the kind of the professional that does that type of thing.
[00:27:06] It’s gonna help you win those, win those types of deals. So there you have it. Some tips on following up. Appreciate you taking the time to listen to today’s episode. And you know what, I’ll see you on the next one. I’m looking forward to it. Take care everybody.
[00:27:23] Thanks for listening to the Pipelineology podcast. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode and look forward to seeing you on the next one. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a review on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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