Best ways to build a personal followup

Let’s be frank: following up is tedious, and it often gets shoved to the back burner as sales professionals are closing deals. Yet, a solid follow-up strategy is essential to closing deals. 

Strong relationships in business and life are built over time across multiple interactions. Whether you connect with your leads on the first or fifth try, the real struggle arises when you must develop a strategy to follow up with them and get them to commit. 

Creating a product and getting people to buy it is important, but the real money is in follow-up. Sales professionals invest time and energy into attending events, meeting new people, and fail to use follow-ups to build the relationship from there. A study by LeadConnect Marketing found that 78% of consumers buy from the company that responds first. Creating an email follow-up campaign sets you up for long-term success and helps you gain valuable insight into your customers’ thinking. 

78% of consumers buy from the company that responds first.

-LeadConnect Marketing

Creating a follow-up system

Most people relate follow-ups to chasing opportunities or playing catch-up with potential clients after a meeting to see if they’re ready to buy. However, the key to following up is to add value to each interaction. Instead of nagging your customers and only reaching out for proposals, consider following up in ways they find helpful. Follow-ups are a series of logically linked interactions that increase your business promotions:

• Make clients feel important and valuable to you
• Share important info with your prospects
• Remind prospects about your business at no extra cost for you

Brands with superior customer experience bring in 5.7 times more revenue than competitors that lag in customer experience. After meeting, timely and effective follow-ups reflect your brand, strengthen your professional reputation, and attract new opportunities. Take the time and opportunity to research and understand your ideal customer(s) to ensure that you keep their interests in mind during your interactions. 

Brands with superior customer experience bring in 5.7 times more revenue than competitors that lag in customer experience.

-Retail Customer Experience

Wherever you can, utilize follow-up content that addresses goals, aspirations, problems, and challenges of your prospects, in addition to the “know and feel” factors you gained from your research. By using data to drive decision making, you can set reasonable and achievable goals for your follow-up strategy. 

Each stage of your strategy should involve a creative approach, messaging, content and incorporate your unique sales activities. Mapping your sales process is invaluable, when you know which actions will guide your leads to the next stage of your relationship, you can work on optimizing those activities. 

While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach check out these tactics to build an effective personal follow-up strategy. 

1. Identify Prospect Interest

There are various techniques to collect prospect research. Attaining insight and a better understanding of consumers and consumer behavior is important to keep up with your industry and maintain a competitive edge. The journey to understanding your prospects’ interests is never-ending; define your target audience so that you focus on qualifying interested leads. You can segment your target buyers by who’s:

• Talking about your brand
• Following along
• Interacting with your brand
• Shows purchasing intent in your products

2. Create a prospect directory

A prospect directory consists of the right customers for your unique set of services. 

3. Plan a roadmap to connect with prospects

Analyze current relationships with your prospects. 

• Do they know who you are? 
• What are various ways to cultivate relationships with your prospects? 
• Have you connected with them before? 

Every message or touch point with a customer or prospect is an opportunity to advance their sales journey. Use your creativity to connect and build relationships with your prospects for effective engagement. 

4. Create follow-up sequences for engagement

Building trust and relationships with your leads relies on an effective follow-up strategy. The more personalized your approach, the better chances for success; be strategic! Each communication should have a specific goal that does everything it can for you and your contacts.

5. Avoid cold templated emails

The best way to help build customer relationships is to add a human touch. Customers notice impersonal communications and will become less interested in your brand’s offering. Make your emails look and feel more personal, and use enticing subject lines. 

6. Combine marketing elements with transactional details

Readers are smart enough to determine the difference between spammy promotional emails and a piece of valuable information. Hence why some email marketers use notifications about orders, payment confirmation, etc., as the basis for the first email follow-up.

Fill your follow-up with FAQ links, contact details, or other elements that bring value to the readers, re-engage them, and continuously bring them back to your brand. 

7. Avoid Industry Jargon

Be as natural as possible with your prospects and talk to them as if they were friends and family. Explain your product’s benefits and specs in layman’s terms to ensure they understand why your product is so unique. Using hi-tech industry jargon alienates your prospects and doesn’t engage them. 

8. Keep a record of prospect responses in  a MSP Sales Management tool. 

Keeping a healthy record of communication is essential to any good business. Finding suitable customers relies on your prospect’s records. 

Boost your follow up strategy 

GlassHive supports your sales and marketing efforts. 

Your sales process is bogged down by tedious and time-consuming activities that take away from your ability to convert. With GlassHive, you can break through those barriers and get the freedom you need to carry out sales activities that help you close. We take the grunt work out of sales follow-up by giving you visibility, accountability, and data management on one solid platform. 

Your follow-up method is only as good as its implantation. GlassHive’s tools give the time to focus on building a personal follow-up system that closes deals. Our platform supports a variety of features:

• Keep track of activities on and off the platform 
• Conduct contact research with a click
• Perform bulk actions to follow-up with leads
• Automate the prospect journey
• Prioritize your leads any way you want

When your sales process lives in GlassHive, you harness the full power of AI, big data, and automation without sacrificing your workflow. Let us help you create a legendary sales performance from beginning to end; get a taste of GlassHive.

What’s next?

It is important to remember that an effective follow-up strategy stems from the understanding of your ideal customer. Try different approaches with your leads when presenting your product’s benefits during following up. It’s your job to take the elements you’ve learned and make them work for your business. Take the time to develop a system or strategy that allows you to remain creative with your process.

 Your CRM is the core of your sales strategy and acts as the foundation of your follow-up structure. GlassHive helps you build the process to track, analyze, and engage prospects at every stage of your follow-up journey. Discover how GlassHive can help you build buzz around your brand, sign up today!