CHAPTER 21

The Simplest Strategy for Growth

There is no simpler or faster strategy to grow your sales than to effectively follow up your sales leads. I have worked with companies and salespeople that have doubled their sales in just a few short years merely by changing their procedures for following up their sales leads. It isn’t a difficult task. For the most part, the skills required to do it well are those that we have already discussed so far in this book: creating positive first perceptions, being completely responsive, delivering maximum value, and creating peak events that are memorable to the customer.

But if follow-up is the key to sales growth, what is holding you back? According to an Insidesales.com study, 73 percent of sales leads are never contacted by a salesperson. I have never understood this reticence. You have a choice. You can generate qualified sales opportunities by talking with people who have reached out and expressed an interest in talking to you. Or you can make cold calls to people who haven’t reached out and don’t want to talk to you.

I recently read an article about the art of the follow-up. The author was making the case that we can all learn certain skills that will improve the effectiveness of our sales lead follow-up. It was hard to argue with his premise.

Unfortunately, that author put the cart before the horse. Certainly there are skills to be learned that, if regularly practiced, will improve the quality of your follow-up. However, there’s a caveat that trips up many, if not most, sellers: Before you can practice the art of the follow-up, you actually have to pick up the phone and call the prospect.

The truth is that successful sales lead follow-up is as much about attitude as it is the art. In follow-up, attitude precedes art just as form follows function.

“These are bad leads. I can tell just by looking at them.”

Really? How often have you said that? Or heard other salespeople make this claim?

I hate to say it, but I still hear salespeople say this as though they believe it. When so much has changed in how our customers initiate their buying processes—how they gather and evaluate the information that they need to make decisions and how they interact with vendors and their salespeople—surely you can’t believe that you can accurately guess the potential value of a lead just by glancing at it. Besides, not only have customer behaviors changed, but selling has also changed. Much of what salespeople do to win orders today has evolved in its execution, if not its intent, from how things were 20 years ago.

Even today, in the face of the explosion of technology and information presaged by the growth of the Internet, some sales myths persist from earlier times. First among these is the belief held by many salespeople that “All marketing-generated leads are bad.” This is followed closely by, “The only good lead is one I developed myself.”

Which begs the question: What is a sales lead?

A sales lead is an inquiry. Many companies have deployed content marketing strategies to attract the interest of potential customers. They dangle content in front of visitors to their websites in the hope that they will register to download it. Some companies think that’s a sales lead. It is not.

Yes, if you consider someone downloading a white paper from your website to be a lead, you will likely have bad leads. Referring to Figure 11-2 in Chapter 11, these customers are still in the Shopping Phase of their buying cycles. Customers enter your sales funnel when they are much deeper into their buying processes. At that moment, potential prospects want to know the answers to questions that they can’t find on your website or elsewhere. At that point, they need you to answer a question. And, as you know from reading the first three parts of this book, the first seller with the answer wins!

Follow-up is a live conversation with the customer. An automatically generated e-mail in response to an inquiry is not follow-up. Unfortunately, many companies think that it is. Their attitude is, “OK, we can check off the follow-up box. We responded to the lead, and now let’s make the customer reach out to us once more to show that he’s really serious.”

That attitude needs to change. Your sales procedures shouldn’t be designed to force customers to work hard to get you to answer their questions. That will only drive them into the arms of your competitors.

Here are the building block traits of the necessary attitude for effective follow-up:

   The Open Mind. Sales leads are neither all bad nor all good. Not every good lead turns into a qualified sales opportunity for you. But you can’t make that judgment before you engage with the prospect. So make the call first before you decide whether it is a good lead.

   The Desire. Why did you become a salesperson in the first place? It wasn’t just for the money. You are always hungry for new business. If you’re in sales, part of the attraction is the excitement of the process itself. If you’re a salesperson and you lose that desire to follow up a sales lead and discover whether it has the potential to be your next big order, then perhaps it is time for a career change. On the other hand, if you’re too successful and too busy with customers to take on new leads, and you can’t be bothered to follow up, give the leads to those who will.

   The Competitiveness. You hate losing. Not only do you want to follow up a sales lead, but you absolutely, positively have to be the first seller to talk to the customer. You understand what is at stake. You have the opportunity to create a positive perception and begin shaping the customer’s buying vision if you get in first. You operate under the assumption that if you don’t immediately follow up, your biggest competitor will.

   The Service Orientation. I use the term “equivalence” to describe how salespeople should treat the follow-up. Ask yourself this question: If the tables were turned, how would you want a seller to follow up on your inquiry? If you were interested in a company’s products and you submitted an inquiry, what would be your expectations for follow-up? You must have some expectations. After all, if you didn’t expect someone from the company to get back to you, you wouldn’t have taken the time to reach out to it. Now you can apply an equivalent expectation to your own follow-up efforts. Someone took the time to contact you. Reciprocate with equivalent interest.

In short, you have to care.

I remember searching online for pricing information on software that I wanted to use for my business. The vendor offered only two service options on its website: Professional (Individual) and Enterprise. Frustratingly, the company’s website contained no pricing information on either option and no way to purchase the product. I filled in a web form requesting pricing information. Two weeks later, I received an email response from a sales manager stating that if I wanted price information I would have to set up a phone call with her to go over my requirements. Two weeks. In the meantime, I had purchased an alternative solution.

Clearly they didn’t care. To succeed in sales, you have to care about the customer. You have to care how your actions (or inaction) impact the customer’s perception of you and your company. The first opportunity you get to demonstrate how you care is in how you follow up.

The art of follow-up is less important than the act of follow-up. Get in the game first. As a seller, you simply have to commit to take action—quickly. Put aside thoughts of technique until you take an action that would benefit from it. And then work on your craft.