Look in your inbox right now, and you’re guaranteed to find
at least a handful of promotional emails, right? There will be one from the
store you purchased a shirt from last winter, one from your favourite
restaurant down the road, one from a speaker you connected with at the Chamber
of Commerce event pitching his services, and so on.
When it comes to sending emails to our list, we as business owners can be sceptical.
After all, we ourselves are being sent numerous newsletters and updates from
many different places and people. The sheer amount of it can be frustrating and
we don’t want to feel guilty for adding to the same frustration of another
person…much less, someone who might potentially be our client.
Here’s the thing though…
Big brands
with big advertising budgets are in front of us 24/7. We have learned to accept
this frustration. Worst of all, they have conditioned us as a society that
anything worth paying attention to is repeated more than once and is in our
face wherever we go, wouldn’t you agree?
That is especially true about consumer products, many of them, like french fries, are a simple item we do not need extra education about.
Now let’s look at B2B. Your products and services are often a thousand times more complex than french fries, yet you explain them to prospects only once or twice. You then leave them for a month to do their own research and discover your competitors. You rely on word of mouth and your sales team’s ability to build strong rapport. And I do sincerely hope you consider follow up as a mandatory activity.
Even if you are an absolute master of follow up, how often do you follow up? Every 90 days? Compare that to every 30 minutes of ads about french fries on TV. Can you sense the disconnect and perhaps a huge reason as to why you are missing out on sales you could be making?
Emails are the new-age follow up which still works. The problem is that even professional salespeople are giving up prematurely, when they could have persevered in order to get the sale.
Even the statistics back this up:
44% of salespeople give up after one follow-up, and the average sales person will only make two follow up attempts. However, 50% of sales happen after the 5th follow up (meaning professional sales people are not even going halfway in their attempts to reach a prospect).
Of course all products and services are not created equal and there are many moving parts. One thing that is for certain: the money is in the follow up and you’ve got to do it. Would you choose spending more time on the phone following up or would you rather do something else while Set’n’Prosper emails are taking care of your follow up tasks?
Find out more about Set’n’Prosper here: