How Often Should You Follow Up With Prospects        

Many of my clients become nervous about when and how often they should follow up with prospects.

In this article you will learn to look at this question from a different perspective and discover much more suitable and profitable answer.

Following Up With Leads

So you’ve had a potential customer show some interest in your products or services. This could be an enquiry call, filling out a contact form on your website or any other form of contact where someone has asked for information about what you sell.

So you start out by providing the information they ask for and then nothing happens…

This is where many business owners feel that they are walking a fine line between making a routine follow-up and becoming an annoying pest.

The thing you need to understand is that it’s not the frequency or timing of the follow up that matters most it’s the quality of the follow up.

If your follow up calls or emails are simply… “Hi, are you ready to buy yet”? Over and over that will soon become very annoying to your prospect.

What you want to do is continue to provide value to your prospects. Find out what are the most common questions your prospects have and deliver that information.

You can use…

• Autoresponder emails
• Video tutorials
• Podcasts

Whatever medium you use doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that your follow-ups deliver value.

Now of course the end goal is to make the sale, though by providing value and highlighting your expertise you are not seen as the annoying sales person anymore. You are seen as an expert in your field.

Someone your prospects can call upon for the information and solutions they need.

As part of each email or value added follow-up there needs to be a call to action to get the prospect to move onto the next step in the sales funnel. That could be…

• A Free Consult
• A Free Trail
• A Project Quote

Whatever it is you want to always have an eye on the end goal while building a highly responsive and highly profitable pool of leads.

Know Thy Customer

One thing I need to mention before we end is that this strategy only works if you know what it is that your client wants on a deep level. Your follow ups need to be like a message sent from the heavens above that answer the specific questions your client is desperate for answers to, and provide solutions for the most painful problems they have.

Again this can only be done properly of you have spent the time to thoroughly research your target market.

Once you know the answers to these questions and provide solutions for them once, you then want to utilise technology to automate your lead nurture and prospect follow-up system to automatically forward that info to all prospects who enter your lead nurture system.

For more detailed, step by step instructions for setting up and implementing these follow-up systems sign up for my free “Double Your Website Leads & Sales In 21 Days” Mini-Course.

Article Takeaway

To finally give you a definitive answer on how often you should follow-up with prospects. I say you can contact them every day through email or phone as long as you are providing really valuable information that your prospects want. If there is no response after the first week then pull that back to a couple of times a week until you are just doing it once a month if there has been no response after 4 weeks.

By keeping a close eye on your email unsubscribe rates and getting feedback from your clients you’ll be able to find a nice balance between helpful expert advisor and pesky salesperson.

The fact is that everyone is so busy that they might not have time to read your emails but you can make sure when they are ready to take action that you have established your authority and provided so much great free info that there is no chance they will contact a competitor.

Cheers,

James Brine

The Barefoot Marketer

P.S. Some people may disagree with my views here and that’s fine. If you have another strategy or have some evidence that contradicts my strategy please let me know in the comments below.