Are You Following Up With Your Prospects?

Want to see some scary figures? According to Gartner Research:

• 72% of companies stop following up with a prospect after the second contact
• However, on average, it takes 5 contacts or more to close 81% of prospects

These contradictory figures should immediately trigger a warning within your mind, particularly if you have no idea how many times you are following up on average.

When we go into a client’s operation one of the things that we frequently hear is that they are doing their best to follow up with prospects who have expressed an interested in their business. Yet despite this, we have yet to interact with a client who has the time or resources to follow up with all interested parties on a consistent basis.

Sure, many do it better than others, but the fact remains that everyone would like to improve their prospect conversion rate.

So how do you accomplish this task?

What we have found is that the majority of our clients and customers do an excellent job following up with prospects and customers via phone calls and person-to-person contact and these both remain the most effective methods of interaction. However, the reality is that many homeowners are very inaccessible in today’s society and this is why e-mail communication can be so effective if it is done correctly.

Now before you stop and say that:

• You have tried this before and it was not very effective
• E-mail is treated as spam from most homeowners

I would like to ask you to rethink your opinion.

First of all, while these two points might be inherently true, the fact remains that most e-mail communication is composed in an ineffective manner. There are freelance services that can be hired at extremely low rates (particularly in today’s economy) to write effective copy for you. Let other people handle the tasks that you do not specialize in.

Second, what are you doing to build your database? Are you attempting to double opt-in all of your prospects/customers? Do you realize how dramatically this will reduce your e-mail bounce rate?

Once these two tasks are accomplished then you need to consider investing in a software service that can facilitate your follow-up process. There are excellent marketing automation tools out there that can accomplish the task of multiple phone sales representatives simply by continuously following up with homeowners.

Why does it work so well? Because it keeps your company in the forefront of the prospect/customer’s mind.

The culture of our society is changing and it is vital that you do everything you can to stay in front of your potential customer.

If you have any questions regarding this blog posting or if you need more information about marketing automation services like Infusionsoft you can e-mail me.