Marketing / Digital Marketing

Fortune is in the follow up

Brad Hartwig

Updated: Nov 26, 2019 · 3 min read

Toolkit for download in this article

tips for follow up in sales

In this post, we're going to talk about two things:

  1. How the brain works
  2. How persistence pays off

Let's get started ...

How the brain works

The funny thing about people is that we’re good at forgetting things. Specifically, sales calls. People will forget most of what you share with them after the first call. But here’s a fun fact about human psychology. It’s called the ‘illusory truth effect’ and it means that something people hear or read many times becomes more memorable, but they also start to believe it.

For example, we’ve all heard how Vitamin C can help speed recovery from the common cold. We’ve heard it many times from many sources, and generally, we believe it. Whether or not it’s true, we accept it as truth and as soon as we start to come down with a cold, we rush out and eat oranges (or strawberries which have more vitamin C than oranges) and buy some vitamin supplements so we can keep working.

Truth is, Vitamin C actually doesn’t prevent you from getting the common cold, nor does it speed up recovery. But that doesn’t matter. What we're talking about here is that we ‘believe’ it does, and that belief comes from repetition and the illusory truth effect.

So anything that we repeat, we start to believe. How does that help your sales funnel? For now, we’ll just let it sink in that a repeated message becomes the truth while we move on to the second principle.

Tips for follow up in sales

I’m not confident on the why, but study after study confirms another principle of human interaction, and that is that persistence pays off. A study of several million leads by Velocify found that for 96% of leads which resulted in a sale, 6 calls were recorded toward that lead. That is to say, that if you really need to close the deal, you’ll need to put 6 meaningful calls toward that deal.

Other studies illustrate the importance of persistence over time, many leads taking 4-8 months to develop into a sale. But making several calls over the course of months sounds really exhausting, right? The best news is that you're actually going to be more effective by interspersing your message over several different types of media. Between phone calls, email, and social advertising, you’ll create familiarity with your leads so that the next time you call, it can be a warm and friendly conversation.

The key principle here is this: For the strongest impact, create a small number of messages and repeat these through various mediums.

Ideally, your lead will see your personalized message in their inbox, hear your message on the radio, read your message in their Google search, and hear your solution recommended by an expert they trust. This would be the golden lead after a few months. Persistence pays off.

Bringing these 2 principles together

Growing your business means getting your message across. What we’ve talked about today demonstrates a couple of principles that will help you get your message to penetrate into the minds of your leads. Know that the illusory truth effect will impact your prospective client's purchase behavior, and the more they hear your message, the more likely they're going to end up finding value in your solution. It’s a virtuous cycle.

Next time you're thinking about reaching out to new leads, maybe you should step back and ask yourself if you could be 1 call away from closing the deal on your existing leads.

Remember, the fortune is in the follow-up.

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