Follow the Rabbit Trail

In this episode, I want to talk about how you make sure you are avoiding the pitfalls many of us, including me, have fallen into, and how to implement an effective strategy for both prospecting, follow up, and growing your business.

When we first started out as a company, as I mentioned in a previous episode, we did cold calling for our clients, and that was it. We’d take either their call list or generate one ourselves, and have our callers generate appointments or leads and email the info to our client - and that was the end of our job.

Sometimes you can learn more about what product or service you should be selling by talking to your clients or observing their behavior than all the brainstorming you and your team can do. They will tell you verbally or by their actions what they need from you, so all you have to do is listen, build the product, and boom your client’s needs are filled instead of trying to stuff your existing product down their throat whether they need or want it or not. 

We found that when we set up an appointment or generated a lead for our client and emailed it to them, oftentimes, they did nothing with it. We realized that once we handed out a lead or booked an appointment, they rarely did any follow up. 

We decided to provide them with prewritten marketing materials in the CRM we built for them, but. we quickly realized that even though they had the capability to follow up and send out things, they were either scared, intimidated, or too disorganized to do it.

To solve this problem, we took it to the next step, and set up automated email campaigns for them using their personalized marketing materials including a mix of value added content and text based emails. This significantly enhanced results our clients were getting because some level of follow up was being done.

However, once again, our client’s behavior told us they needed more. We noticed that when we would send out automated email campaigns using the return email address of the client so they would get the replies, clients would be confused on what to do next. 

To handle this, we then built a system to manage email replies to our client’s marketing emails so that replies would come to us, and then our team could review and decide where to go from there based on the response. 

We also knew we needed to start doing the follow up calls for our client. This was the strategy that completed the follow up loop and #4 of the components of follow up I talked about in the last episode.

Today we still use a similar approach, and it has been extremely successful for our own growth with new clients, but also with our client’s businesses. It is an example of the power of good follow up.

Well, there are two lessons to take from this experience with our company. The first is that listening to what your clients are telling you they want, and more importantly what their behavior is showing you should be the driving force behind what product or service you are offering them. 

I would really challenge you to look at your business and the behavior of your customers and clients. What do they do with your product or service? What do they buy in tandem with your product? Are they verbally telling you they want X feature or service? 

The second thing I’d like you to take away today is the example of the full circle follow up system. Like most things, if you don’t systemize it, it’s unlikely to happen consistently and with the same results.

All of this sounds like a lot, but you would be amazed how well it can work once it is set up. Our company SalesDouble offers this complete system to our clients, and we are certainly a good choice for some B2B businesses and probably not for others as we are very selective about who we take on as clients. However, there are other companies that do each of the individual components of this follow up system and you just have to manage the different compone