Power of follow up
Power of Follow Up
When someone raises their hand and identifies himself as having interest in your business, it is just plain dumb to make only one attempt at selling to that person - or equally dumb to let that lead “chill” before follow-up.
Recently I attended a very expensive product launch. The organisers had gone to great lengths (and expense) to get a large crowd to attend, a critical step in creating goodwill and customers for life, I give them full marks. When we arrived we were directed to a registration desk where no-one seemed to be in charge, there was a mass of people not quite sure what to do next! I noticed that someone had the foresight to create a registration form requesting name, number and email address yet no-one bothered to ask me to fill it out. I was curious to see whether I would be contacted and whether the company was going to use their advertising Rands in order to follow up, so I completed the form and left it on the table. I noticed that I was only the 3rd person on the list.
“A follow-up to the same list within 30 – 45 days will pull 40% to 50% of the first mailing” Bob Stone
This suggestion initiated my thinking about marketing funnels and mailing sequences. It turns out Bob was and is WRONG; in some cases, the follow up mailing, phone call, voice broadcast or fax, and in many cases: a series of follow ups can actually out-perform the first contact or product launch results. However at a bare minimum Bobs’ number should occur.
Using this number, it is very easy to determine whether or not you should do a second contact – are you profitable with half the results you got from your first contact? If so, and you do not follow up then you are an idiot!
People attending this launch are not there for the “free lunch” they are there because they are interested in what you or your product can do to enhance their business or wealth. So not following up, or presenting me with the benefits I would have by doing business with them, they wasted a golden opportunity and a lot of marketing Rands.
To illustrate further, I recently left a restaurant after a meal and noticed that when the waitress logged into the computer screen to enter an order, it read “Sell Wine and Sell Desert.” This restaurant probably serves over 100,000 meals a year. If 20% of the customers are sold a dessert or glass of wine that they would not normally have ordered, and the restaurant makes an extra R10.00 profit on each sale that’s an extra R1,000,000.00 worth of profit. The power of upsell and follow up “profits” alone can make a business owner rich.
If someone invests X Rands to get me to a launch or make a phone call in response to his advert, and then has done nothing else to try and turn his investment into business. Dumb. See, having the first move right is useless if all your moves aren’t right.
Because virtually nobody does a decent job with follow-up, when you do, your competitive edge is huge and automatic.
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