Could your sales team be forgetting about this crucial step?
I once coached a sales manager and discovered that their inside store reps thought they were too busy to do a proper quote. So, they just printed the page from their website with the products on it, wrote the price on it in pen and gave it to the customer.
They also printed a copy for themselves with the price, and the customer’s name on it.
This copy went on their desk. And the pile grew. When we looked at the large pile of quotes, I could not help but wonder what they were worth. $2 MILLION it turns out!
And not a single one had been followed up on. An average closing rate for them was 30%. That’s $600k of unconverted business, sitting in a pile on a desk.
What happened to that $600k? Did it go to the competition?
Probably.
As I’ve discussed before, any salesperson who gives up after the first or second try likely isn’t producing any type of notable result in their sales.
In some cases, like the example above, a seller won’t even attempt to follow up once! Other times, they’ll take another crack or two at it and give up if the prospect isn’t immediately ready to pull out their wallet.
This is the reality that seems to be occurring in more organizations than you might think.
Salespeople may buy into the belief that their buyer has nothing better to do than to interact with them, but every seller needs to remember the number of priorities their prospects are juggling at any given time.
Just because a prospect isn’t immediately ready to buy, or asks you to call back another time, or simply doesn’t respond, does not mean they ultimately won’t become a buyer.
However, if you simply choose to “not bother” with “bugging” a prospect, you never know how much of an opportunity you’re throwing away. That one client a member of your team didn’t follow up with could’ve brought in 10 other clients of the same type. Yet, all of this potential gets thrown out the window the moment a seller neglects to follow up.
Don’t let your sales team make this mistake.
Ensure that they’re not neglecting to follow up with their prospects and not giving up too easily!
