There
are very few business
people who haven’t lost an important opportunity
because they failed to promptly “follow up” with
someone.
It’s all too easy to do.
You promise to get back to them with
a price, a formal proposal, or some other detail… and
you really intend to do it… but… well… there was a
crisis at the office, that other deal you’ve been
working on suddenly heated up, or maybe you just plain
forgot.
Your good intention “slipped
through the cracks”
and that golden opportunity slipped right through with
it.
Adequate lead follow up is not a little problem.
A recent study by the Aberdeen Group of
Boston found that
87% of leads eventually result in
a sale.
The same
study however, showed that only 10%
of leads were followed up promptly, and
a whopping
69% got no follow up at all!
That’s a lot of
opportunity slipping through those cracks.
How does this
happen?
Follow up takes time, it takes meticulous attention, and
it’s not scalable when done by an individual.
Worse, the more business opportunities you are
given, the more likely you are to let something
slip through the cracks by not following up!
All of this is why automating your
customer relationship management (CRM) functions is so
vital.
CRM can
be employed to ensure that
follow up does happen in a timely and appropriate way.
Using a CRM system does not leave follow
up to chance; it
guarantees that
each lead will remain on the radar
no matter how slow-acting they might be.
After all,
people buy when they’re ready,
not necessarily when you are.
And think about it - if
you are able to follow up effectively,
several things will happen.
First, you’ll get a
much bigger share
of those 87% of leads
that do eventually buy.
Second, your sales
operations can scale more easily
which is the key to your overall growth.
Third, your sales
operations will not have to focus as much on finding new
raw leads, and
instead focus on harvesting the ones they already have.
When viewed in those
terms, it is surprising that all businesses don’t focus
on improving their follow-up systems.
