In sales we use the phrase "Follow Up" to mean "follow up on a process after a step has been performed."
For example:
You've issued a proposal and you're waiting for feedback. Every action you take, from asking how the decision-making process is going to sending an email with complementary tips on what you sell, we call it a follow up.
Did you follow up on that proposal?
Another example is when you schedule a meeting and need to organize the next steps with actions that lead the opportunity to a closure. These follow-up actions we call follow ups.
How was the follow up from that meeting? (What are the next steps from that meeting? What will be done?)
In corporate sales processes, the vast majority of potential business situations, will not conclude in sales in the early stages.
In prospecting, where you are the one approaching the prospect, 90% of the companies you approach will not be interested at that time to buy what you sell.
You have a list of 100 companies. You contact them all. Statistically, the probability is that 10 of them will show some interest in continuing and between 1 and 3 will close a deal with you in the next few months.
The question is: What do you do with the 97 companies that were approached and did not move forward? What is your Follow Up strategy?
I even had an answer to that question, but the results were very low in terms of conversion into sales.
The answer was: Put these companies in the Newsletter mailing, that is, once a month these companies would receive a generic newsletter from our company.
We did this for years on end and never got results that paid the bill for the effort expended. It just wasn't worth it and the process was abandoned. After a few months it would come back, with a new design strategy or a new trigger software or even with some content changes.
I can count at least three attempts we made to put in place a relationship system with our publics. All of them had failed.
At the same time, you have the conversion situations, where you issue a proposal and wait for a response, which statistically also, does not come most of the time.
How to charge a return without reducing your image?
It is not convenient for your brand reinforcement, you charge a return of a proposal issued or return of some email.
Yes, it's important to follow up, but depending on how you do it, it will give the image that you're desperate to sell and that you lack customers. This is bad for your brand and for business in general.
How to follow up without falling into this trap of perception of extreme necessity?
Another very common situation: you exchange cards with a very interesting person, but you have not arranged anything to evolve into a possible approach for business.
How do you keep that person close to your radar and "warmed up" to what you sell?
I had been looking for that answer since 2015, when we organised our database and counted over 3,000 people who went through our CRM who were derelict in terms of 'relationship'.
We then created the bases of a system that united the production of relevant content (according to the reader's perception) with automatic systems, leaving out all the other elements that until then were essential for "good relationship marketing", such as segmentation.
We call this process Follow Up Systems.
We tested it on some bases and after some adjustments, we implemented it in our company for some isolated bases.
In August 2017, we did a global test, that is, we implemented the Follow Up System in all our bases, of leads, prospects, suppliers, customers, in short, all the names that were in our database.
And the result reaped in 30 days was a 280% increase in qualified lead generation.
Follow Up systems are now a reality in our company and in some other companies that are using the model.
