Relational Follow Up

It’s funny how quickly you can tell who’s there for you and who’s just trying to plant some sort of flag.”  Michelle Obama

I’ve always been on the bandwagon of ‘always follow up with value’.

We all receive DM’s or emails that start “I hope you’re doing well, I just wanted to:

"Follow up on my previous email..."

"Circle back to see if this is a better time..."

"See if you can tell me who would be in charge of this..."

Or, some version of one of the above.

The answer, many trainers would say, is to follow up with value- give the prospect information to help them in making a decision or about their industry to show that you’re their ally and want to work with them.

My wife and I are reading “Becoming” by Michelle Obama and the quote above was referring to how her family realized after being in the public eye for a bit that there were people who didn’t want to befriend them based on their humanity, but based on their own personal agenda (flag).

Too often, as sale professionals, we try and provide value as a form of manipulation, a ploy to get into the prospects inbox, DM or mailbox in order to fulfill our own agenda which could be:

• A closed deal
• Information to give our boss about the deal (“McCormick, where are we on the Acme Industries deal??)
• Soothe our fragile egos (they don’t reply so they must not like me)

Ghosting is real and it happens, but most often (in my experience) it rarely is because of anything we’ve done.

People typically don’t reply because they have no new information to give you.

Also, people are busy, not only your contact in the company, but the other people that need to weigh in on the deal before it can be signed.

Do you know how many people influence the decision of whether to  sign in a given company?  Most stats say, depending on industry and product sector, there are anywhere between 6-12 (I’ve seen it as high as 18!) decision makers of decision influencers in any given B2B deal.

So when you ‘follow up’ with your contact, they then need to ‘follow up’ in some manner with some or all of those decision makers.  If that doesn’t happen immediately, the busyness of their day can quickly push your need to know to the bottom of their priority list.

TWO CONSIDERATIONS

The first consideration I learned from Larry Levine and Darrell Amy at Selling From the Heart- make sure you can meet with as many people on the buying team as possible.  Get them involved, connect with them on LinkedIn and begin to build relationships with them.  This is an entire blog topic on it’s own (and maybe will be next week’s!).

By having as many in the meeting as possible will give everyone the opportunity to be on the same page.

The second consideration is your level of relationship with your contact.

If you have just a salesperson/prospect relationship (superficial just based on business meetings, discovery calls and proposal presentations) your ability to follow up is going to be solely based on your proposal and most attempts to ‘add value’ are going to be seen as you trying to ‘plant your flag’.

But I recently had a few experiences that have shown me that if I’ve taken the time to build an authentic relationship with my prospect and began to build trust, they actually give me permission to follow up and be persistent.

This means I don’t have to manufacture value to just get into their inbox.  It means that I can be frank and honest in follow up messages and say “hey, I’m concerned about not hearing back from you, are you ok?” And I really mean it.

I just finished a training for a company and we started discussing in the beginning of October 2022.  There were many follow ups, but because I had developed a relationship that went beyond just the proposal, scope of service and price, my prospect (now client) thanked me for being so persistent, for being their reminder or alarm and stay on top of the flow of information.

Another person recently said, “It’s ok to bug me”- what he was saying is “I will forget about this, but you won’t, please stay on top of me.”

Building authentic relationships isn’t just sales fluff, it helps in many ways and certainly helps with follow up.

So, provide value if that’s working for you- make sure the value you share is really pertinent to your client or prospect and share with no expectation of a return on it.

But if you really want to shorten your sales cycle, take the time to build trust at the start of the very first meeting/outreach.  You build that trust first by being passionately curious about them as people and the industry and company they are in.  Find out who is on the buying team and work to include them in subsequent conversations.

Lastly, get a commitment to next steps at the end of your meeting.  If you’re sending a proposal or planning to, consider setting a meeting and reviewing the proposal with everyone on the buying team or if you have to send it, don’t end that meeting until you have a date on the calendar to review it.  

When you have the meeting to review it, don’t end that meeting until you have a date on the calendar to reconvene for a discussion on next steps.

These steps will help you in not having to send endless emails, DM’s or phone calls to ‘check in’.

We have to follow up, the stats back this up. In a recent ZoomInfo survey on sales follow up the cited that 50% of sales happen after the fifth follow up and 44% of salespeople give up after one follow-up. You can read the blog HERE.

Set up your follow up at the beginning by building solid relationships and scheduling next steps throughout the sales process and your closing rate should increase, I know mine has!!!