Are You Sabotaging Sales by Not Having a Well-Defined Lead Follow-Up Plan?

If you’re like many sales prospectors, you power through a large list of leads, hit each lead once or twice, and then move on. But did you know that 80% of sales require at least 5 contacts to close a deal? The trouble is that only 10% of sales reps follow up with leads more than three times.

All-star sales trainer John Barrows rightly recommends “5 ‘unique’ touches in 30 days.” This is a great basic benchmark. Some of the most successful reps I’ve seen are even more relentless. And while simply touching leads multiple times is often better than only contacting them once, to really accelerate the ROI of your prospecting efforts, you should develop a contact plan that maximizes engagement.

Here are 3 key ways to build a contact strategy that can help you outperform the competition and rock revenue!

Go Deep, Not Wide, With Your Follow Up Strategy

When inside sales reps are handed a list of leads, all too often, they contact a lead once and then just move on. That’s often because they’re trying to hit a lot of leads quickly. The thought is that touching more leads are better.

However, touching 200 leads 5 times usually yields much better results than touching 1,000 leads once. Contacting leads multiple times can be powerful. However, if you’re contacting leads with random messages, instead of utilizing a well-thought-out foll0w-up plan, you’re likely sabotaging lots of revenue!

Vary Your Messaging

It pays to remember that each lead is a human being with unique interests and needs. When prospecting, you probably don’t know which value proposition will be the one that starts a sales conversation. So it therefore pays to vary your messaging. When prospecting, I like to imagine myself as a fisherman, trying different bait until I find the one that hooks a lead.

Here at Revenue.io, we’ve found that different features and benefits of our inside sales platform resonate with different prospects. As an example, some of our customers are inside sales managers who love all the real-time sales data we provide in Salesforce dashboards. But other customers are much less metrics-focused. They simply want a tool that empowers their reps to connect with way more key decision makers. By varying our messaging with each contact attempt, our sales team is able to find which value prop appeals most to a lead. And once you know what your lead is interested in, it’s that much easier to close the deal.

Mix Up Your Contact Methods

Everyone has their own preferred method of communication. Some of your prospects might prefer to talk on the phone, others might like responding to emails, while you may find that other leads are far more active on LinkedIn or Twitter. We’ve found that it helps to vary up the method you use to contact your leads.

For example, a contact channel pattern might look like this:

1. Social outreach (Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.)
2. Call (value prop A)
3. Email (value prop A)
4. Follow-up phone call (value prop B)
5. Email (value prop B)
6. Follow-up phone call (value prop C)
7. Email (value prop C)

It doesn’t take long to plan a solid follow-up contact strategy, and the results can be game-changing. Rather than randomly reaching out, why not give yourself every opportunity to deliver the right message.