Sales and marketing pros know the importance of speed and persistence when they acquire a new prospect. If you’re in sales, you need to quickly build trust and close and persist through the objections. In marketing, you need to show your USPs and your value, and keep nurturing.
These are two easy but powerful tips to follow-up speedily and persistently, and beat your competitors to the punch.
1) Have a living, breathing database
Studies show only 2% of sales close on the first meeting. Despite that, it’s the first touchpoint and it’s your green light to go for the sale.
Never give up early, because 60% of customers say “no” at least 4 times before they say “yes.”
Instead, always think of expanding your knowledge of the prospect’s needs and fears. This starts with an actionable, living contact database.
That database includes customers, prospects, and any contact you’ve acquired.
Ideally, such information is shared among the company, as well. Sharing leads is a scarily progressive idea for sales hunters, but it can completely shift how you sell.
This (hopefully centralized) database needs to have all contacts properly tagged and ordered to track their status.
The CRM is a natural place for it since it already houses so much customer data. And 91% of businesses that have 11+ employees use a CRM. That means you likely use one.
Rather than using it to move leads along and eliminate them, use it to build their profiles and iterate your approach. You should always be feeding your database with new contacts and notes, and keeping it updated. Here’s a quick and free way to do it.
2) Digitize and follow up leads immediately
Trade shows, cold prospecting, and random encounters all bring you new prospects and leads. How do you get their contact information and what do you do with it?
While it’s common to exchange LinkedIn or WhatsApp contacts, business cards remain the most reliable and accurate form of contact data. Always get a business card. Even in remote work, you can get a virtual business card.
Business cards are guaranteed to have highly accurate data. After all, who’s going to make business cards with typos? The whole point is for people to get in touch with you.
They also contain first-party data including name, company, job title, address, and phone number.
Sure beats buying leads or trying to find this info on social media.
Even then, most business cards stay in binders, cases, or the contacts are hidden in individual phone books. Get them into the CRM, the living database immediately. Use a scanning app to do this.
Whether you’re scanning business cards into Salesforce, making contacts in HubSpot CRM, or using another CRM or content manager, scan them. The best apps these days require little to no cleanup of data and they integrate with your CRM.
So, right after you get a business card, scan it in, add a few notes, and get it to the CRM for immediate follow-up and/or nurturing.
In Sum – Build the data and feed it with scanned contacts
When you get your contact data – everyone from the upper-funnel prospect to the thrilled customer – centralized and active, your follow-up churns healthily.
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Author Bio:
Adam Goulston, MBA, MS, is a US-born, Japan-based writer and digital marketer.
