My favorite responses come over the phone. They come from people who we’ve reached out to, sometimes recently and sometimes quite a while ago. They start the conversation with some statement like, “I want to know more about what your company does because I have a need and I want to see if you can help”.
Like anyone else in sales and marketing, I don’t get nearly as many calls like that as I would like. And, because I don’t max out on my most preferred type of lead/response, I’m more than happy to have second and third best lead types come into the company, even though they are going to be treated differently.
But, I’ve found that one type of lead that often slips away is the email click through and while I’m sure that there are organizations that glean them without fail, I’m equally positive that many, many companies are similarly letting them get away without a follow up.
It’s easy to understand why. You’ve sent a person your email with an offer and a link to the offer. It appears that they were intrigued enough to click through the link on your message (which given all the scams online these days, is becoming an almost foolhardy act of trust). Finally, it appears that once they viewed your link, your offer was not sufficiently interesting to keep their attention or persuade them to take the next step. On the surface, it looks like a clear case of “Not interested” with nothing to follow up, but I beg to differ. The point is, you really don’t know why they didn’t go to the next step. So you make an assumption that closes the door on a potential sale. It’s a terrible habit to get into and it will cost your business a lot of money if you permit this mentality to become part of your corporate culture.
Maybe they were interrupted. Maybe they were late for a meeting. Maybe they weren’t expecting what they found and needed time to consider. Maybe you have a technical problem and the page didn’t load, or it loaded too slowly. Maybe you have a confusing and/or poorly laid out landing page. Maybe their computer crashed. Maybe………
Obviously, there are a lot of possible reasons for “responsis interruptus” from contacts who might be very viable prospects and so, what I would like to propose is this- make contact. Call them. Leave a voicemail. Follow up. Do it without fail and do it within a business day (at the most) because interest and opportunity can be fleeting things, but they have tremendous value.
A concerted effort to follow up every lead opportunity will shorten your sales development cycles and save you a lot of money, in the end.
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