Are you sick and tired of giving away more than 3/4 of your prospects to your competition because of follow up failure? Keep reading…because you’re about to go from FOLLOW UP Failure to Follow up FABULOUS!
In the housing industry (senior or residential), a lead costs an average of $500 on average. And after going through all the trouble of generating these expensive, valuable, precious leads, it would be a shame to not get your money’s worth from those inquiries…but that’s exactly what’s happening.
It’s shocking, but 80% of all inquiries or leads never receive ANY type of follow up!
If that’s not enough, in a survey, 65% of managers cited “Follow up” as their #1 Business Failure!
No surprise, but the largest and fastest growing source of new leads is the Internet. 87% of our inquiries will research you online first – on your website, search engines and all the various social media and review sites like Angie’s list and Google Plus. Of the people who go to your website, 45% of them will purchase from you or a competition within 12 months….and 75% of those people will buy from the first person they speak to.
In fact, when a web leads contact you, if you contact them back within 5 minutes of them reaching out to you, you are 100TIMES more likely to reach them, engage them and sell to them than if you wait just 30 minutes!
I’ve always said the most damaging statistic is the one you don’t know. And the truth is, I’ll bet no one reading this knows for certainty how many prospects they are GIVING away. But we can only take a guess at the cost of NOT following up by estimating lost revenue.
Maybe you’re thinking, Mona, I hear you, but I know our people ARE doing follow up. My answer to you would be AWESOME…that’s great. Let’s look at what follow up is being done.
Ask people why they don’t do follow up or stop doing follow up, and you’ll hear some very legitimate reasons:
- Afraid to appear too pushy
- Forgetting to follow up
- No time
- Don’t know what to say
- Don’t have system
- Don’t know what to do with some of the prospects you get
I recently googled “sales follow up” and got 969,000 hits. Everyone recognizes that follow up is a problem and is necessary for success, but no one tells you HOW to do it. So I will take a stab at it.
CLICK HERE to read Mona’s 6 specific FOLLOW UP tips.
And don’t forget your past/current clients and referral sources! If you provide a service that people need repeatedly – like home health or services – don’t neglect to follow up with your past clients. They represent future business.
The tips I gave you in the link are practical and make common sense. But honestly, we know that they are easier to talk about than they are to do. So is there a secret to great, effective, consistent, bullet-proof follow up? And if so, what is it?
The secret is to plan out your follow up paths and goals and messages in advance and then automate them. You can do that on paper or spreadsheets or you can use the set it and forget it follow up TaskoMatics built into Advantage.
Each TaskoMatic is strategic and intentionally designed for a different type of lead and has a specific goal. Maybe it’s for a web lead and the goal is to get them on the phone for discovery. A TaskoMatic allows you to prebuild follow up sequences of activities, calls, emails, notes, and other actions that move your prospects towards the goal. These actions can be strategically assigned to different people to do different things and use intentionally relevant messages.
I love it when technology serves as your assistant, don’t you?! By automating your systems, you can focus on the high value activities (relationships that generate revenue) and let your technology “take care” of your automated tasks.
So although FOLLOW UP is our number 1 failure, I’ve got good news for you!
Follow up failure may be expensive, is definitely unnecessary but the good news is, it’s fixable! You can go from Follow Up Failure to Follow Up FABULOUS. And your follow up will have FABULOUS results on your revenue!
Here’s to FABULOUS Follow Up!
Mona Hilton is the CEO of Occupancy Advantage
Watch the video with Mona Hilton and RetirementHomes.com, How to Forever Fix the #1 Failure in Your Sales Teams: FOLLOW UP.