Are You a Follow Up Failure?

What do you traditionally do with the leads that you capture? I am assuming that most of you will call them or send them an email. If they don’t respond, you will call them again or send them another email. If they don’t respond again, you will probably call them again or send them another email.

Now, here’s the real question. What do you do next? Because, if you are like most small business people, you stop trying to contact the prospect and it ends up in the trash. Do you realize how much business you potentially throw away every single day? Imagine the impact on your business if you could convert an extra 10% of the leads that go in the trash.

Have you ever wondered why it’s so important to nurture your prospects?

It’s because 81% of your sales happen after you make seven or more contacts to your prospects. Seven contacts! How many of you can honestly tell me you attempt to make seven or more contacts to your prospects.

Please don’t feel bad because 85% of the time, we stop after 1 to 2 contacts.

Have you ever wondered the cost of not making the additional 4 to 5 contacts to each of your prospects?

Here is a very good example that will help identify the cost of not nurturing.

Let’s say you do a campaign to 10,000 people. This could be by email, direct mail, etc. Out of those 10,000 people, 100 people say they are interested in your product or service. Out of those 100 people, 10 people end up buying your product or service.

I’m assuming many of you would be thrilled by closing 10% of the people that were interested in your product or service.

The question I always like to ask is: what happens to the other 90 responders? Most of them fall through the cracks, have zero follow-up, or will end up buying from your competitors.

In other words, most of these 90 responders will end up in the trash.

What if, on the other hand, you had a way to easily stay in touch with them? What if it was automated?

What if this system allowed you to convert 15, 20, or 25 people instead of just 10? How much of an impact do you think all that extra profit would have on your business?

It would be huge, wouldn’t it?

That’s what I’m talking about! If you aren’t systematizing the lead nurturing process, you could be leaving thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars of profit on the table…for someone else’s business to grab.

Now, that’s just not good business!

As you can see, the key to great nurturing is with AMAZING follow up. This is where so many business people drop the ball. They are great at making lots of contacts and connections but they lack the skills necessary to follow up properly.

This is why most business people need a specific campaign or path to follow to deliver the right follow up.

Three Basic Follow Up Campaigns

There are three basic follow up campaigns that will help most businesses.

• New Lead Campaign – to be used when you capture a new lead and want to nurture them until they are ready to buy
• New Customer Campaign – to be used after a customer purchases your product or service so you can work on repeat sales, up-sales and referrals
• Long-Term Nurture Campaign – to be used for those people that aren’t really interested in your product or service but you still want to follow up with them over a period of time.

If you’re curious what one of these campaigns looks like, please take a look at the diagram below.

Screenshot from Infusionsoft’s Campaign Builder

This is a typical lifecycle marketing campaign. Starting on the left, you can see how this company plans on attracting traffic to their business. They plan on doing this through blogging, Facebook, their website and organic marketing.

They will be offering something free as their lead magnet.

They will then enter the customer into a new lead campaign that will send information about their product or service to educate the customer until they are ready to purchase.

From here, either the customer purchases the product or service online or they will be added to a long term nurture that will provide them consistent information until, sometime in the future, they will hopefully be ready to purchase a product or service.

Once they make the purchase online they are entered into a new customer campaign which will provide them with information to encourage repeat sales and to upsell them on other products and services.

As you can see, this campaign is a easy (and easy to replicate) follow up system. Best of all, we do all of this automatically!

What does this mean for small business owners?

It means you get to spend less time on worrying about your marketing and more time working on growing your business.

It means that emails, white papers, videos, etc. are sent out to the right people at the right time without you thinking about it.

It means that fewer of your leads will fall through the cracks and more of your prospects will become customers.

It means that you are generating the maximum amount of sales from each of your customers and generating the amount of referrals necessary to reach a higher level of success.

Doesn’t this sound like the kind of business you always dreamed of owning? With an automated follow up system like Infusionsoft, this can become your reality.

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