Sales Lead Follow-Up That Builds Trust
By Perry Rearick, Chief Editor, Follow Your Buyer
What is the best way to follow up with the leads I receive? This is one of the most common questions we hear from B2B solution providers and when they cannot do this effectively, they assume their poor results are the fault of the media company they’re working with. This often leads to nonrenewal!
Effectively following up with a prospect, a good target audience match, calls for a combination of nurturing, listening, discovering, informing, educating, offering examples, and above all, helping.
If a solution provider understands and accepts the real buyer’s journey and employes a solid content strategy to engage prospects throughout that journey, they should also align their follow-ups with the buyer’s journey.
If you think the purpose of sales follow-up is to make a sale, think again. As a solution provider, that may be your ultimate goal, but an effective follow-up helps the buyer advance to the next stage of their journey.
Engagement data is not a list of leads, but rather a body of intelligence that enables sellers to develop business with precision.
Precision comes from the process of analyzing the intelligence to determine where the prospect is in their buyer’s journey and then meet them there with help. This analysis could be tech enabled, but it doesn’t have to be. If the buyer is in the early stages, follow-up may be sharing similar content to what they expressed an interest in, not just once, but perhaps a dozen times, and then monitoring their continued interest.
If their content engagement is sustained, advance to the next stage with case studies, examples and third-party research on the topic and so on.
This process anchors the buyer-seller relationship in trust!
When done well, it isn’t uncommon for the prospect to seek a conversation with the seller. But if the seller initiates the conversation, the prospect will be open to it, because they trust the seller, someone who has been helping them, not just trying to make a sale.
When sellers meet the buyers where they are with help, they earn their trust and their business!