You want to grow your company, you want more clients and more sales, but chances are you suck at follow-up. You’re not the only one. 95% of the businesses I work with have little to no follow-up systems in place and often, if they do have some semblance of a system, they fail to implement. This means that you have leads that have been ignored and left to your competitors.

Here are the top 10 mistakes you are probably making with your follow-up. Implementing these will easily increase your sales and profits:

1. Don’t have a highly effective, consistent, multi-step system for follow up, do it haphazardly or when they get a chance. They need to a plan for follow up for each entry point that a prospect comes into their marketing funnel (for example: trade show, call in, internet lead, etc.) and develop the pigheaded discipline to implement.

2. Give up too soon. Statistics show that 80% of sales are made on the fifth to twelfth contact so you need to stay in front of your prospect and keep following up.

3. Not personalized. Make sure you inject your personality and some personal details that you have learned about your prospect into your follow up pieces. If you are using an auto responder, write it like you are talking to one person so they will feel like you wrote it to them.

4. No strategic objectives. Before creating your follow up strategy and pieces, establish your strategic objectives overall and for each piece. Do you want to develop rapport, establish expertise, build social proof, etc…?

5. Too much about their company or product vs. their prospect’s wants, needs, pain points and desire. Don’t tell me about your product or company, tell me how it can help me, the prospect.

6. No call to action. Give the prospect a next step to take. It doesn’t need to be to purchase something it could be an article for them to read or an online video for them to watch.

7. Doing your follow up the way you see other companies in your industry doing it. Be a resource for your prospect; give them information of value that they can use, even if they don’t buy from you. Be original, have fun and make it interesting so they want to open it and read it. One of my clients just closed a major account and when his staff asked the client why they chose their company, the new client said it was because of the consistent creative follow up that made him see that an alternative was available to his current provider.

8. Using only one type of follow up. Mix it up use phone, email, social media, video, direct mail.

9. Stop after the prospect becomes a client. Just like marriage experts tell you to date your spouse you should continue to “date” your client and deepen your rapport and relationship by sending them fun things and inviting them to events.

10. Not tracking your implementation and results and modifying follow up systems once you see which things are the most successful.

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