Follow-up emails or follow-up calls are a crucial part of any sales-marketing activity. Knowing what to send your prospect and when can enable better chance of a response. While sales and marketing teams today can draw from various creative follow-up templates and tactics, the fact still remains, it is still common to suddenly have key prospects go silent in the middle of a prospecting campaign.
Prospects can go silent for a variety of reasons, sudden budget limitations, change in company structure or policy, change in priorities, etc. The onus for sales and marketing teams lies in understanding the prospect behavior up until the stage they went silent to try and pull out insights that can help drive a better follow-up campaign with the aim of eliciting a positive response.
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A successful follow-up campaign can be a sales and marketing team’s biggest strength. Here are a few things that can help drive a more robust follow-up strategy:
Understanding Why The Prospect Disengaged (and When)
If you’ve had a continuous chain of communication and suddenly notice your prospect has gone silent, dive into past data. Did the prospect ask for a customized pricing and were you unable to give it to them? Did the prospect indirectly say they may need to hold off any new tech investment?
Dipping into your email data to assess whether the prospect has read your emails (and still chooses to stay silent) along with previous engagement data can help frame a more thorough follow-up strategy.
For sales teams who can’t necessarily find any solid indicator of the sudden ghosting, after a fair amount of time has gone by, a simple follow-up with a ‘’Anything wrong” or ‘’Can I help” can help kick start another round of email conversations.
Automate and Set-up a Different, Targeted Follow-up Process
After identifying a list of prospects who were previously engaged but suddenly went silent, using past email data to understand their interests and then putting them into an automated email sequence that helps nurture them can save sales rep’s time and also help understand more about the prospect interest or sudden lack of during this cycle.
A short cadence that is built to – reintroduce the product/service in a different way, along with a custom discount or trial/demo can be the central theme. Today’s sales engagement platforms allow sales teams to set up different types of email sequences for different target lists.
Measuring Output on the Basis of CTAs
Sales and marketing leaders have to prioritize prospects that matter versus those that have no intent of buying. Once a narrow target list is identified for a follow up cadence, it is important to track engagement based on desired responses: every email or follow up call should include some kind of CTA (e.g: book a meeting / click here to know more / ask for custom pricing). This will make it easier to identify and track end results.
Leveraging the Power of (not too Persistent) Omnichannel Follow-up
If you have data that tells you more about your prospect including a little insight into their social / online activity, it is time to use that in a follow-up cadence. B2B salespeople often swear by LinkedIn being a go-to platform for certain parts of their prospecting endeavors. A follow-up email with a short (non-intrusive) message on LinkedIn is an option that can work.
The choice of channel should also depend on how familiar you are with the prospect, needless to say, an Instragram follow-up might not be the best thing if you are in B2B sales…
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Email follow-ups are a necessary part of any sales/marketing cadence today. Prospects are hard-pressed for time and can suddenly experience different kinds of challenges that might result in silent treatment. Getting creative while being relevant during this stage can help reduce the number of lost opportunities that crop up from a list of disengaged prospects. Sometimes, prospects might just need a little more time or have it on their mind to get back to you at a later stage.
Remaining connected, finding an opportune moment and using your data to tap into the opportunity before its lost is key to a robust follow-up strategy.
