One of the biggest challenges sales organizations face is securing customers who aren’t ready to buy. Maybe they’re considering a competitor’s offer or having internal issues that are delaying their decision-making. Whatever the case for their indecision, your goal is to convince these prospective customers to eventually buy from you.
To accomplish this often elusive task, you need to be savvy about the way you follow-up and deal with prospective customers. Here are our top keys to guide you in this feat:
Set a Deadline
Some clients only make decisions if we set a deadline. It’s important to recognize early on that there are many reactive organizations out there. Come up with extra services, upgrades, and more coaching. However, only if they can make a decision by a certain date. And it works. Just the fact that you are offering something that expires soon may well drive prospects into making a decision.
Multiple Touchpoints
Email is the easiest and quickest way to follow up with prospects, but don’t limit yourself to one form of communication. When following up, you can reach out with a phone call, through snail mail, or by sharing a video link. All of these give you a better chance of engaging prospective customers, increasing their likelihood of buying.
Building Prospect Trust
While the ultimate goal of following-up on your prospects is to close sales, your messaging to indecisive customers needs to exceed just selling. No prospect wants to constantly be barraged with messages that scream “buy my stuff.” What you should do instead is to use the follow-up as an opportunity to establish yourself as someone they can trust. When they are finally ready to make their buying decision, they will be more likely to buy from you since you already have an established relationship by then.
Follow-up Timeline
Set a follow-up timeline based on your typical sales cycle. Let’s say if the typical sales cycle is one month, perhaps you should follow-up with your indecisive customers twice per week for the next four weeks, once per week for the following two weeks, and then monthly for the next 12 months.
Most importantly, don’t give up. You’ll be surprised how effective reaching out to a prospect six months after your initial contact can be. Most importantly, because your competitors will rarely follow-up with indecisive customers for that long, you’ll often be able to close sales without any competitive pressure.
Follow-up System
It’s important to establish a system, particularly with follow-up sequences that last many months or even years. Without systems in place, it’s too easy for someone to drop the ball and for necessary follow-ups not to get done. This can range from simple follow-up alerts in your CRM system to hiring a marketing manager whose sole focus is helping sales staff secure more sales from follow-ups.
Reassure Nervous Customers
When you feel any indecisiveness in your customers about the longevity, quality, the material used, mention to them examples of the products, maybe a sample product, or talk about comparable or very much alike projects and build a trust base with them. This will counter the indecisiveness from moving in.
Set Realistic Expectations
Customers will always have very high expectations for the product or service they are paying for. It can be in terms of timeline or budget. It’s really essential to set expectations right with the customers right from the start and keep it honest with them.
Conclusion
In today’s competitive business world, it’s all too common for buyers to delay making a decision. Those firms that can leverage this fact via effective follow-up will dominate their markets. Remember the old adage — you can’t improve what you don’t measure. Measure the effectiveness of your follow-up campaigns. Determine what’s working and do more of it. Likewise, fix or refrain from continuing the efforts that aren’t yielding results.
