How to Carry Out Sales Follow-Up Faster

For today’s busy customers, speed is everything. When you’ve got a lead on the line, the last thing they want is to wait around endlessly to hear from you. And of course, if your team can improve the speed of your follow-up, you can also spend more time and effort on other tasks that deserve your attention. 

Of course, you don’t want to just start working faster—that can lead to mistakes, missteps, and a complete misalignment of your efforts and goals. The goal is to find ways to streamline work, automate repetitive tasks, and make other changes so that follow-up can be done more quickly and efficiently every single time. 

For example, you can outsource to a team like Smith.ai to streamline your outreach campaigns and give your own reps the time to focus on other efforts. 

First up, automation

One of the most effective ways to speed up any process is by capitalizing on automation where you can. Sales automation tools abound these days, from CRMs and analytics tools to automated email services and SMS campaigns. Take a minute to look at all the steps and touchpoints involved in your customer journey and sales funnel. How many of those are repetitive, tedious, or could otherwise benefit from automation?

Consider automating:

• Scheduling 
• Email marketing campaigns (with personalized emails you’ve crafted, of course)
• Prospecting
• Some aspects of customer service (chatbots, etc.)
• Sales forecasting and reporting
• Data collection and aggregation
• Email/newsletter sign-ups and confirmations
• Lead qualifying and scoring

Getting any or all of these things off the plates of your sales reps will alleviate a lot of stress and tedious work. It will also streamline the process and make these things happen much more quickly, cutting the time it takes to get through the pipeline. 

Create a follow-up process 

The single biggest problem that sales teams have with follow-up is that there’s no dedicated process or methodology in place that everyone can implement. Leaders offer plenty of insight on how to follow up and when to follow up, but they don’t often have a concrete follow-up strategy that can make things run more smoothly.

Come up with a process that works for your team. Outline a plan from first contact to conversion, and beyond, that includes actionable steps that people can take. You don’t necessarily need to create a hard-and-fast follow-up timeline because each prospect will have different expectations, but you should have a general outline of steps that your people can follow to streamline the process. 

As a part of your process, you can even create “triggers” that cause certain actions to happen in the follow-up timeline. For example, you could set an email sequence that looks like this:

• Follow-up email of gratitude within a few hours of the initial sales meeting with action items and important notes. 
• Another email 24 hours before an action item is due to gain acknowledgment or confirmation. 
• If no acknowledgment, call or send an SMS message for confirmation instead. 

And thanks to auto-responder tools and automated messaging programs, this entire sequence can happen without anyone on your team being involved. That’s definitely worth taking advantage of when it comes to streamlining the process of following up with prospects. 

Build follow-up into your sales training 

In addition to creating a dedicated process for following up with your leads, you should also incorporate the training that you provide your existing team into your onboarding practices. Whenever you are looking to upskill your sales reps, make sure that follow-up training is included. Many sales reps are intimidated by this process because they’re not trained on how to do it effectively. 

And even if you already have a follow-up process in place, it might be time to tweak things or consider improving how your new people are trained on the processes. The goal is to get everyone on the same page so that every lead gets the exact same personalized, authentic experience. 

Track and refine your efforts 

Of course, you can’t very well improve on things if you don’t know where they stand. As part of your strategy, you should include a plan for tracking the efforts of your sales team to see how successful they are. Then, you will be able to refine your efforts in case you need to:

• Reach out on a different channel 
• Choose different messaging or CTAs to reach different audiences
• Alter the number or frequency of touchpoints
• Change other elements of your follow-up process 

Like anything, becoming an expert at follow-up takes time and practice. Make sure that your entire team is on board and ready to take on the challenge, and then start working towards a better follow-up process right away. 

Figure out how to best allocate your resources. What can you automate? What can you outsource? Will this be effective in freeing up time for your reps? These are all things you have to consider when it comes to making the most of prospecting and lead nurturing with the way that you choose to follow up. And speaking of outsourcing, that’s another great way to speed up your efforts. 

Outsource admin tasks and other duties to free up your sales team 

Of course, the best way to free up your time is to have someone else do the work. Plus, when you outsource, you can get access to a much larger team than you might have in-house, meaning sales follow-up can be done faster and more effectively. That’s what you get when you partner with the virtual receptionists at Smith.ai. 

In addition to our support for outreach campaigns, we can also act as your 24/7 answering service to ensure that you never miss a lead. Plus, we can take care of lead intake and appointment scheduling, and even set you up with live chat so you can expedite and streamline sales in every way possible. 

To learn more, schedule a consultation or reach out to hello@smith.ai. 

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