O MANNY's

Sales and Marketing Follow-up Strategies

1. Follow-up is THE crucial component. Survey after survey
supports this statement. Put a weekly inspection process in play by your
leadership for your sales team today.

2. Time is of the essence when performing follow-up. Leads have a limited shelf life
and the leads you are working on never stay in neutral—they are either moving
closer to or further away from a sale. Leadership must show sales teams that
timely follow-up on their leads is important to your organization.

3. Keep your sales lead process simple in the lead
follow-upstage. Leads can only be in one of the following three categories:
"purchased," "not interested" or "in-progress."

4. Make sure you have follow-up policies for "not interested" and
"purchased." Ensure your leadership focus on leads in progress. In progress
lead are where you will find the majority of your lead marketing investment—and
your biggest potential return on that investment.

5. You need a software program to help sales and leadership
keep track of each of these three leads categories. Make sure your system is
easy to use and can produce effective lead follow-up reports.

6 Your software and reports must reconcile and account for every
lead that your sales team has been assigned. For example, if a sales agent
received 40 leads for the month and five were not interested, two purchased and
33 were in-progress, your reports must reflect this. Ensure that your sales team
has been directed as to what the next steps are on each of these categories. If
you do not take the time to do this, sales will have leads with little or no
follow-up. Remember: Leadership must do this at least once a week.

7. Leads in progress should be reported in categories
so leadership understands what is holding the customer back from
purchasing. Leadership should be able to guide sales on their next follow-up
steps based this important information.

8. When you review the report details with your sales team, you can see the in-progress
leads updated each week. Making sure there is progress each week for every
lead is the key. If there is little progress on the leads from week to week,
stop giving that sales agent new leads until they catch-up on the current leads
they have been assigned.

9. Weekly performance reports on the in-progress leads should have three or four key follow-up areas that you will be looking for when you meet with the salesperson. This
type of leadership follow-up will help your sales agents improve. Make sure you
write down what you will be looking for next week and then next week record the
action the sales agent took toward these requested steps.

10. Recognize and celebrate great lead follow-up in front of the
entire sales team. Set the tone for the importance of this process.Coaching
and counseling with poor follow-up agents should be done one- on one and will
also send a message to your team on the importance of follow-up.



In his new book "Lead
Domination," Jamie K