Sales follow-ups are more important than you think. And if you already think they’re important, they’re still more important than you think.
In fact, their importance cannot be overstated. Nailing the follow-ups is just as important, if not more so, than nailing the initial pitch. If you do a great first pitch, but botch the follow-ups, you don’t make a sale. If you do an excellent first pitch, but don’t bother reaching out to have a follow-up, you don’t make a sale. If you smash the first pitch out of the park, but after three follow-ups, you decide to cut your losses, you don’t make a sale.
More often than not, sales follow-ups are where the money’s at. So as a salesperson, you’d better get good at them. And for that, you’ll need a market intelligence platform that helps your sales team improve their overall performance by uncovering insights that inform strategy and decision making.
Having said all that, it starts with a simple hello.
Did You Know?
Want to know a secret? 44% of sales reps give up after 1 follow-up call, but 80% of sales are only finalized after 5 follow-up calls. This means that almost half of the sales reps are missing out on more than 80% of the potential deals.
Are you one of them?
Strategies for Mastering Sales Follow-Up Calls
Before we dive into the usefulness of call recordings, there are some simple strategies that you need to get right first. Once these are under your belt, call recordings can take you to god tier.
1. Don’t Pester Your Prospects
While you want to arrange a follow-up call, you don’t want to alienate your potential buyer. It’s as simple as that really. If you start emailing and calling them too soon, you’re gonna p*ss your prospects off and quickly reduce the chances of them ever agreeing to a deal.
To avoid this, space out your attempts to reach them. Purchasing decisions take time to consider. Don’t expect anyone to have just magically decided overnight. Sometimes it might happen, but the super eager will have no trouble reaching out to you.
Bear in mind that there are often multiple stakeholders involved in the decision making process, especially if the purchase is upwards of a thousand dollars.
When to Reach Out?
There’s no one-size-fits-all formula for follow-up emails or calls. One prospect might tell you they need a week to decide, in which case call them back after a week. Another might say they need a few days. Err on the side of caution and make it three. A third prospect might tell you they’ll raise a discussion about it at next week’s board meeting. Pay attention to what your prospect tells you: if you jump the gun and email them the next day, they might be frustrated that you didn’t listen.
Try to get a rough time period for when to reach out at the end of your initial pitch. It should be a crucial part of your “next steps” ending to the call. If for whatever reason you don’t get any ballpark figure, then set a calendar reminder for seven days later to check up.
Another good way of deciding when to launch a follow-up email is by checking when they’ve rewatched your call recording. With tl;dv, both parties receive a copy of the call as soon as the meeting is over. If your prospect is rewatching it, the chances are that they’re interested and at least thinking about your offer. When they rewatch your call, you’ll receive an email automatically. Then it’s go time. Schedule an email for the following morning (or afternoon if they watched it in the morning).
Obviously that’s not something you can rely on happening every time, but it’s a good indication of when to send the email.
2. Don’t Stick to One Method
If one method doesn’t work, it’s time to switch it up. It’s easy for emails to get buried, so if they aren’t responding, try giving them a phone call. Similarly, if they’re super busy and unable to take your call, drop them an email. By diversifying your approach, you’re more likely to get a response. But always keep point number 1 in mind: don’t reach out too frequently.
There are plenty of other ways you can maintain contact too. LinkedIn is a great one. Depending on your relationship with the prospect, it may also be acceptable to use other, more personal, methods like SMS or a different type of social media.
Always remember though that if they’ve specified a way for you to contact them then respect that.
3. Keep it Personal
If you’re sending follow-up emails, one of the best ways to get a response is to personalize them. A personalized subject line on an email leads to a 22% higher open rate.
Nobody cares about generic follow-ups, but ones that show you listened and reiterate points that the prospect showed a particular interest in can be a lot more engaging. They will know you wrote it just for them and that makes them more likely to respond.
Depending on how many clients you have, you can use a software to autofill personalized info, but if you’re speaking to less, it’s always good to write out something even more personal just for them. Generally speaking, the more personal you can make the email, the more likely they are to respond.
Viewing your recorded calls or catching up on the AI generated summary is a great way of getting some quick information on your prospects’ pain points, specific desires, and objections. You can use these to tailor your emails.
4. Keep it Clear and Concise
Your prospects are busy. Like you, they don’t have time to burn, so don’t waste it by sending a load of jibber jabber. Be brief. Get straight to the point in a clear and concise manner.
Try to keep follow-up emails to a maximum of 6 lines, and restrict phone calls to around ten minutes. Grab their attention quickly and prompt swift action.
5. Outline the Next Steps
One of the best ways to finalize a sale is to always end follow-ups (and the initial pitches) with a brief outline for what’s next. You can call it a call to action.
Agree a rough date for when the decision will be made. If they need to talk with other stakeholders, for example, get a date in mind when you can continue your conversation and the decision can actually be made.
Try to set a specific date and time on the call for your follow-up. Send them a calendar invite on the spot so that you can get the next call slotted in already.
6. Know When to Call it Quits
If prospects clearly aren’t interested, call it quits and move on. There are plenty more fish in the sea. Six follow-ups are usually where we suggest you draw the line. If you haven’t heard back by then, just drop it and look elsewhere. You don’t want to be aggressive or pushy. Keep in mind that 60% of prospects say no four times before saying yes.
It’s a good idea to send one final email before you sever contact. This is known as the break up email and basically lets the prospect know that you’ll no longer be in touch and that this is their last chance to speak to you about the deal. If the prospect wanted to reply but hasn’t had the time, this email will spur them into action.
Of course, it should be obvious that if the prospect gives you a firm “No” or asks you to stop messaging them, then do so. Anything after this is essentially harassment.
Uncover Hidden Gems With Sales Call Recordings
In order to craft a great sales follow-up, you need to first conduct a fantastic initial pitch – and then use the recording from that pitch to inform your follow-up strategy. Here are several tips for you to make the most of your call recordings for enhancing your follow-up pitches.
Active Listening
Active listening is a must when you’re in a sales pitch. Consider the effect pausing has on your prospect and how much extra trust you can build through that simple action. Having said that, it can be difficult to keep track of your active listening when you’re caught up in the moment. You’re trying to pitch your product, run the sales demo, listen to your prospect, make notes on their pain points, react to their objections, and more! It’s not an easy task.
But by scheduling a chunk of time each week to rewatch your sales pitches using a market intelligence platform like tl;dv, you can analyze your own listening skills. Did you interrupt the prospect at any point? Did you notice any body language the prospect used that showed frustration or like they wanted to say something but didn’t have the time or space? These are tell-tale signs that you should be listening more. Remember; the sales pitch is all about the potential customer. Let them do the talking.
Review Transcripts
Another great thing you can do with tl;dv is review the transcripts. No matter what plan you get (even the free one!), you get transcripts with speaker recognition. This means you can quickly scan the transcripts to be able to check your language. You can see if you’re using enough power words or if you need to be more convincing and clear.
Create Clips and Reels by Keyword
One of the great features of tl;dv is that you can create clips of your video calls super easily. You can even do it directly from the transcript. But even better than that, you can create highlight reels that mash together numerous clips from different meetings.
Want to organize objections about the subscription length into one highlight reel that you can share with stakeholders? Easy. Want to analyze successful calls to see what convinced your buyers to say “yes”? Simple. Want to scan dozens of sales pitches in mere moments to find keywords mentioned by you or the prospect? Piece of cake.
tl;dv’s library is your home of organization. You can easily search via keyword to find exactly what you’re looking for in the transcripts. You can jump straight to the bits you’re looking for. It basically makes hours of content skimmable in minutes. That’s why tl;dv is often regarded as one of the best sales follow-up tools on the market.
Identify Key Information
While you can use tl;dv’s search function mentioned above to search for key terms in seconds, there are also other methods.
tl;dv’s AI can take notes for you during the call, meaning you don’t have to take your finger off the pulse to do it yourself. You can maintain your concentration and listening while the bot does all the leg work. It also provides an automatically generated summary at the end of each call that refreshes key points made during the meeting and any call to actions you may have set.
If you want to scan the meetings manually, you can start by checking the summaries and notes. It’s also worth mentioning that if you want to send the key information that you’ve found to a colleague, they don’t need to search for it. You can set a timestamp which will email your colleague directly with a link to the exact moment they need to see. This can be done before or after the meeting. It couldn’t be simpler.
Analyze Patterns and Trends
By analyzing your sales calls, you’re bound to pick up on certain patterns and trends. It might be that one objection in particular keeps coming up over and over. Maybe this means your product team needs to do something about it. Using the highlight function mentioned earlier, you can create a reel of these objections and send it to the relevant team.
Similarly, you might notice that something in particular is triggering successful calls or unsuccessful ones. Whatever the repeat pattern is, you can highlight it and bring it to your sales reps’ attention so that you can make a positive impact on future pitches.
Pay Attention to Customer Sentiment
Pay attention to the customer’s tone, language, and emotional cues during the conversation. This can provide insights into their level of interest, concerns, and feelings about the product or service.
One of the ways you can do this is by learning your prospect’s personality type. This might sound difficult at first, but once you get the swing of it, you’ll start to notice similarities fairly quickly. And the best way to practice is through rewatching call recordings.
Share Success Stories & Effective Strategies
Identify instances where salespeople effectively handled objections or secured a deal. These success stories can be shared across your team for training purposes to help others learn from real-world examples.
It’s the best way to onboard new members and show them what to expect. You can make reels, clips and timestamps of important deal-winning moments to show others what works.
Similarly, it can be used to show what doesn’t work and how to improve…
Continuous Training and Improvement
Using the same technique as above, you can highlight what needs improvement. A great way to do this is by organizing regular training sessions where salespeople can discuss call recordings, share insights, and learn from each other’s experiences. This fosters a culture of continuous improvement.
Integrate With CRM
Integrate call recording analysis with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. This helps salespeople access call recordings and relevant information while engaging with customers, ensuring they have a holistic view of each customer’s journey.
tl;dv’s pro plan allows you to integrate your call recordings with all your favorite CRM systems. From Salesforce to Hubspot, tl;dv has got you covered.
Personalize Your Follow-Up Strategies
Touched upon earlier, the best way to personalize your follow-up strategies is to reread your AI summaries, check out the timestamped moments, and have a scan of the transcript. Within moments, you’ll have a feel for the prospect, their desires, pain points, objections, and personality.
It doesn’t take a genius to take this information and convert it into a personalized follow-up. The more the prospect feels remembered and personally targeted, the more likely they will get back to you and eventually purchase. People like to feel remembered. And tl;dv makes it easy to remember people.
Data-Driven Decision Making
Encourage salespeople to base their follow-up strategies on data from call recordings rather than gut feelings. This makes their approach more targeted and increases the chances of success.
This is also a great tool to show evidence when taking an issue to stakeholders or product managers. You have the potential customer’s own voice to back up your points. It’s a lot more persuasive than your regular old statistic.
Get tl;dv and Turbo Charge Your Sales Follow-Ups Today
Download tl;dv for Zoom or Google Meet today and get started recording your sales pitches for free! Use the recordings to personalize your follow-ups and increase the likelihood of finalizing the deal.
