Summary:

• Salespeople often focus only on warm leads, ignoring colder ones—a costly mistake that reduces revenue and weakens customer relationships.
• Data from Wes Schaeffer shows 81% of sales close on or after the fifth follow-up. This highlights the importance of following up efficiently and strategically.
• Sales reps commonly avoid follow-ups due to forgetfulness, focus on hot leads or fear of being pushy, but this hands potential sales to competitors.
• Wes’s “ABCDE of Sales & Marketing” model (Attract, Bond, Convert, Deliver, Endear) builds lasting customer relationships, focusing on repeat business and advocacy.
• Strong follow-up requires documented processes, integrated tools, and multi-channel outreach. Automating tedious manual tasks like sending emails can make the process much easier and help you follow up more consistently.

How to Fix Follow-Up Failures

Many salespeople make the mistake of focusing too much on warm leads. Warm leads are undoubtedly important – and it’s understandable why SDRs lean into their warmer leads over nurturing colder ones. But this mistake can cost you significant revenue and leave you with a smaller, less engaged pipeline.

Interest doesn’t happen immediately. It takes repeated exposure, careful nurturing, and timely touches. When agents give up too quickly and fail to properly follow up with older or colder leads, they leave opportunity on the table. 

What’s more, insufficient follow-up can negatively impact warm leads too. Follow-up is an extremely important part of your job, and as Wes Schaeffer (aka The Business Fixer) explained in our joint webinar - follow-up failures have costly consequences.

Below, we explain why follow-up matters more than you think, what mistakes people make when doing (or not doing) it, and how you can improve your follow-up process. Read on and learn how to fix your follow-up failures.

How Many Touches Does It Take to Close a Sale?

Here’s some data from Wes on how many calls it takes for agents to close deals:

• 2% close on the first call
• 3% close on the second call
• 4% close on the third call
• 10% close on the fourth call
• 81% close on or after the 5th call

It’s not rocket science—the more you stay in touch, the better your chances get. The question is, what are you doing to stay in touch?

Why You Don’t Follow Up with Your Prospects

Ask a group of salespeople why they aren’t paying more attention to their follow-ups and you’ll get all kinds of excuses explanations. Here are a few of the most common ones:

• Forgetting: Pretty self-explanatory—but agents who are consistently forgetting to follow up might not be cut out for the job.
• Focusing on hot or warm leads: This might seem to make sense at first—shouldn’t you put your attention on the people most likely to buy? The problem with giving these leads all your attention is that it allows unconverted leads to fall through the cracks. As we’ll see later on, this can be a massive waste of opportunity (and money).
• Not wanting to be pushy: Some sales agents assume prospects will call back if they’re really interested. But remember: your number one job as a salesperson isn’t actually to sell; it’s to prospect. So anyone who’s leaving it up to prospects to identify themselves isn’t really doing the job.

No matter which of these reasons someone might give, it all comes down to the same thing: they don’t realize the potential impact proper follow-up can have on sales.

But by not following up, they’re delivering sales right to your competition.

Think about it: if people hit your website, opt-in, get information, and don’t receive adequate follow-up, they’re going to forget about you – likely ending up with a competitor who is more proactive, attentive, and frankly deserving of a deal. 

It’s a sad story, but it doesn’t have to be your story. You just have to learn how to follow up more effectively.

The Value of Following Up

You can literally put a dollar amount on what good follow-ups are worth. To show you, let’s take a look at two different sales approaches: one that doesn’t include follow-ups and one that does.

Traditional Approach (No Follow-Ups)

The table below reflects the approach most sales agents take—one that doesn’t involve proper follow-up tactics. Agents who take this approach might be diligent about making that first contact, but from there, they probably save the majority of their time and energy for the leads that seem like easy wins.

Let’s assume that you’ll close about 10% of your leads this way, and that another 10% will be warm ones. Out of those, you’ll probably close about another quarter (just because it’s easy to reach people who are already receptive). The rest will be cold.

Those numbers might not look too bad—but in this example, what’s happening to all the cold leads? Nothing—they’re turning into dust, and you’re missing a huge potential opportunity.

With Follow-Up

Now, let’s see what it looks like if you follow up with those cold leads and manage to close even 20% of them:

As you can see above, this translates to a massive increase in your total sales revenue—even when you close a smaller percentage of cold leads than warm ones. That’s because there are just so many more cold leads that you can close if you simply bother to follow up with them.

Common Follow-Up Problems for Sales Professionals

Of course, effective follow-up is easier said than done. Here are a few of the obstacles that I’ve seen standing in the way of better follow-ups time and time again:

Poorly Integrated Departments

Lots of companies have departments that use disparate systems. I’ve seen a company whose Sales department was paying for Salesforce while their marketing team used Hubspot, and their actual agents were using Pipedrive. This makes following up with accurate data a lot harder. It’s not a recipe for success.

Ideally, you want to make sure all your key customer information is stored in the same place—or at least that the different platforms your company uses can integrate with each other meaningfully. Learn more about how PhoneBurner can integrate with 200+ popular tools for sales teams.

Poorly Documented Processes

It’s a mistake to simply forget about a lead and move on if the first contact doesn’t seem promising—but when you don’t have a playbook, or cadence, for following up properly, that’s what tends to happen. Instead, you need a documented process that spans the buying life cycle of your customers.

According to Wes, Gartner Research says that 67% of prospective buyers who tell you “no” today will be ready to buy in the next year. And 80% of the leads you consider “dead” will buy within 2 years. But what are you doing to stay in touch with these people long-term? Are you nurturing them or ignoring them?

Related: The Beginner's Guide to Relationship Selling

No Process that Goes Beyond the First Purchase

Closing a lead is important—but it isn’t everything. In fact, play your cards right and it might only be the first of many sales you make to that same customer.

Are you tracking how many times a prospect has purchased from you? Do you have different scripts and resources to reach buyers who you’ve developed a deeper relationship with?

The ABCDE of Sales & Marketing

Wes uses a cycle he calls the ABCDE of Sales & Marketing to nurture relationships with leads and sell to them repeatedly over the long term. Here are the key elements:

• Attract: Drive traffic to your website, storefront, tradeshow, booth, etc. Give them something in return for their contact information and get them to opt in—a free report, coupon, etc.
• Bond: Once the prospect opts in, you can use different methods to reach them and nurture the relationship. It’s best to use a multi-step approach (see “The Multi-Step Follow-Up” later in this article for more).
• Convert: Now you make the first sale. But this isn’t the end of your work—you don’t stop working on a marriage after the wedding, so why cut a customer loose as soon as you’ve won them over?
• Deliver: Wow the customer you’ve just won by overdelivering. Make sure the customer’s experience is so seamless and satisfying that they can’t help but develop positive associations with your product.
• Endear: If you’ve done everything else right, the customer does this part for you. Once they’re endeared to your brand, they become advocates—taking pictures of your product for social media, talking to their friends about it, and so on. This puts you in an ideal position to attract them (and other customers) all over again.

Think of your sales model in the same way you think about dating. First, you make eye contact. Then, you ask that attractive person you’re locking eyes with for a dance, or buy them a drink. You do all that before you start going on dates, meeting their family, moving in together, or eventually popping the question.

You might be able to skip one or two of those steps (especially in the early stages). But your chances of success aren’t going to be great if you just jump right to the last part.

Unable to Detach

Not being able to detach keeps you majoring in the minors and missing the small hinges that can swing open big doors.

It’s why surgeons don’t operate on their own family members. It’s why you can’t coach yourself on your golf swing. You can’t be too emotionally wrapped up in the outcome of your work or you’ll miss things. As the saying goes, you can’t read the label from inside the bottle.

Sometimes, bringing in an outside expert like Wes can help. Maybe you’re missing some basic resources that would make your follow-up process easier—like an effective email script. Writing follow-up emails manually might not seem like a big waste of time, but do it a hundred times and it adds up to hours lost. Streamline that process, and you free up enough time over the course of a week to reach a lot more contacts.

Focusing on Outreach Before Optimizing Conversions

Follow-up sequences are like landing pages and scripts. If you don’t have them in the right place, all the money you spend reaching people won’t produce results.

You always want to look at your conversion rate and tighten that up before you spend money on traffic. Figure out what you need to adjust—in your follow-up process and elsewhere—so that you’re making the best impression possible every time you contact a prospect instead of just focusing on sheer call volume.

Related: 7 Call Center Metrics Beyond Call Volume

How to Stop Letting Prospects & Customers Slip Through Your Fingers

Now that you know the value of a good follow-up and the common challenges sales teams face during the follow-up process, here are some suggestions for making your follow-ups better:

Essential Follow-Up Elements

Following up isn’t that hard to do when you boil down the process. Here are the essential elements:

• Education and nurturing
• Relationship building via consistent, ongoing, and relevant contact
• Providing long-term value
• Staying top-of-mind
• Differentiating yourself from the competition

The Multi-Step Follow-Up

For best results, you’ll also want to use a combination of different channels to follow up with prospects. Suggestions include:

• Email
• Voicemail
• SMS
• Phone calls
• Snail mail
• Fax

Putting these different messages together might seem like a lot of work, but automating certain elements can save you a lot of time—which is time you can spend talking to more prospects in live conversations. For example, PhoneBurner’s built-in workflow automation features let you leave voicemails or send emails in a single click.

Fix Your Follow-Up Failures For Good

At the end of the day, here’s all you really need to do if you want to take your follow-up game to the next level:

• Make a commitment to market and sell: Decide that following up properly is worth it. We’ve already shown you the difference it can make to your bottom line.
• Create a follow-up program: Use the ABCDE of Sales & Marketing as your starting point.
• Find a system to automate your follow-up sequences: PhoneBurner can make your follow-ups so efficient that you never forget to do them again.

So there you have it—a complete guide to improving the way you follow up with prospects and reaping the rewards. Not a PhoneBurner user yet? Start your free trial here and see the difference it can make for your follow-up strategy firsthand.

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