Why Salespeople Don’t Follow Up
Why are we so resistant to follow up?
What is it about this extremely important habit that’s so off-putting? What makes us reticent to do that which is in our best interest AND in the best interest of our customer?
And what do we do to fix it?!
I need to talk to you about resistance.
I talk a lot about this really interesting thing called resistance in my book, Follow Up and Close the Sale.
It’s a term that I first learned when I read Steven Pressfield’s excellent book, The War of Art. And he talks about that term resistance, this invisible force that prevents us from doing the things that we really ought to do.
It comes in the form of a comfort addiction, and it gives us 1,000 reasons why we shouldn’t do what we really need to do.
This is true in life in general, but it’s particularly true with follow up.
So why don’t salespeople follow up with their prospects?
First of all, they have a wrong idea of what follow up is.
They think that follow up is what is sometimes called intrusion marketing. They don’t want to be seen as a telemarketer. They don’t want somebody who is a nag, who’s just bugging them until they buy.
What they’re missing is it’s about the depth of the relationship.
If you did your job right from the beginning, you built a trust relationship with your prospect. You built the type of relationship where the customer wanted to talk to you more.
What we’re trying to do in follow up is leverage on all the great work you’ve done thus far.
Now, the second reason people don’t follow up is they don’t think it works, but it does.
Why? Because no one else does it.
You can stand out massively because no one else is following up.
But why does follow up work? Why is it effective?
Well, that has to do with something that I call emotional altitude.
The emotional altitude measures the amount of positive experience that your customer is having. That emotional heightened sense in a conversation when they’re with you, when they’re looking at your product, whatever it happens to be.
And when I’m looking, when I’m shopping and I’m really enjoying the process and I really like the person that I’m dealing with, I have a high level of emotional altitude.
What follow up does is it sustains that emotional altitude. After that initial conversation, the emotional altitude starts to wane.
But with follow up, what happens? We support it. It comes back up. It’s a beautiful way to keep your customer emotionally engaged.
Why is that important? Because psychologists tell us that 85% of a purchase decision is emotionally based. If you lose your emotional altitude, you lose your sale.
But the third reason salespeople don’t follow up is that they don’t know how to do it well.
You will never get good at anything if you don’t practice, but I don’t want you to just be good at it.
I want you to enjoy it. That’s right, enjoy it. There are salespeople everywhere who totally dig doing their follow up.
Why? Because it’s relationship time. They love people. They love to connect with people. So let me challenge you.
Where is your mind at on this?
Is your comfort addiction getting in the way, or do you really want to truly serve your customers?
You can stand out and you can stand out in a big way if you’re willing to do things that others are not willing to do.
Until next time, learn more, to earn more.
