Agency owners are busy.
Following up with leads without an efficient system is time consuming. Therefore consistent follow-up is often neglected.
Consistent Follow-Up is Difficult
Here’s some advice—stop accepting poor follow-up and lead management as an agency norm. Your sales efforts will never improve unless you take the time to improve them.
Think of sales the same way you think of inbound marketing. There is effort that is required upfront for a greater, long-term payoff. If you take the time to develop your sales system upfront the amount of future sales and consistency of future sales will increase dramatically.
The Key to Consistent Follow-Up
The pain is clear, so what is the solution?
The answer comes in three parts:
- Commitment
- Dedication
- Responsibility
Commitment
Many different sales systems have been created and implemented for different types of companies around the world. A lot of them are fundamentally solid. A lot of them also don’t yield great results. Why? A lack of commitment.
Once a process has been implemented a strong commitment to that process is essential for success. That does not mean that you should not be consistently improving it. It does mean that you need to be committed to seeing it through.
Dedication
Be dedicated to consistency. Sales systems only function properly if the agency is using it consistently. The entire process losses effectiveness the moment you lose your consistency.
Commit to the system itself and be dedicated to the consistency of it’s use.
Responsibility
The best way to enforce commitment and dedication is to assign responsibility.
There needs to be a team member who is assigned the responsibility of either executing or overseeing the execution of the sales system that is put in place.
Practical Advice
I want to lay out some keys to success I have discovered to help make my prospect follow-up more consistent.
Create An “Ideal” Week
Agency life is busy. Walking into a week without a clear plan of what needs to get done is doing yourself and your agency a disservice. The solution is to at some point the weekend before create your ideal week.
Take a look at your calendar and block off times to get certain activities done. Create some extra buffer spaces (we both know you will need them) but try to be as thorough as possible.
This will give you vision going into each week.
Assign Time for Outreach in Bulk
This piece of advise ties in nicely with the ideal week. Each week I block time to do all of my outreach in one sitting. I block off an hour each day to do my prospect follow-ups.
I make sure to never have that time be early mornings on Monday or late afternoons on Friday.
Play around with different times and see how performing follow-ups at various times of day affect your results.
Create Tasks Habitually
I cannot stress how important this piece of advice is. The two words that come to mind here are “discipline” and “habit.”
After EVERY interaction with a prospect you need to create a task which is your next step for that prospect. These tasks are what you spend time every day on to make sure your outreach is consistent and that no prospect is forgotten.
Be disciplined until this becomes a habit.
Below is a picture of how I execute my daily tasks.
I can see which tasks are due each day. The tasks are coded to represent which type of outreach I need to preform. Ex. “CEL #4” is the 4th email in my series that i send to “Cold Email Leads.”
If you need help figuring out where to start in the process of developing a sales system for your agency feel free to download the free eBook below for a point in the right direction.
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