Lead Follow-Up & Nurturing: Achieve 100% Higher Contact Rate!
We’ve talked about speed to lead and the best times to call your leads. How about follow-ups though? What is your nurture strategy for the leads in your database? The Lead Management Study shows that sales reps should call at least six times before throwing in the towel. Surprisingly, over 30% of leads in the study were never contacted at all. Increasing your call attempts — or by making call attempts at all showed that sales reps showed up to a 70% increase in contact rates.
Never miss an opportunity on your follow-ups and nurture streams again, with a MyOutDesk virtual assistant. Book your Double My Business Strategy Session today to find out how.
A 2018 Bridge Group Inc. SDR Metrics Report found that most reps make an average of 45 dials per day — a number that’s hovered around 50 for the last decade. The report further states that “There is much debate over the usefulness of this metric. It remains, however, one of the few levers that individual SDRs are able to pull. Dials are 100% under your reps’ control — conversions, demos, and meetings are not.”
The study also cites an article by EverFi President Preston Clark in which he laments “The Rise of the Silent Sales Floor.” He says, “When the hum of voices is replaced with the hum of keystrokes, you should be very, very concerned.” To remedy this, Clark recommends reps learn how to lead a sales process from start to finish. “Every step. Every stage. Open to close.”
How Many Lead Follow-Up Calls Should You Make?
Below is a contact probability arc created using sales data on persistence. It shows the correlation between making another call and the probability of making contact.
The chart above yields some interesting insights:
- Calling three times is 68% more effective than calling once
- Calling six times is 94% better than calling once
This same research also reveals that leads contacted after the the 6th call are 45% less likely to to convert than leads contacted prior to that point.
The good news is that as the odds of making contact go up with each additional call, the odds of agents actually making another call are also going down.
Not all leads are ready to buy right out of the gate, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth pursuing. If real estate is about location, location, location, lead nurturing is about follow up, follow up, follow up.
The goal is to stay in front of prospects in a way that creates value rather than annoyance. It’s part art part science.
A good lead nurturing effort matches the buying timeline of every prospect, whether that be a week, a month or a year. The pace and tenor of follow up may change over time, but it should never just stop because the prospect wasn’t ready to buy immediately.
The companies that master this are able to build a long term asset out of their leads rather than running a churn and burn operation that wastes good leads.
How To Achieve A Higher Lead Follow-Up Contact Rate
1. Create a follow-up schedule and plan. Just like any well laid strategy, you need to follow a schedule and create a map of what happens in different situations. Do you know what to do with your lead if you were able to contact them but they are not ready just yet? What is the next step? What are the avenues in which you are trying to contact them? How many times and how far apart should contact attempts be?
2. Use different ways to reach out. Make sure to utilize every avenue available for contact. This could mean emails, social media, SMS, etc. The goal is to touch prospects in different ways in order to stay top of mind and stand out from the competition. Be creative and find different ways to do that.
3. Track EVERYTHING. Make sure you are keeping track of all your contact attempts and what the results are and whether you are able to reach them or not. Are they reading emails? Engaging with the content you send them? These are all important in order for you to keep your database clean and organized. You can manually create trackers or use software that can do it for you; the bottom line is that you need to track all activity.
4. Get Help. Your follow-up and nurture is essential to ensure that you are utilizing your data and leads. Let’s face it though, it often falls to the wayside or does not get the attention it needs because you have a lot of other things on your plate. This is why finding a team member who can solely handle your lead follow-up and nurture is essential!
MyOutDesk can help match you with a real estate virtual assistant that can focus on your follow-up and nurture strategies to help you build your business. Our virtual assistant services can give you the leverage you need to work on your business instead of in it. Make sure to schedule your Double my Business Strategy Session today to find out how!
