Following Up With Cold Leads

If you've ever worked in sales then you've probably heard this expression before: the money is in the follow up. No truer words have been spoken! Staying in front of leads without being seen as spam is a fine line to walk. I'll share with you my timeline for follow up and how I create a sense of urgency within a lead.

It's important to know how the majority of your leads prefer to communicate with you. Phone call? Email? SMS? Once you identify the preferred channel of communication, then we can start standardizing our follow up approach.

For example: one of my clients, Freedom Jiu-Jitsu, has leads that prefer a combination of email and SMS communication. So we create a sequence that looks something like this:

The screenshots are taken from our client's account inside our CRM software.

To walk you through the process it goes something like this: a lead stops responding to us, we send them an email + SMS, we wait 2 days for a response, if they respond the Freedom staff gets notified and will communicate with the lead, if the lead doesn't respond we send them another email and SMS.

This process repeats a total of 4 times. This ensures we are keeping communication with the lead in a reasonable timeframe without crossing into the spam category (remember desperation is a stinky cologne!). If the lead still hasn't answered when the process finishes repeating we mark them as lost and move on. We don't want to commit too much time and resources into a lead that isn't interested.

Now let's look at the language we use in our messages with leads:

Using language such as "offer expiring soon" creates a sense of urgency within the lead. The fear of missing out is real! A generic "are you still interested" message will never turn cold leads to warm ones.

Try these tips out in your own school and let me know how it goes for you! Feel free to share your system or approach with me, I'm always looking to learn and improve.

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Part of the topic Martial Arts Sales Process.