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When was the last time you reached out to an existing or former customer hoping to make another sale? Have you bought leads, sent them one email and never reached out again? Or worse, bought the leads and never reached out to them at all?
If your answer is, “Um, I don’t really do much customer outreach or email marketing,” don’t feel bad. It just means you’re human.
Steve Rosenbaum understands. He’s a born salesman who “starts with the follow-up” but knows that “most businesses aren’t doing it. They’re ignoring the follow-up.”
And that means they’re leaving the easy money on the table. He points to statistics showing that if a company can improve its customer retention by as little as 5 percent, it can boost the bottom line by as much as 95 percent, Rosenbaum says.
Rather than focus on this easy money, companies have their salespeople making cold calls and sending cold emails to potential clients in an endless sales cycle.
It’s All About the Follow Up, Baby
The founder of the aptly named Flawless Followup, Rosenbaum says his company helps businesses optimize their customer retention sales process because “getting customers to come back and buy again is so much quicker, easier, faster, and cheaper than acquiring new customers.”
Over the last 12 years, he’s taught sale follow-up techniques to 60,000 people in 155 countries — even on a cruise ship!
The Automated Approach to Converting Leads
Rosenbaum teaches the four-step Profit WRAP lead conversion strategy. It goes like this:
- W: Win back former customers with email outreach.
- R: Ask existing customers for a referral to other potential customers or a review or testimonial you can use on your website or in future messaging.
- A: Automate the lead management process so all qualified leads get a follow-up sequence of emails with a clear call to action.
- P: Count your profits.
Case Studies
One of Rosebaum’s clients, a fitness franchisee, was spending money every month running lead generation ads on Google and Facebook. Potential customers would click on the ad, signaling that they were interested in joining the gym. But the sales follow-up strategy was ineffective. If the lead didn’t covert within 30 days, the outreach stopped.
All of those names stayed in the CRM, however. One franchisee sent Rosenbaum a list of 9,000 prospective clients — leads the company had bought and paid for but not turned into paying customers. Rosenbaum’s more effective follow-up resulted in a 26 percent lead conversion rate, he says.
In another case, he worked with a weight loss company. The company wanted to target past customers with the following sales pitch and CTA: We helped you lose weight in the past. Do you need to lose weight again?
That resulted in 43 returning customers in just four days — revenue of $22,089 — just by sending a few sales follow-up emails.
Even large corporations understand the benefit of sales follow-up. More than a decade ago, 3M used Rosenbaum’s system as an automated follow-up for the dealers who sell and install 3M window film products. It gave the dealers an easy, consistent, automatic way to reach out to their list of interested prospects.
How It Can Work for Your Company
The lead conversion process starts with data. Every business has data. Big companies will have large-scale official sources of data, like a lead generation plan or sales team CRM, such as Salesforce. But smaller firms, even startups, have access to many sources of data: social media followers, LinkedIn connections, website visitors, the spreadsheet of your paying customers, even the people in your personal email address book.
“Everybody’s got a calendar these days,” Rosenbaum says. “Everybody’s connected to people on social media. Everybody’s got email inboxes. There are customers and prospects and connected contacts there that you could reach out to very quickly. And within those people, I assure you, there are people that want to buy from you right now.”
Once you have the list of potential customers, all you have to do is reach out and “simply invite them back to do business with us,” he says.
One sales follow-up email isn’t enough. More outreach equals a higher conversion rate. Automation makes it easy.
Are you ready to re-engage your customer base? Call or text us at +1-847-849-2800 to talk about how an experienced operations executive can help you sharpen your process and focus your team to target past and current customers, boosting your bottom line.
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