The Simplest And Fastest Strategy For Sales Growth

There is no simpler and faster strategy to grow your sales than to quickly and effectively follow-up your sales leads.

Great sales lead follow-up can be an engine of sales growth for most companies and salespeople. I have helped many to double their sales merely by modifying and accelerating their procedures for following up their sales leads. (Click here to read my post with a definition for a modern sales lead.)This isn’t a difficult task. The question is: what’s holding you back?How much money are you leaving on the table?Various studies have found that among companies of all sizes and industries approximately 50% of sales leads are not followed up. One prominent expert on sales leads, Ken Krogue, President of Insidesales.com, says that studies conducted by his company show that up to 73% of sales leads are never contacted by a salesperson.Consider for a moment that nearly $250 billion (yes, that is billion with a b) are spent each year on traditional measured media and new media to create buyer interest in products and services. If we use 50% as the benchmark for sales lead follow up, then half of the sales leads generated by those $250 billion are deemed unworthy of follow-up by sales teams. That means that $125 billion in marketing expenditures are essentially flushed down the drain each year due to sales indifference.Even more important than the wasted money, is the money that's being left on the table. What is the dollar value of all the orders companies aren't getting because sales isn't following up its sales leads?You have a business decision to make about your timeI’ve never understood a salesperson’s reticence to follow up with a sales lead. After all, as a salesperson you are in many ways your own boss. You get to make the business decision about how to allocate your sales time. You have the freedom to prioritize your activities in order to maximize your sales productivity.You can choose to generate qualified sales opportunities by talking with potential prospects that have done their research and proactively reached out to you for more information about your product or service. Or, you can make cold calls on suspects who may or may not be aware of your product, who haven’t done their research and who haven’t proactively reached out to you. Which one should you do first?If you want to make the most productive use of your limited sales time, as measured by the revenue you can generate, you always should choose to follow up on your sales leads first. The probability is higher that you’ll be able to engage in a serious sales conversation with the person who has proactively reached out to you versus the person that receives your cold call and who might never have heard of your company (and hadn't really been thinking about making a change).By no means does this mean that you shouldn’t proactively reach out to develop new business. You absolutely should. But not before you have followed up your sales leads.The simple power of follow upHere is a simple illustration of the power of responsively following up your sales leads. In the simple sales process I show in the table below, the only change I made from "Today" to "Tomorrow" was to increase the percentage of sales leads that were promptly followed up. All the other conversion rates stayed the same. You can see the results for yourself.

The math is compelling. I’ve seen it work first-hand in many companies that needed a quick, cost-effective strategy to jump start their sales. There are no free lunches in sales. But, this is about as close to one as you will get.