How many follow ups are too many?

Just had to bring these great points out again in the quote box. In my experience, You are dead on correct with all of these

Pride goeth... and all that. Have to agree, and you were ahead of me on my other post up there. No one is saying it, but I wonder how much this fuels the "dump her" attitude.

Yes, I concur with you on this too... because the universal law can kick in later, Stuff Happens.

And most of my No's are not really firm No's... they just can't get off the fence and my probing and answers are not working. Many prospects find it psychologically difficult to give you a simple No or a Yes, even when they desparately want to say Yes! Its that Lizard Brain working, Fear. Fear of the unknown. What if something better comes along. The word NO is powerful stuff psychologically.

Brings up a salient point from static IM selling on a landing page. By simply adding a "No. Not Interested" button to a landing page, we've increased conversion substantially on many products.

We are just overcoming the Lizard Brain with the oldest close in the books. Either Or. The No Thanks button forces a decision.

Stupid as it sounds the No button works time and again and I use the same device in direct mail sales letters. I put in 2 phone numbers... a Yes phone number if you want the Analysis/Report/DVD and a No phone number if you don't want us to call you again.

This goes against all conventional wisdom and "common sense" but it works. I'd say there is something psychologically working we might call a "Negative Yes". For those people who cannot overcome their fear of commitment, offering them the easy opportunity to say No makes a decision happen

In fact, I recall that my first marriage began under similiar circumstances because I was consumed with a young man's fear of commitment.

Fax. Really glad you brought this up. I'd say a personalized merged Fax gets 20 times the respect of a postal letter and 1000 times more than a personal email. Particularly for the assistants and gatekeepers who hand deliver the fax to a decision maker for you.

* 100's of 1000's of businesses still rely on fax capability every day. In many segments that's the normal communication channel for vendors

* Faxes are Hard Copy. They tend to stay around on the decision-makers desk for a long time.

* Sending your Prospect a Fax followup is cheap. And having your own business Fax number(business cards, letterhead) makes you a REAL business in the eyes of the recipient, even when you operate from home.

* If you use a CRM such as Sage Act, then simple addins make sending a personalized merged fax as easy as one click and it's done. You can also get online hosted fax numbers for sending and receiving for a few dollars a month.

When I am segmenting target lists for telemarketing campaigns, its amazing how many fax numbers are in the data. They are there ready to use the powerful communication channel after first contact

You can send faxes to any business you have a prior relationship established... but please don't go fax blasting to cold prospects and end up in hot water


Often forgotten in the churn and burn mentality of IM. Everything is finite, and the pool of extremely qualified prospects is way smaller than we assume. You are your own worst enemy if you burn through a good targeted list hoping to get lucky.

Hi Mike, glad to see this. Congratulations. I'm one of those that feels like following up on truly interested leads is worthwhile enough to keep at it. To put into perspective, you did a genuine proposal here after speaking with her and analyzing the needs. She also called you. And you had something in the pipeline, so this sound like much more than my definition of a prospect. I would certainly have kept following up... small investment.

And yet, either she respected your effort and professionalism, or she was just tire-kicking. Problem is... All too often, they don't telegraph their reasons for 'putting you off' and not coming to a decision. Can be many things. Turns out in your case, she just hadn't finished the shopping trip

However, if you can polish up your sales skills... I recommend you try to be proactive with the stallers in your sales process. Take them right to the mat with direct conversations or with voicemail messages. After the work you did, there's nothing wrong with being insistent about a meeting. And there can be hidden objections behind the putting off behavior... money issues you can solve with payment splits for instance. Again, leaving those voicemails that were not returned cost you little time, so in the end it paid off to hang in there.

A lot of this comes down to it being a website... I stopped doing them as a service long ago, but I remember all too well how personal the issues were. For us its just a website, for them it can be huge... for small owners the website is often more about personal vanity than business, so they sweat all the details, including the first choice of who is going to do it.

You're right, I just assumed(wrongly) that everyone would be using Sage Act, SalesForce, or other CRM, to keep deals on auto-pilot followup.

So, I stay with followups since a tickler reminder tells me its time to push a button and send the email. And it can be fully automated too in an AR series, but CRM's make it painless to crank out followup emails and phone calls with an autopilot reminder system

While this an individual decision... when to quit on followups... for me, I have to be careful with the feeling I should drop a followup, since perhaps its tied to my own silly ego. That sneaks up from time to time... "what's wrong with these people, don't they realize what a good deal this is and how brilliant I am?" Silly, yes, but all too human I suppose... and forgetting that stuff happens in your prospect's life to get in the way of a decision.