Followup Fallacy & More - Agency Inner Circle #14

There is a line, dude...there is a line.

Author

Tim Kilroy
27 Aug • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

This Week in Agency Inner Circle

The Followup Fallacy

I was on a webinar today and someone pulled up the old chestnut “the average salesperson only follows up 1-2 times whereas prospects need 8-10 followups in order to become buyers.”

Let me call BS here.

It isn’t that followup isn’t important (it is), but followup does not turn non-buyers into buyers. It isn’t the number of followups that you do, but rather how effective the followups are. I remember a few years ago I saw a Grant Cardone video where he was celebrating because his team got a cease and desist letter from a car dealer who did not want to be cold called any more about sales training. If you are aggressive enough that a car dealer gets PO’d at you …wow! But the follow up that caused the cease and desist letter is just tone deaf…it isn’t respectful of the prospect, and relentless follow up means that you did a shite job of communicating the value of whatever you are selling.

Better than focusing on volume of the followup, try to think of ways that you can add value as you follow up. The idea that you can ever convince somebody to make a purchase that they don’t want to is a fallacy. Find ways to keep them aware of you. As Gary Vee says, we now “day trade” in attention. So if follow up isn’t working, or if you haven’t been able to build enough value during the sales process, what can you do to stay in the prospect’s field of vision? How can you build value without harassment? How can you continue to build trust and authority without it feeling like a medieval castle siege?

Get Your Foot In The Door

While you are working on your visibility and staying present for your target audience, there are ways to take those interested but not sold prospects and give them a teaser of what it’s like to work with you. I don’t mean free audits or working on performance, but rather what can you do to create a working relationship with a prospect to help them experience the benefit of your experience and insight.

I call this an upfront offer. It is a portion of your service that can be sliced off and offered discretely. It might be a go-forward marketing strategy, or a competitor marketing teardown, or landing page development or…whatever you can dream up.

The idea is that you create something where you can actually work WITH the prospect and engage with them and create the working relationship that reveals all of the added value that doesn’t get illuminated in a statement of work. You know, things like the quality of questions you ask, your attention to detail, the ways in which you listen and understand. All of these things create a mesh of trust and respect that can only happen inside of a working engagement.

What can get your foot in the door?

News & Notes

  1. Lead Gen Survey: Upcoming next week - the results of our Agency Lead Gen Survey! We have lead gen data from about 350 different agencies to let you know what channels are working the best…and which ones you shouldn’t sleep on…

  2. The Inc 5000 List: In the latest Inc 5000 list, 489 of the honorees are in the advertising industry (9.8%) and those businesses created more than 16K jobs. Despite economic circumstances, platform weirdness and geopolitical/election distractions, the industry seems to be generating tons of growth. When might we see YOU on the Inc 5000?

  3. Agency Kickoff: Just a quick plug for my Agency Kickoff program. We’ve just added some exciting new members that might help you grow your perspective, network & insight. Check it out - at $249/mo, I think it is the best value in the biz. (I may be somewhat biased, though.)

  4. Hubspot AI Grader: Hubspot just released an AI-search grader - it basically grades you on what shows up in Chat GPT 4.o. Check it out.

  5. Apollo (my favorite GTM software) has just launched a really good outbound sales book - get it free at Apollo Academy.

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