Recently I read a blog article about the Art of the Follow-up.  I liked the general premise put forward by the author, namely that there are skills we can all learn that will improve the effectiveness of our sales follow-up efforts. 

Unfortunately, the author put the cart before the horse. While there are skills to be learned that, if regularly practiced, will improve the quality of your follow-up, there is one big caveat that trips up many, if not most, salespeople. That catch is that before you can practice the art of the follow-up you actually have to pick up the phone and call the prospect. 

My own experiences with client companies over the past 13 years have found that a majority of salespeople still view in-bound sales leads with hesitant suspicion instead of welcoming them as a source substantially pre-educated sales interest that they typically are in this Internet age. I have read studies and heard statistics about sales follow-up that are uniformly depressing, with estimates of the percentages of sales leads that are never followed-up ranging from 80% on the high-end to 30% on the low-end. (Personally, I believe that any percentage greater than 0% represents a significant failure of sales management.)  No matter which end of the statistical spectrum you subscribe to, the bottom line is that follow-up suffers more from inattention than ineffectiveness.

In addition, seminal studies on follow-up, such as the Insidesales.com/MIT Lead Response Management Survey, unequivocally demonstrated that it is not enough to simply follow-up. Effectiveness of follow-up is directly tied to how quickly follow-up occurs. The conclusion of the MIT study is stunningly self-evident but its lessons continue to be blithely ignored by the vast majority of sales people. The study demonstrated that the longer you take to follow-up the less likely you are to actually contact the prospect. In short, any interest a prospect has in talking to you quickly diminishes once they hit the Enter button on their computer or leave you a voicemail to register their interest in your product.

Therefore, the central issue in effective follow-up is really that of attitude. A sales person simply has to commit to take action. Quickly. Put aside thoughts of technique until you take an action that would benefit from it. 

In follow-up attitude precedes art, just like form follows function.

 I was recently searching for pricing information on a specific SaaS application that I wanted to use for my business. There were only two purchase options: Professional (Individual) and Enterprise. Frustratingly, the selling company's website contained no pricing information and no way to purchase the product online. I filled in a web form asking for pricing information. It took two weeks just to receive just an email response from the company's Director of Sales stating that if I wanted price information I had to set up a phone call with her to go over my requirements. Two weeks. In the meantime, I had identified and purchased an alternative solution.

The art of follow-up is less important than the act of follow-up. Get in the game first. And then work on your craft.

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