3 Reasons Your Salespeople Aren’t Following Up

If you’ve ever looked at your revenue and wondered how much slipped through the cracks after that first call, this episode is for you.

In this Maven Monday conversation, Brandon tackles one of the most expensive blind spots in small business: inconsistent follow-up. Because most salespeople don’t struggle with skill, they struggle with identity, confidence, and clarity.

Why does follow-up feel awkward?
Why do good people hesitate to reach back out?
And why do so many businesses leave serious money on the table after doing all the hard work to generate the lead?

This episode challenges the way you think about sales, leadership, and responsibility. It’s not about being pushy. It’s not about scripts. It’s about building a culture where following up isn’t uncomfortable; it’s natural.

If you lead a sales team, manage revenue, or simply want to stop wasting opportunities you’ve already paid for, this one will make you rethink what’s really happening after the first touchpoint.

#Sales #FollowUp #SalesLeadership #SmallBusiness #BusinessGrowth #LeadGeneration #SalesTraining #RevenueGrowth

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Host: Brandon Welch
Executive Producer: Carter Breaux
Audio/Video Producer: Nate the Camera Guy

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Transcript

The Cost Of Not Following Up

Brandon Welch 0:00

When we take off the identity as pushy, slimy, things we don't want to be, and we put on the identity of I am saving somebody from a bad decision, it changes everything. Welcome to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Today is Maven Monday. I'm your host, Brandon Welch, live from the headquarters of Franken Maven. And I want to ask you, how much did you lose in sales volume last year because your salespeople simply were not following up? The statistics are alarming. Uh, if you are a$1 million business, the studies suggest that you lost two to$300,000 last year just because you didn't follow up enough. These are leads you already generated, you paid good money for. And because there wasn't that follow-through uh that is required for today's modern sales equation, you simply lost the customer to another option. If you're a$5 million company, the studies suggest that's over a million dollars per year and lost opportunity. And if you're a$10 million company, that's two to three million dollars per year. Why are we doing this? We're going to talk about that today. There are three reasons I believe that the modern salesperson and the modern sales organization, and possibly even you listening as a business owner or a visionary or leader, there are three main reasons we are not following up. This is the place, the Maven Marketing Podcast, if you've arrived here, where we help you eliminate waste in advertising so you can grow that beautiful small business of yours. We serve businesses that are doing less than$100 million a year, helping them figure out this stuff. How do we get more out of our marketing? How do we eliminate the things that are holding us back? And ultimately that leads us how do we achieve that big dream through this small business that we all uh love and we've given our life's work to? That's why we're here. We have a team uh of people on the other side of this wall that are just unreasonably excited about helping you get more out of your small business. And so this topic is something that uh is very, very, very relevant. Um, we spend millions and millions and millions of dollars every year helping little companies generate these sales opportunities, helping them become famous in their market, helping them uh be very easy to found at that finish line, and then helping people take the next step. And very often, uh, while we never point fingers uh and and you know duck any responsibility, very often the biggest thing that um limits our campaigns from the maximum profitability is when it's handed off to that salesperson. So let's uh let's jump right into it. Uh, if you've done any studying on the modern sales equation, 44% of salespeople give up after one phone call. Yet 80% of sales require five follow-ups. 44% of salespeople, almost half of all salespeople give up after that first contact. Um, 80% of sales in general require at least five follow-ups. So you see the chasm, you see the void already. Um, and only 2% of sales happen on that first interaction. That first, you know, time they call, they're ready to do the deal. So um, in between, here are the three reasons why we uh as sales organizations uh are having such a hard time with this. One is mistaken identity. Number two is a poor mindset. Uh, and number three is the lack of a clear scoreboard, a lack of a process for us to follow. And so I'm gonna just go through these things. Every time I've been able to share this uh this technology, if you will, this this study, this is something deeply rooted in not just um uh sales methodology, but this is human psychology, this is neuroscience, uh, this is really the very essence of marketing. We're doing this at a large scale with our big uh marketing plans, um, but it gets brought down to the human level and we kind of lose it. So let's talk about number one, mistaken identity. Uh, in every sales presentation I've ever offered this, and I ask the people around the room, and this has been thousands at this point, uh, what do you think of when I say the word salesman? And we can all guess what comes up: slimy, pushy, uh abrasive, um, annoying, right? And so right there we have identified the problem. If we are asking our people to be better salespeople, uh, we are suggesting to them culturally, uh, just by what is known to be true about salesmanship or what we think good salesmanship is, is that they are in uh at direct odds with this person they don't want to be. They have said, Ah, I'm a salesperson, but I really don't want people to know that. Uh how many mothers wish that their sons and daughters will grow up to be salespeople? It's not an aspirational identity. However, it is a mistaken identity. We have, over time, we have allowed the sales role to become this um caricature of this slimy, no good person that none of us like or want to be. And so when we are asked to put ourselves in that identity, it's incongruent, and it's no wonder uh if you just look at basic human psychology that that is that is a grind for us, and so there's immediate resistance. I'm gonna suggest that we should never um put that identity on ourselves in the first place. And we all know the you know, sort of the cliche um statement or some of the cliche trainings by now of, you know, um consultative salesmanship. Well, that's a better identity. Um, we don't, we're not, we're not salespeople, we're consultants. That that helps us feel good, and and that would be a really good thing to implement as like a baseline, uh, maybe in some of your sales training language. But I'm gonna suggest that there's a an even deeper and more productive identity that we could take on, and that is the person who is saving them. We are not salespeople. We are, it's gonna sound weird, but we are saviors, and let's talk about what that means. Um, if you are working or if you are leading a sales team, hopefully you believe your product is the best solution. Hopefully you believe your value is unmatched in the marketplace. Hopefully you believe that the way you do it is better than they could get it somewhere else for at least a certain type of customer. Hopefully you believe that your process is superior. Hopefully you believe at all costs that your heart and your intention is at the highest and best for the people you serve. If not, you don't have a sales problem, you have a company identity problem, you have a heart problem, you have a vision problem. That would be another episode for another day, but let's just assume because you're listening to the Maven Marketing podcast, that you believe all of those things. You have the best product, you know you can do it better, you know you will be more um personable, more caring, uh, and more excellent throughout the process of delivering that product. If that is the case, and if you believe that, and if you have helped your people believe that, your job is not to sell them something. Your job is to save them from an inferior decision. I want you to go around the room and ask your salespeople about a story that they could think of of where somebody chose a product that wasn't theirs and what might have happened to them. Or what are the horror stories that exist in your industry? If it's home improvement, you don't have to look very far. There are a lot of uh chucks and trucks um promising things that they were not able to deliver on. There are a lot of um really good stereotypical slimy salespeople promising things that they were never going to be able to deliver on. And I want you to put that as your big bad wolf. And your sales agenda no longer becomes about what was your closing rate this week? How many um how many points of contact did you make? That is important, but it no longer becomes foundationally about that. It becomes about how many people did we save from a bad decision? Because if you believe that, if you're wearing that and you're going, man, these poor people, these, these, these little old ladies, these um these misinformed, misguided, over-manipulated uh customers that would have been ours, they got led to a bad decision. And that is very, very easy gas to turn the errand of sales uh follow-up and relational excellence into the same gas that if we were running into a burning building trying to save somebody, we would not think about ourselves. We would not stop to worry about um anything except for getting these people out. Now that's a little dramatic, but it's the same psychological makeup, it's the same foundation. When we take off the identity as pushy, uh slimy, things we don't want to be, and we put on the identity of I am saving somebody from a bad decision, it changes everything. So I would ask, um, when you operate in savior mode, or what op what mode are you operating in right now? Are you protecting your ego? Are you protecting yourself from no? Are you protecting yourself from looking bad? That is not the mindset of a savior. Saviors look at their entire goal is to help the other person win, thrive, survive, and get what they want. So that's what you need to do. Let's adopt that uh I'm saving you mentality. Number two probably should have been number one, um, but it's a really good setup that we are uh in the wrong identity because uh poor identity leads to poor mindset. Um I have come to believe that we are at any given time in one of two mindsets. We are in a powerful mindset or we are in a primal mindset. Um this happens to me and you, and it will happen multiple times every day. Uh the key is to recognize when we're in these mindsets uh so that we can back up and say, is that mindset serving me and is that what I really want? Okay, before we get too woo-woo, let's define a primal mindset. Primal mindsets are driven by fear, anxiety, doubt, overwhelm. If you are feeling any of those things, you can bet you have been uh delivered to a primal mindset. Um primal mindset uh is the part uh physiologically where um blood flow gets cut off to this imaginative part of our brain, the right part of the brain. We go to logical deductive reasoning. Um our hippocampus uh gets gets uh overridden, and we get we get in this mindset of just seeing um the grim details of what's in front of us. Uh it sounds like to a salesperson, they don't want to hear from me. I'm bothering them. If they wanted it, they'd respond. I'm gonna look like a big fat jerk if I call that person one more time. The powerful mindset, by contrast, is driven by service, joy, creativity, contribution, confidence. This is where we experience um love and human connections and future possibilities that um may not be granular factually in front of us, it may not be objective, but when we are tapped into the powerful mindset, we believe they could be there. We we believe what's what's possible. This is the rocket fuel of effective people. Powerful mindset is the rocket fuel. If you can tap into it, it is inside every human, it's inside every heart, whether you're a salesperson or a customer or a uh administrative professional, it is inside of you. And the key is to get to that powerful mindset as often as we can. Here's what happens. We are driven. Uh the the psychological wiring of who we are and how we operate are driven uh foundationally by one thing, and that is what we believe to be true. There are five steps to sort of unwiring this uh primal mindset if we get into it. Here's the thing what we believe to be true directly influences our thoughts. So it's belief number one, two thoughts, which directly influence our feelings, number three, which directly uh influence our actions that we do or don't take, which of course directly uh produce the results that we do or don't get. What I believe determines my thoughts, determines my feelings, determines the actions that I take, which gives me the results that I get. And if we start our uh by the way, this is true in every every facet of life. You could apply this to relationships, you could apply this to your thinking about money and prosperity, you could apply this to politics, you could apply this uh foundationally, it's it's our spiritual code that allows us uh to end up in in health or non-health in basically every area of life. But let's bring it back down to sales. Um, if the salesperson believes this is awkward, if that is the belief, because they have been given a lifetime of examples, or possibly, uh, we don't want to admit this as leaders, but possibly with our poor training, we have caused them to see that the errand of sales is not about servanthood or or saviorhood. It is about uh push, push, push, push, push. And unless that person is psychologically wired to think that pushing is good and that they don't have empathy or care for the other person, which is a very, very, very small subset of the population, by the way, the average person, even the superstar performers in sales, actually have deep-rooted empathy and a deep-rooted self-awareness about how they're being perceived. But if we allow that perception to be this is awkward, they don't want to hear from me. Uh, I'm going to, if I do this, I'm going to be bothering them. Or a foundational belief is if they wanted to hear from me, they would call. And you can see that when that is the foundational belief, instead of I'm saving them or I'm surfing them or I'm I'm I'm keeping them from a bad decision, it sets off a change reaction of thoughts. Well, this is gonna feel bad. Well, um, I'm going to probably look like an idiot, or they're probably going to uh, you know, be a little bit annoyed when I call. And it and then it gives us poor feelings. That does not feel good. That's incongruent with who we actually want to be. And internally we have this um deep desire for alignment. And when we are doing things that are not in a line with who we know we want to be, that makes us feel bad. And then that makes us act bad. My voice is gonna be shaky if I do that, if I start with that belief. Um, they're going the the actions are gonna be get off that call as soon as they possibly can. The actions are going to be um let it ring three times instead of five to leave the voicemail. The actions are going to be saying things like, oh, I know I'm I'm probably bothering you, or you're gonna say things that just don't lead to confidence. And so you can you can um imagine what happens then is that we get the result of awkwardness and and poor traction. Uh, and possibly we've even created neuromiring, um, neuron mirroring where the person sees the fear and the and the um the anxiety in us, and they meet us there and they give us back the very same thing. Um, and then of course that result proves to the salesperson, see, it was bad all along, and it re-enforces that poor belief. That poor, poor belief. And so this is all mindset stuff that it's not woo-woo. It's not like we can just believe it's true and so it becomes true, but there is an objective reality. There's an objective psychological mirroring that happens when we show up this way and we when we believe that this is what we're gonna get, that's kind of what the rest of the cybernetic loop of thoughts, feelings, actions, results give us back. And so what if uh we instead adopted, I am saving them. I'm not bothering them, I'm saving them, I'm not selling them, I'm saving them. And we would go in that order, that belief would cause us to think, yeah, they really do need to hear from me. I have a duty. I have a I have an honorable thing I need to call uh and talk to them about. Uh that would cause us to feel not scared or uh you know unconfident about it. That would cause us to feel um ownership, that would cause us to feel um duty and courage. Um when we're acting off duty and ownership and responsibility and courage, we show up to calm. We show up ready to do what needs to be done. We say things that indicate and we we we tune our voice uh to a level that indicates we are there to serve them. And there is there's a ridiculous amount of human communication that comes in the nonverbal form, and just by starting with that mindset deep breath going into this, I've gotta save them. This is something I have to do. It is not I'm go I'm gonna try, it's not maybe it'll happen, it's not I'm gonna see how lucky I can get. It's I have to do this. And when you have the mindset of I have to do this, wonderful things happen. Ted Lasso, uh, if you're familiar in that famous of all Ted Lasso scenes, uh the barbecue sauce scene where he throws the dart and he wins, uh, wins over the hearts of everybody he is um who was previously against him, um says finally, uh at the end of the climax of that scene, he says, um, be curious, not judgmental. And he's referring to a Walt Whitman quote. And if you haven't seen the scene, just look up Be Curious Less Judgmental, Ted Lasso. That would be a fantastic thing to start your next sales meeting with. And what we learn in that quote, in a in an extremely efficient economy of words, is that when we are curious about the other person, it there there is no room for us to be judgmental of ourselves. And so I would ask Um being too judgmental of yourself and not curious enough about your customer? When you are curious about your customer, it immediately takes this poor mindset off of us and it makes it about them. And that, of course, we all know this. That is the essence of every good marketing message and every good sales message that ever existed. Curiosity sounds like what's actually holding them back? What fears do they have about making this decision? What decision are they trying to justify? Um, who is judging them by the decision that they make? Like when you lead your sales activity with that sort of curiosity, and you think, I wonder what is going on, how can I help? How can I understand him or her better so that I can lead them to the result I know is saving them from a bad decision because I believe in my company? Everything changes. Let's be less judgmental of ourselves, let's be less judgmental of how we're gonna look, how we're gonna sound, how we're going to um be this person that we don't want to be, and let's go, you know what? None of that matters. I'm just curious about where they are and how I can help them. And doesn't that change everything? Okay, the last thing. Uh, this is really more about you as the sales leader. Um a ridiculous amount of people I run into are doing millions and millions and millions of dollars worth of revenue, and they are frustrated that they're not getting even more. And then I ask, well, what's your process? And show me your follow-up. And we get those onesie twosies that we talked about at the very beginning of today's uh episode. We get no follow-up. And you know, you could get mad at your salespeople for that. You could say, gosh dang it, follow up more. But what if we defined instead, hey, this is this is the Frank and Maven way, or this is the solid roofing way, or this is the this is the way we follow up with our people. And it's just it's really simple. Um we in all of our observation of tens of thousands of leads every month that we generate, um, we believe that 10 to 15 uh is is the baseline of enough. So if you haven't done 10 to 15 follow-up points, you're just asking for a for a reduction in profitability of your marketing. Um, I'm gonna give you some steps. You could define these that make a little bit better sense to you. Um, but every time the customer sees you and thinks about you in that two or three week window is another point of contact. So, day one, what if we just sent a thank you email? It was so great to meet you. Um, I love your dog spot. Uh, hey, here's a uh summary of what we talked about, and here's what you can expect next. An email. Okay, that's non that you you could you could um template out that email. If you have some salespeople that aren't the most gifted with words, well, you could template it out. You could hire somebody to write that really well, and they could nuance that, and you could probably even turn it into a chat bot, but let's be very careful. Let's not make it too squeaky clean and make it obvious that it was a chat bot. Um different episode for a different day, but but we're sending an authentic email that's really just gratitude. Day two is a phone call. Um there's there's some more depth we could put into this. Um, you're always you always should be calling with good news. Uh, there's an episode we did on on um on like 11 tactics you need to know to be a better salesperson, but you should always be calling with good news. Hey, good news. I figured out um, you know, I talked about a four-week uh turnaround window, I actually found out we have some openings, we could get that done at about two and a half. Or hey, good news. Um uh there's a new promotion that came out, or hey, good news. Uh, I could get that financing offer down to like$89 a month for you. Whatever it is, call with good news. Um, you're never calling to just following up. You need to call with good news or you need to call with gratitude, or something that you planted in that first sales uh process is a reason you'd be following up. Maybe you said, hey, in your email, your first point, I'm gonna follow up tomorrow on some of those questions that we answered. It's really, really good when you can leave a couple of ins open in your sales presentation. Day four is a text message. Um, hey, I'm putting in my orders for the week. Just wanted to see if you wanted to get this done. Um day seven might be a value email, case study. Uh, you might send this organizationally. You might send uh testimonials, uh, you might send a video of the process, you might send some tips for how they deal with their insurance company or how they talk to family members or uh the seven. Mistakes everybody makes for this XYZ service. Uh no, the the the next point of contact could be following back up with a phone call. We're going in a round robin. The point is you have email, text, um, phone call, then you might send a personalized video, then you might text back again, then you might send an email reminder. And all along, you're not being pushy, you're going, I wonder if Mrs. Jones understands how um how crucial this decision is. And the internal language is something you should workshop together, but lead it with not how do we follow up and add more points of contact, lead with how do we prove who we are and be in line with our new identity as people who are saving them from a burning building, not as people who are pushing them. And you will find reasons to be valuable. Case studies, statistics, um, tips. Um, hey, just fun stuff. Hey, I saw this thought of you. Send them a Ted Lasso quote. Uh, send them a funny cat video, send send them something that you picked up on on that first conversation that would just mirror them and build that relationship. No different than you would a good friend, right? You would send your friends and people you are building strong relationships with, you would talk to them about them, about what matters to them. And that's what we want to do. So, what have we done? We have ditched our identity and we have chosen consciously a new identity. Uh, we are no longer the slimy, pushy salespeople that everybody thinks of. We are now the savior servants and the people who just want to help them get the most out of their investment. Uh, we have uh acknowledged that when we have a poor mindset, bad things set off in a chain reaction to give us the things we don't want. And it starts with that foundational belief of who I am. If I believe that this is going to be hard, I will find proof that it's gonna be hard. If I believe that this is a worthy errand and I'm gonna do it because it's who I'm called to be, then I will go do and find things that are in line with courage and calling to be who I'm supposed to be for this human being that was put on my path. That is so powerful. Uh, we're gonna be less judgmental, we're gonna be more curious, um, less judgmental of ourselves, more curious about the person who's on the other side. And then we're gonna just have a systematic follow-up to continue proving that. Uh, if you did all of these things uh one time in on your sales presentation, I promise you're gonna see a noticeable improvement if you just trade this mindset out. But the the every follow-up is a statistical improvement uh that you are going to get what you want. And more importantly, as we've talked, help them get what they want. You're gonna lead them to the best decision. Um, so as a leader, as somebody who is who is um trying to help these men and women get the best and get the most out of their careers as sales professionals, help them believe in who they are, not who they don't want to be. Uh, help them acknowledge when they can choose to get out of that bad mindset and give them a system and a process, standardize it, celebrate it, talk about it in your weekly meetings, and maybe even put some KPIs to it. Have we have we hit those uh checkpoints, the minimum viable process for us earning a sales uh reward? Um fix identity, fix belief, install a system. That is what we have for you guys today. We'll be back here every single Monday answering real life marketing questions because marketers who can't teach you why are just a fancy lie. Have a great week.