Consistent messages inspire customer confidence

In one of our newsletters recently we used the quote “Consistency breeds familiarity, familiarity breeds confidence, and confidence breeds sales” from Jay Conrad Levinson. He was the author of the 1984 book ‘Guerrilla Marketing’. While many of the marketing strategies that he suggested proved short-lived, his key point about consistency being the best way to secure long term customers is more valid than ever.

There has been lots of research into how businesses buy. The main takeaway from it is that it needs an average of seven contacts before a client is ready to make a buying decision. When they surveyed clients from a range of business sizes and types the CRM provider HubSpot discovered that 44% of sales people gave up after a single follow up. Pressure of sales targets, and servicing existing clients was blamed for this. But whatever the reason there is a mismatch between what the average internal sales team can achieve and the potential customer’s mindset.

Connecting with the client is the most important thing you can do to build a relationship. Emails only take the process so far. Picking up the phone and letting them hear your company’s name and the fact that you are there to support them when the time is right to talk is the single most effective way of following up a sales conversation.

In a restaurant the waiter will often follow up delivering food to your table, asking if everything is OK. Often, we just smile and say, “yes thanks”, but occasionally we do need something else or have a problem that is stopping our enjoyment of the meal. The same applies in a sales conversation. You provide the answer to a question and then follow up appropriately to confirm that all was well with the resolution to the query. The biggest concern of a salesperson can often be that they are being annoying or intrusive with follow ups. The reason for employing a professional lead nurturing service is to make the difference between being supportive and the waiter who constantly asks if everything is fine.

New business is vital to your business growth. Generating and nurturing leads that build a pipeline of sales potential for the future can be something that does not fit easily into the working pattern of your existing team who are focusing their energy on servicing and retaining existing customers.

YBDT can help you create and implement a clear business development strategy to generate and nurture leads up to the point that your sales team can take them on to orders. We can’t put it any better than one of our long-term clients. David Champ of TC Consult. “Using YBDT gives you an opportunity to focus on your sales process. Ultimately, it’s a much quicker more efficient process than trying to organically grow a sales team. If you are familiar with your core business but not with sales, why would you try and create a spec for a business development manager when you could use experts to help you and see results a lot quicker?”

Get in touch to learn more about how we can help.