Optimizing Your Franchise Lead Follow-Up Process
As important as it is to focus on the lead "generation" part of the sales funnel, it's equally, if not more, important to make sure that your franchise's follow-up process is optimized.
I'm sure we could get together and share stories about how many leads have gone stale in our respective careers.
The fact of the matter is that most franchises out there have a long way to go to prepare their follow-up process to handle leads well.
Velocify, one of our favorite sales automation tools put there, put together an absolutely phenomenal report on the ideal lead follow-up funnel and we wanted to share some of their findings with you.
(To give you an idea of how big of study this was, they looked at almost 3.5 million leads to come to these conclusions.)
Finding #1: Speed of Call Response is Vital!
391% improvement! Now that's nearly unbelievable. That number then cuts in more than half if you delay one extra minute!
no matter what your follow-up plan is, it should probably involve calling the lead as fast as possible, even if that means 11PM!
Finding #2: Calling Six Times Will Lead To Success
Ah, the old adage "If at first you don't succeed, try try again" comes to mind. you gotta keep hammering those leads. There's clearly a limit to the number of you calls you can make, but Velocify's study found that it's effective up to 6 times.
Finding #3: Email is Just as Important As Calls
Some of the statistics they share:
- Leads who get emails have a 16% higher chance to get contacted via phone
- 59% of prospects didn't receive a single email
- While some of those 59% didn't have an email address, 40% of people who had an address will still never sent an email!
- Leads conversion improves up to 5 emails sent, after which the conversion rate drops 36%. (I guess too many emails can be annoying?)
Finding #4: The Best Contact Strategy is a Combo of Calls and Emails Over 22 Days
It's all about the first few weeks after a lead enters your system. As we showed earlier, it all starts with the first minute! But the process should continue for another 22 days. You could at least double your performance by altering your strategy to mirror something like this.
Don't worry! You can do it! We're here to help. Let us know if you want to have a conversation about your follow-up process and how it can be better!
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