Did you know that 16 % of small business owners view the Internet as a threat? And, only 3 % of small businesses even use the Internet to sell their products or services. But, the benefits of Lead Follow up should far outweigh any Internet usage concerns. If you are willing to embrace Lead Follow up, you can save yourself time, effort, and thousands of dollars in missed sells.

Lead Follow up is the ability to market your products or services to prospects after the initial encounter with a company. In other words, it includes emailing, websites, and every other marketing approach. Through computer/Internet capabilities, small business owners that embrace Lead Follow up will save themselves hours of time. With Lead Follow up, business owners can ensure that no lead goes unharvested. That means that Lead Follow up capabilities are taking care of the day-to-day tasks small business owners and their employees would normally be engaged in.

By extension, Lead Follow up saves business owners extra effort. Many small business owners want to practice follow-up marketing with their contacts, but don’t know how. Or, they don’t want to spend extra effort on marketing they are uncertain of. With Lead Follow up, neither of those situations will occur. The small business owner will be able to quickly and effectively keep in contact with their prospects and customers. But, best of all, Lead Follow up tools do all the work for the small business owner.

Finally, by using the follow-up tools in a Marketing Automation system, small business owners capture hundreds, even thousands of dollars they would have otherwise missed.Lead Follow up engages your contacts, improves your website, and keeps your name in front of your prospects. With Lead Follow up, you are enhancing your natural selling abilities and encouraging more people to do business with you.

Let Lead Follow up improve the way you run your small business and manage your growth. With Lead Follow up, you’ll start seeing the benefits right away. Save yourself time, effort, and missed dollars with Lead Follow up tools.

Lead Follow-up: Build the Relationship
If a small business owner is going to successfully market to the average person, they must perfect their lead follow-up and build relationships with their prospects. Lead follow-up helps the small business owner build a relationship by: keeping in front of the prospect, focusing on the individual, and offering the individual something of value.

Effective lead follow-up can significantly increase the number of prospects you guide to a sale. You see, with lead follow-up, you are constantly keeping your name in front of your lead. When leads are caught up in their own lives, it is difficult for them to think about other things- particularly your business. With lead follow-up, your lead doesn’t have to remember or think about who you are. Your lead follow-up does it for them.

When small business owners keep a prospect database like Infusionsoft, their lead follow-up becomes even more powerful. Think of how much easier it will be to sell to a prospect if you remember their name and other personal details. The key to lead follow-up is to take what you know about your prospect and cater your message to them. The lead follow-up should discuss the benefits of your products or services that will most appeal to your lead. By doing this, you are making your lead feel important, appreciated. And, when they are ready to buy, they will come to you because of these simple lead follow up techniques.

Finally, with lead follow-up you can give your prospects valuable information. Provide them with ideas, interesting stories, and other things that they will appreciate. When your lead follow-up causes your prospects to look forward to hearing from you, you become the welcome guest instead of the unwanted pest. Once this relationship is developed, selling to your customer becomes a much easier process. With lead follow-up, you can quickly and easily send valuable information to your leads.

With lead follow-up, you can build a relationship with those individuals that are not yet your customers. With effective lead follow-up, you stay in front of your prospects, focus on the individuals, offer valuable information to your lead, and overall build a relationship that will help you sell more easily.

About Infusionsoft Infusionsoft provides award-winning small business CRM software that automates business management, sales, marketing and customer service to liberate small business and allow them to grow faster, better and more profitably.

Find out how: Start building relationships automatically – Try out Infusionsoft – Free!

Let me ask you a question: how much money do you spend generating leads? What happens to all of those leads, particularly those that don’t purchase right now? Lead follow-up might well be on of the most effective ways of increasing your sales. That being the case, why don’t more companies take lead follow-up seriously?

What is the primary purpose of lead follow-up? It is to keep track of those customers who weren’t ready to buy today, but who will buy in the future. In other words, lead follow-up prevents companies from having to continually track down leads to make another sale.

So, now we get into the math. How much do you spend every month to generate leads? You might get leads online, purchase them from a lead generating company, or send mailers and other direct response pieces. Now, imagine that you never do any lead follow-up. What is the return on your lead generating investment. In other words, of all the leads you received, how many bought from you right away? Divide that by the amount of money you spent generating leads.

Now, let’s see what happens when you incorporate follow-up marketing. Imagine that by using lead follow-up, an additional 50% of your leads turn out to be buyers. Think about how much money you spent to generate the leads. Then take the number who bought and increase that by 50%. What is your new return on your lead generating investment?

Alright, so maybe that math wasn’t super simple. Nevertheless, lead follow-up is. Lead follow-up is the key to making the most of your marketing dollars. With lead follow-up, you have an entire selection of buyers (in different stages). By not taking the time to do any lead follow-up, you are tossing all those buyers out the window, and allowing someone else to pick them up.

Lead follow-up is the fastest, most cost efficient way to get more buyers. Using lead follow-up will dramatically improve your sales. Lead follow-up is the key to making more money and creating more customers.

About Infusionsoft.  Infusionsoft provides award-winning small business CRM software that automates business management, sales, marketing and customer service to liberate small business and allow them to grow faster, better and more profitably.

Find out how: Start capitalizing on your hard earned leads – Try out Infusionsoft – Free!

Until recently there has been no solution to help manage the complex tasks involved with multi-step, multi-media follow up campaigns.

People have been forced to come up with “creative” ways to get the follow up done… and I’ve seen some amazing creativity.

And now, just for you here are…

5 Mistakes Small Business Owners Make when considering Follow Up

1. “I’ll Just Try To Do The Follow Up When I Have Extra Time”

This is the most common really bad idea of small business owners in America today. After all, is it really worth your time to sit down and start stuffing envelopes? I see a few problems with that:

• First problem: “Extra Time”… yeah right! When did any entrepreneur you know have any “extra time”?

• Second problem: What is your time worth? If you’d wanted to be stuffing envelopes and licking stamps, that’s the job you’d have gone for, right?

• Third problem: Complication. It’s too hard to keep track of all of this stuff on your own.

• Fourth problem: It’s not scalable. If you get a big response one day, you may not be able to keep up. Your tongue will fall off.

2. “I’ll Create A Card/Folder Tracking System”

Oh yes… there have been some pretty creative tracking systems built using multi-color file-folders, index cards, and multiple sheets of pre-printed labels. I’d love to see you try managing a 37-step multi-media, multi-step, multi-branch campaign to a list of  137,343 and not end up in the crazy house.

Come on… can you imagine what 137,343 index cards even looks like? Where the heck are you going to keep them all? Under the stairs?

3. “I’ll Hire Staff To Manage The Follow Up”

Once people burn out of doing the follow up themselves, they usually hire more staff to help get it all done.

And the really funny thing about staff is how quickly business owners hire someone to “fill a hole” and pay them $30,000 or $40,000 a year but then shudder and moan and gnash their teeth at the thought of investing 1/5th that amount in the tools to make their marketing successful! It’s insane!

Now, there’s no problem with hiring more employees if that is what you want to do. But when you hire people you have a couple of things to deal with.

• First problem: Payroll

• Second problem: They aren’t perfect. They get tired and cranky. And they don’t suffer quite the same way you do if they get it wrong. They’ll phone you at 7:00am and say “I’m not feeling too well, pity about those 10,000 stamps you’re going to have to lick yourself now, isn’t it?”

• Third problem: Burnout and cost of training new employees

4. “I’ll Just Outsource It”

I’ve seen people create relationships with vendors who will manage their marketing for them. I have seen this work fairly well for small runs of really Really REALLY simple print-only follow up.

But there are problems with this, as attractive as it sounds:

• First Problem: I haven’t seen anyone who can handle an effective follow up that includes mail, email, phone, fax, etc.

• Second Problem: List maintenance becomes a problem because they don’t know when people are buying and can easily send follow up pieces to those who have already purchased or who have opted out.

• Third problem: I bet you can’t show me one single outsourcing firm who cares as much about getting your mailing right as you do.

5. “I’ll Pay To Have Follow-Up Software Built”

I’ve known entrepreneurs that hire software developers to create a program to manage all  this follow up and keep it all straight.

Some people make the mistake of hiring a college student, or some guy who’s “taking a break”, or a programmer who just doesn’t “get it”… and they end up with something resembling half a car battery and a microwave held together by a few rubber bands.

Listen, you need a solution like this… like a fish needs a bicycle.

And even if you find competent programmers who “get” this direct marketing thing… you still run into problems.

• First Problem: Cost. They can easily drop $20,000 to $100,000 trying to develop a comprehensive software package. Heck, they can easily drop $20,000 to $100,000 just coming up with a “feasibility study” (in which they’ll tell you it can’t be done without another feasibility study).

• Second Problem: The project drags on forever. If you’ve even been involved in software development, you know what I’m talking about. It’s called “feature creep”. A good way to calculate how much a software project is going to cost is to ask the programmer for his “absolute maximum” and then multiply by 4.791.

• Third Problem: Technology becomes obsolete so quickly that you should plan on rebuilding within a couple of years to keep up. That’s going to be another $20,000 to $100,000 for the feasibility study. You did know that, right?

6. “I’ll Buy ‘Off-The-Shelf’ Software To Manage This”

Now we’re getting warmer… It does seem like with all of the technological advancements we have made that we should be able to go into a store and pick up a software tool that will help us follow up.  Makes sense, right?

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you should expect to be disappointed for a few reasons:

• First Problem: Most entrepreneurs really don’t “get it” when it comes to direct response marketing and follow-up, so what kind of a chance do you expect software geeks to have?  If they don’t “get it” then how are they going to build you a tool that will work for you?

• Second Problem: You lose TONS of efficiency and effectiveness because you’ll have to build a patchwork of computer programs to do all of the things you need to with your follow up. You’ll need a “Contact Manager” like ACT or Goldmine, plus a “Shopping Cart” program, plus an “Email Autoresponder” program, plus an “Order Processing” system, plus a “Lead Management” tool for your sales reps and you’ll still probably need Microsoft Excel or some other spreadsheet program to manage the data you couldn’t find any other place for!

I get a headache just thinking about it!

Then you’ll still have to find vendors to send voice broadcasts, fax broadcasts, direct mail, etc.  As you can see, this really starts to be a big mess!

• Third Problem: Orchestrating your follow up becomes almost impossible because you have your prospect and customer information in a gazillion different systems. How would you send out carefully timed sequences where the email, voice broadcast and direct mail are all synchronized?

The End

(but, hey, you can always try again!)

About Infusionsoft

provides award-winning marketing software that centralizes, organizes and automates lead generation, lead conversion and client fulfillment. Unlike any other software available on the market today, Infusionsoft is an “automated follow-up marketing” solution built specifically for marketers, entrepreneurs and successful small businesses.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!