Prospect Follow-up Part 2 – Move Them Forward or Move Them Out
When I look at the notes of salespeople who have lots of leads but not many closing, I often see things like, “not ready quite yet. Call back in three weeks to check again.”
Some prospects can string out the sales process indefinitely and those that have no intention of ever becoming a member are robbing you of valuable time that could be spent more productively elsewhere.
Therefore, don’t allow people who are unwilling to make a decision to lead you on. You can get an idea of specifically how much importance they place on becoming a member by asking, “John, we’ve spoken several times now, and I thought we were in agreement that you wanted to get into shape and our club could provide you with everything that you need. Tell me, how much of a priority is it for you to make this change in your life?”
If their answer is something like, “It’s very important” then you can become more invasive and seek out the real objection, which they’ve been hiding up to this point.
Or, perhaps you’ll determine that it’s just not worth it to spend more time with this prospect, which is also good since you’ll save time. If you’re ultimately going to get the “no” anyways, it’s better you get it today. Move them forward or move them out.
Or, best yet, they may surprise you with the positive answer you were hoping for.
Now, just because you have taken them out of your active follow-up process doesn’t mean that you will give up on them completely, it just means that you will move them over to your passive follow-up system.
If a person has shown interest in the past, they may show interest again in the future so we will make sure that they are on our email subscription list and part of our social media interactions. We also may give them a random call, text or email to check in on them or let them know about an upcoming event in the club.
As I mentioned in Part 1, most clubs don’t have a sales program, tracking system, or a follow-up system at all so implementing any of these even at a basic level will produce results. Once you have the systems in place then you can work on training and development to increase their effectiveness and drive those numbers up.
