Following up without pestering
Most sales are lost to silence, not to a decision. Four messages over a month, then stop, and the fourth is the one that gets answered.
Most sales are lost to silence rather than to a decision, and most follow-up is abandoned after one attempt because the second message feels like pestering. Both of those are solvable with a system that requires no judgement in the moment.
Why silence is usually not rejection
The person who has gone quiet is, in most cases, having a week with more urgent things in it. Your proposal is the most important document in your week and somewhere around eleventh in theirs. Reading silence as a no is a common and expensive error, as is reading it as interest.
The practical consequence: follow up on a schedule, without emotion, and stop when the schedule says so rather than when you feel awkward.
A sequence that is not annoying
- Agree the next step in the conversation, with a date. Half of all follow-up problems are created by not doing this.
- On that date, follow up. Short, specific, referencing the thing you said you would do.
- A week later, once, with something useful attached rather than a reminder. An answer to a question they raised, something relevant that changed.
- Two weeks after that, the closing message: I am going to assume the timing is not right. Shall I come back in a few months, or close this off.
- Then stop, and diary it for whenever they said.
Four contacts over about a month, then stop. That is not pestering by any reasonable standard, and it is more persistence than most people manage.
What to put in a follow-up
Not just following up, which asks the recipient to do all the work. Each message should carry something, and the something does not have to be large.
- The answer to a question they asked, which you said you would find out.
- Something that changed and affects them: a rule, a deadline, a price, an availability.
- A shorter version of the proposal, if the original was long.
- A specific question that is easy to answer in one line.
And keep it short. A long follow-up is harder to reply to than a short one, which is the opposite of the intention.
The long game
A no on timing is not a no. Diary it properly, with a note of what they said, and come back when they said to come back, referencing it. Being the supplier who actually returned in April, as agreed, is unusual enough to be remarkable.
A meaningful share of work for a small business comes from conversations that started a year or more earlier. The only requirement is a list and the discipline to look at it, which is what the next article is about.
Which channel, and when to change it
Follow-up fails as often from using the wrong medium as from giving up. Email is the default because it is comfortable, and it is also the easiest thing in the world to leave unanswered.
- Email for anything with a document attached, and for the first follow-up. It respects their time and leaves a record.
- A phone call when two emails have gone unanswered and the opportunity is substantial. It feels intrusive and frequently resolves in two minutes what a month of messages would not.
- Whatever channel they used to contact you. Somebody who messages you is telling you how they prefer to be reached.
- Not a new channel for the same message. Emailing, then messaging, then calling about one thing reads as pursuit rather than persistence.
A practical rule: change channel once, not repeatedly, and only after the same channel has failed twice. The change itself carries information, which is why it should happen deliberately rather than out of frustration.
Work to do
- Decide in advance at which point you will change channel, so it is not a decision made while annoyed.
- Write your four-message sequence down, with the intervals, so it requires no decision when the moment arrives.
- Send the permission-to-close message to everybody in your pipeline who has been silent for over a month.
- Diary every timing no with the date they gave you, and a note of their words.