How often should you follow up with prospects in sales?

Here’s the approach that’s worked best for me over the years: Get the client’s buy-in on timeline and follow-up based on their desired outcomes and ability to move the deal through. Set and propose your plan for a reasonable timetable based on their needs and your sales cycle. Wait for your prospect’s response and act accordingly. It should never be a surprise that they’re hearing from you - you’ve both already agreed to a timeline. I’ve found a mutual activity plan - with dates and shared ownership over benchmarks - helps to keep everyone accountable and focused on their desired outcome. The biggest little thing most newer reps miss: Never end the current meeting without scheduling the next meeting.

The frequency of follow-ups with prospects in sales depends on various factors such as the prospect's responsiveness, the complexity of the sales cycle, and their specific needs. Generally, it's good practice to follow up consistently but not excessively. A common guideline is to follow up after an initial contact, then again after a reasonable period, such as one week or two, if you haven't received a response. Beyond that, adjust the frequency based on the prospect's engagement level and feedback, ensuring you stay on top of mind without being perceived as pushy.

This can be early and upfront and it's useful to use current Customers as an example of how this will flow. In Digital Banking, you have a spectrum of Prospects from well educated and informed to starting at square one and requiring a lot of education. In a replacement scenario, use current contract expiration as the go live date of your solution with the decision and conversion coming well before that.

There's an art to pursuing and persistence, yet not being an annoying pest. Understand your sales cycle. Look for key interest and engagement indicators from prospects. Evaluate your prospects' responsiveness to your communication (their willingness to schedule meetings, demos, and decision-making process involvement). Persistence and practicality balance. Nurturing relationships. Knowing when to pivot. Understand your industry market sales cycle and process.

Having a mix of both is ideal for any sales funnel. They will tell you more often than not what their timeline is, closer term deals have a lot of detail behind them with all of the internal steps outlined. It can be advantageous to engage early on longer term deals and build the process together, you should have scheduling and preparation to do as well and getting the Prospect to buy into your planning can work to your advantage, after all they will have outlined when they will be ready for certain steps.

Sharing testimonials can be an effective way for your Prospect to share the similarities in their situation as well as the differences. It can be a nice practical application of the ongoing Discovery process as well that can be more conversational as opposed to using a list where it almost feels like an interrogation of questions. Case studies from 3rd party partners are effective also, when they highlight results it's quite objective and it doesn't come across as your pitch since an outsider is reinforcing the value proposition you bring. That is probably one of my favorites when I can say, "it's their endorsement of our work and results", highly credible.

Even if you are fortunate enough to win a deal after being overbearing, you will have created an element of buyers remorse and future references can be jeopardized. When a deal is big and important to your company, the pressure from C level executives from your own company can create pressure that you never intended and, is out of your control. 9 times out of 10, you have already used tactics that leadership suggests and that may not have accelerated your deal anyways. If you are tracking your deals, the timing of them coming in is according to forecast, you should never have to use pressure tactics. Getting a deal in earlier to help pick up the slack for others on the team isn't a good excuse to rush a deal either.