My Top 7 Tips for Successful Follow Up Calls

[man_in_pain]

Video version for those who wish to watch

The most important things in business are often the most obvious. A few that quickly come to mind are treat your customer’s right, be honest, and do the important but not necessary things if you wish to grow. However there is a trend where the important but not necessary things are being skipped over at a huge loss.

Example:

I recently had my home painted. Over the course of a couple weeks I had four highly rated home painters come out and give me a bid. All four quotes came out to within a couple hundred dollars from one another. They all had great reviews. None stood out any more than the next.

At this point I would have probably gone with whichever company seemed the most eager to have my business. Unfortunately not a single one even gave me a follow up call after my initial quote. No email. No text.

Painting is a business with a high price per sale and so I would have assumed they would do whatever they could to land an additional job. It got me thinking “how many other service businesses are neglecting follow up calls?”. Something so obvious and easy to execute.

I have been utilizing follow up calls in my businesses for years and can attest personally to the huge benefit of doing so. I decided to share my experience and best tips for an award winning follow up call.

My top 7 tips for successful follow up calls:

1. Set a consistent schedule. In my office we call every single customer quote the day after they are quoted AND three days after they are quoted. We keep track of this with a to-do list app that offers recurring tasks so each day a specific person is reminded to call all of yesterday’s quotes and another person is reminded to call all quotes from three days ago.
2. Call between 4-6pm for personal buyers. We find that the rate in which people answer our calls is around 30% higher when we call later in the day. Note: B2B sales are likely much different in this.
3. Don’t scare the person you’re calling. Because of spam calls people are constantly wary of who is calling their phone. Don’t call someone and start the conversation with “Hi, is Jennifer there?” instead try “Hello! My name is X with company X calling for Jennifer”. The former will start the call with your potential customer in defense mode when we are trying to do everything we can in order to make the customer feel comfortable.
4. Hammer in your strong points. Tell them again all the reasons they should use your company; it doesn’t matter if you already told the potential customer when you initially quoted them. Tell them again. Tell them about how you hope to offer the absolute best service, how your staff is professionally trained, or whatever you are the best at.
5. Be excited about the sale and business. If you’re excited to make the sale this energy will no doubt rub off onto the customer and make them more likely to go with you. This is something that is hard to train into employees but becomes much easier if you run a high quality business. People want to sell things that are of high quality and if they know the customer is going to have an awesome experience it will be way easier to be excited for the sale.
6. Ask for their business. During a follow up call sometimes all you need to do is simply ask “So do you want to go ahead and get scheduled?”. Doing this will lower the amount of chit-chat on calls and will increase the closing rate.
7. Send a follow up email. Follow up immediately with everything you talked about including rates, terms, benefits, you could even mention how you hope their nephew has a wonderful birthday if you happened to have a short personal chat.

I’m sure some of theses tips are quite common sense but I felt the need to share my experience in the hopes of sparking a small reminder for other business owners and managers. Thanks for reading!

 

[613jono]

@man_in_pain Just as an aside, my day job is in the painting industry, I have painters who aren't even taking any jobs till October. If you are worth your salt you can have all the work you want currently. That's probably why you didn't get a. All back, they were already on another job.

 

[moonphantom]

@613jono So why not raise your prices as high as possible?

 

[613jono]

@moonphantom Prices have gone up, BUT were not a huge community. People don't take well to paying 5$ per square foot now, then 3$ sqft when work slows down. The customers remember who squeezed them just because they could.

 

[keepyyy]

@man_in_pain This is good advice. I recently changed our funnel to interact more often with our leads. We are a construction company and I pride myself on being the "anti-construction company". To me and my team this means everything you have heard about with other contractors is the complete opposite here. Not exclusive to this post we have all been eager about doing a project and had to chase down the contractors just to get a bid.

My process is as follows:

1. If a web generated lead immediately send out automated email and text message that their info was received and we will be contacting them shortly to make an appointment.
2. Office will then call, qualify and schedule an estimator to go out and visit with the owner.
3. Immediately after scheduling an appointment the lead gets an email and text message confirmation of the appointment.
4. 1 day prior to the appointment the lead gets an automated email and text message reminder with the ability to confirm the appointment. This also has the estimators mobile number in case they have a last minute issue.
5. Upon resulting an appointment to a maybe an automated "thank you for meeting with me" email immediately goes out highlighting our reputation, reviews and additional services offered.
6. 3 days post meeting the office calls with a "survey" designed not to be sales oriented at all. Instead we ask if the meeting went well, if we were on time, if there are any other questions or concerns that they would like us to help them with.
7. 7 days post meeting an automated text message leaves our system designed to look like it was from the inspector. It asks the lead to please call on their mobile number if they would like to discuss the proposal. (My God does this work well).
8. 14 days post meeting the office calls with a rehash script gently nudging at the major objections of work proposed, products proposed, problem with the inspector and pricing.
9. If we go to contract then when the installation date is scheduled they receive an automated confirmation text message and email.
10. 1 day prior to the installation they receive an automated email and text message along with a confirmation call from the office staff.
11. Following installation they receive an automated "please review us on Google" email.

During all the the whole process the estimator is still required to do their own follow-up. As you can also see most of the process is automated and really takes little effort on our part to make sure the customer feels our presence. I'm slowly building on this whole process and hopefully will be adding more as time goes on.

While too soon to have numbers I have noticed a slight uptick in closing ratios... plus people actually love the notifications!

Also worth noting we are using MarketSharpM as our CRM which allows all of this to happen.

 

[keepyyy]

Also, noting another users post... being busy is no excuse for poor customer service! I have 9 installation crews and 5 estimators. My installation schedule is out until the 3rd week of September and my calendar for an estimate (@ 5 appointments a day per estimator for 6 days a week) is out between 1.5 and 2 weeks... Also, all of this contact with customers... only 2 people in the office! Since August 1st alone @ 5 office days a week we had over 899 scheduled calls with another 204 scheduled appointments. OVER 1103 calls in or out in less than 13 days.

Busy is a poor excuse.

 

[sandronodi]

@keepyyy Amazing, what do you install?

 

[keepyyy]

@sandronodi I am a contractor specializing in waterproofing, foundation repair and masonry. We have also branched out over the last 15 years into other services our customers usually need such as microbial remediation, egress windows, indoor air quality, crawlspace encapsulation.

 

[jonathanef]

@man_in_pain #3 is very true in this day and age. In the past I have found it is super important to identify yourself immediately. Never go with "Is jennifer there?" You will always get a timid reply of "...yes" or they will flat out hang up.