If you’re judging the success of your sales career by how many sales you make, you’re destined to live in feast or famine.
You’ll be chasing the next deal in front of you and not planning for long-term revenue. It’s a cycle of pain that will never let you get on top of what does allow you to win in this profession: prospecting.
We recently sat down with Meridith Elliott Powell on our live stream interview series, and she shared a sales system with us that belongs in the quiver of any salesperson and also allows them to ensure their own success.
She shared that, “Salespeople who win are the ones with follow-up systems.”
How To Systemized Follow-Up
As always, we’re using the TRIM system in order to trim hope from our sales strategy and build a follow-up system to keep prospects in front of us:
T – Trigger: When we’ve qualified an opportunity or after meeting someone who might be a great prospect/referral partner and are beginning outreach.
R – Repeatable: First, this means the system lives outside your head. A repeatable follow-up system lives in a CRM or on a spreadsheet so that we don’t have to remember the next step of outreach across a lot of people.
Second, a repeatable outreach system is the same number of steps across different communication channels like phone, email, social media and direct mail.
I – Improvable: Any static system is only good for when it is created. To ensure our time prospect outreach system can be improved, Meridith advises we take a periodic look at the results we’re getting from our outreach system and what amount of touches and what communication methods yield success.
M – Measurable: When measuring outreach systems, we have to measure how many prospects they are used on (we advise to use the same outreach system on everyone in specific steps of your prospecting/sales cycle) and how many steps are executed on each prospect. Those numbers form a basic response ratio that allow us to predict when prospects will likely convert into sales conversations.
If you want to win in 2021 and beyond, take Meridith’s advice and get a follow up system in place.