Small-to-mid-size businesses spend a great deal of money to acquire leads for the purpose of acquiring customers.
However a good number of small businesses don’t properly follow up. Some reasons for a lack of follow-up are: they don’t have time, they are busy or they are buried in day-to-day work. Or, they engage with things they think are more valuable to the business than following up on leads they received.
They don’t realize the value in it; they may not know their customer acquisition cost (CAC) or customer lifetime value (LTV). Leads are the money left on the table.
They lack a system to record the data properly and don’t have a way of capturing the data to record the leads. For example, when I ask some business owners when a customer calls for an inquiry, what happens? Where is this data captured? They usually answer, “Of course, we provide the client with rates.” Following this answer, I ask “What happens to the customer’s data? Where do you save it? What do you do with it?”
The answer is, “Oh we just respond to the request. We don’t save or do anything with the details.” To confirm, I ask again “So, when I call to get information, the agent – the rep-answers and provides me with rates, but afterward, nothing else happens.” There is no place where my contact information is saved, and no one follows up with me afterward.
Last, they may not know how to follow up. They lack the knowledge of when and with what frequency to follow up. Or, they may start to follow up when they have time, then stop when they get busy.
In short, small-to-midsize businesses don’t follow up with their leads because they don’t see the value, don’t capture the data, and don’t know how to follow up. Without a proper follow-up system, you are not just losing a sale today-you are hindering the scalability of your business.