by Jerry Reith

Do you run an online business? Most of us are doing business online in one form or another these days. I run a network marketing distributorship and literally hundreds of my downline members are promoting their businesses online. It's very interesting to me that I can look at my downline report each month and automatically know which reps are good at sales follow-up and which need some help. Simply put, the reps with good follow-up sign up a lot more new people and sell more services than those with poor follow-up.

Whether you are selling a product or service, promoting a consulting firm, or a business opportunity, the key to closing sales is follow-up, follow-up, follow-up!

You may have the best product on the planet, at the absolute lowest price anywhere, but if you don't follow-up with your prospects and customers, you will never be completely successful in sales. I've seen some of my downline members use follow-up techniques so successfully that they increased personal sales by as much as 400%.

Follow-up is an on-going aspect of most sales efforts. It specifically refers to each step taken beyond the initial contact with the prospect, or potential client. Whether initial contact was made by mail, phone, or in-person, any subsequent contact is follow-up. Follow-up is a critical component of the sales process as well as an important element of on-going customer development. How many hours do you currently spend following up with each of your prospects and potential clients? An hour per week for each prospect? Five hours?

Did you know that it takes an average of 7 follow-up contacts before a prospect is ready to make a buying decision? That's right, 7 follow-up contacts! How many times do you currently follow-up with each prospect? If you are like most people, you probably follow-up no more than twice. Many people only follow-up ONCE, if at all! If your day is anything like mine, it would take years to follow-up with every prospect at least seven times!

There simply are not enough hours in the day and most of my prospects do not like to be contacted in the middle of the night! With my online business, I rarely have a prospects telephone number, so even when I find the time, I can't call them for follow-up sales! I'm certainly not going to just lose those prospects and let them walk away! So, I go out of my way to capture their email address. I give the prospect every possible opportunity to receive more information via email autoresponder. Offer your prospect several chances to receive information via email. Offer different articles or free reports. Making several different reports available will also give you insight into what types of information each prospect is interested in. That is critical information if you know how to use it!

Okay, so you've posted links to several different free reports and made them available via autoresponder. Now what? Now you need to access the referral logs of each autoresponder and gather each and every email address that requested information. Be careful though, don't mix them up, or you won't be able to tell which email goes with which autoresponder! You wouldn't want to send follow-up messages about Product X to someone who is only interested in Product A.

Many of you are now thinking, "If I don't have time to do follow-up today, how in the world will I be able to add all of this work and additional follow-up to my schedule? How will these autoresponders save me any time?" My response to you is a polite, "I have no idea! In fact, they seem to increase your workload and cut into your personal time more than ever." There is a solution to this paradox however.

You need to automate that follow-up process, so it is being done for you, day or night. I got involved with network marketing because of the power of automation. There's nothing like getting paid for your own efforts, as well as everyone else's efforts! The same principle holds true here. You need to automate your follow-up.

You need an autoresponder that can send out several follow-up messages to your prospects, at predetermined intervals that you control. It needs to capture their email address for future follow-up messages, but more importantly, it needs to capture the prospect's NAME. This is critical in your follow-up process! When your prospects receive personalized follow-up messages, you greatly increase the chance that they will actually read it, not just delete it.

You must have complete control over your follow-up messages and your message must be the only thing that the prospect sees! I have seen several "free" services that place their own ads in YOUR follow-up messages. You would be amazed at the number of sales you lose when prospects have two ads to choose from and yours is NOT the last one they see! If your business relies on Internet sales at all, don't mess around with freebies that could hurt your sales conversion rate. This is your business, so be smart and treat it accordingly.

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