La sottile arte del follow-up con l'automazione delle e-mail

Let’s start with the ‘why’

Perché preoccuparsi di seguire la vicenda?

Perché funziona. Il follow-up porta alle vendite.

Le statistiche mostrano che l'80% delle vendite avviene dopo almeno cinque follow-up.

Le statistiche mostrano anche che 44% dei rappresentanti di vendita rinunciano dopo il primo rifiuto.

Il risultato è migliore:

• 22% interrompere il follow-up dopo due rifiuti
• 14% smettere di seguire dopo tre
• 12% smettere di seguire dopo quattro

👉🏼 92% of sales reps give up before the crucial fifth follow-up.

Avete letto bene: potete battere la 92% dei rappresentanti di vendita semplicemente essendo persistenti.

That’s easier said than done though. Most sales reps know they should follow up consistently, but are afraid to do so. Afraid of being rejected.

Sending countless emails to someone to then be ignored or rejected time and time again makes you feel like you’re annoying and nobody wants to be annoying.

Ma: cosa avete da perdere, in realtà?

Il primo contatto è facile. Avete superato l'ostacolo di avvicinare qualcuno. Avete organizzato l'incontro, fatto la telefonata, inviato l'e-mail. Avete fatto il vostro lavoro, vi sentite bene con voi stessi. It’s up to them now, right?

That’s where you go wrong.

Get it in your head: whether you get a response from your prospect is on you. You’re not entitled to anything and the waiting game isn’t going to get you anywhere.

Why follow up? Because it’s good for business.

You need a CRM tool

Before we transform you into an email follow-up superhero, we need to put you in the driver’s seat.

Remember, we’re assuming you used automation for personalized outreach at scale. No set of magic tricks is going to hold much water if you’re not equipped to deal with the waves of replies your automated outbound campaigns are triggering.

È qui che entriamo nel regno del software CRM. Uno strumento che consente di costruire relazioni umane con una moltitudine di potenziali clienti contemporaneamente.

At Salesflare we believe most CRM tools achieve the opposite: they force you to log calls, update contacts, attach emails and other mindless admin work humans aren’t meant to be doing. You’re being kept away from what really matters: talking to prospects.

Abbiamo costruito Salesflare come uno strumento che vi aiuta senza che voi dobbiate aiutarlo per primi. Qualcosa che sia più un assistente alle vendite che un foglio di calcolo.

Going forward we’ll be using Salesflare as CRM of reference in the follow-up equation, without making the tactics exclusive to it.

Automate everything that doesn’t need you

In order to focus all of your time and talent on follow-up and building relations, you first need to get rid of everything else that’s keeping you from doing that.

Technology has matured up to the point where it doesn’t need adult supervision anymore. Take advantage of that. Have the robots take care of the robot work so you can focus on stuff that matters.

You can automate pretty much everything straight up to the point where you’re needed in the conversation. No coding required, a combination of Salesflare and Zapier will do.

Zapier consente di collegare tra loro le app SaaS e di farle lavorare insieme in flussi autonomi. L'idea è piuttosto semplice: ogni app ha una serie di trigger e una serie di azioni. È sufficiente indicare quale trigger di un'applicazione si vuole innescare quale azione nell'altra.

One triggered action is called a Zap. Depending on how complex the flow, you’ll need one or more Zaps to make it work.

L'esempio più pertinente è quello di inviare automaticamente i lead dal vostro pianificatore di riunioni al vostro CRM.

Il risultato sarebbe questo:

1. You send out personalised emails at scale using the email workflows in Salesflare. (Want to see how? Here’s a customer showing how he uses the email workflows for prospecting.)
2. Nell'e-mail, suggerite loro di prenotare un incontro con voi attraverso il link personale del vostro programmatore di incontri (come YouCanBook.me o Calendly).
3. You set up Zapier to automatically create an account/company, contact and opportunity in your CRM, Salesflare. You can even automatically create a task to follow up and store some more info in custom fields or an internal note. Just use your imagination. 🤯

Ora basta lanciare una campagna outbound e la vostra pipeline di vendita si riempirà automaticamente di contatti, pronti per essere seguiti.

Of course your leads don’t have to come from email. You can also use Zapier to push leads to your CRM from forms (e.g. Typeform, Google Forms) , Facebook Lead Ads or chatbots (Collect.chat, ManyChat, Chatfuel). Browse around in our Zapier templates for inspiration.

Come vincere al follow-up

It’s all you from here on out.

Ne abbiamo già parlato in precedenza: l'unico superpotere di cui avete bisogno è la costanza. La corsa si vince continuando a correre, non essendo veloci.

How to win at following-up? Keep at it until you get a response, no matter what that response is. Getting a ‘no’ is not losing. It allows you to move on to the next one and invest your time and talents where it matters.

That’s the mindset you need to get you in the game. Now add the following 11 ingredients to the formula to become a champion of the game.

1. L'esecuzione è qualcosa, il tempismo è tutto

By ‘response’, I really mean response. Not getting an email back doesn’t count and shouldn’t stop you.

Too often sales people assume silence is a sign of rejection, while in reality it’s just bad timing.

First off, your email could have just gotten lost in clutter and confusion. Using email tracking can shed some light here. If you use Salesflare’s email sidebar for Gmail or Outlook or email from the CRM itself, it can tell you if an email has been opened or not.

Even if your recipient opened your email, there’s still multiple possible reasons other than rejection for prospects to not reply to your email:

• they’re not available (illness, travelling, personal problems)
• they’re in the middle of something else
• hanno semplicemente dimenticato di rispondere

Whatever it is, don’t take it personal. Assuming you didn’t get an email back because of rejection is a losing mindset. Change things up: assume the timing just wasn’t right and try again.

Maybe they ignored you because they’re not interested, maybe not.

The only thing you know for sure is that you don’t know. Get out of maybe-land and follow up until you do. The only outcomes you should settle for are ‘yes’ and ‘no’.

In the game of follow-up, getting a ‘no’ is not losing, it’s winning. When someone tells you they’re not interested, you can move and focus your efforts on the next prospect. The only way you can lose at follow-up is by staying stuck at ‘maybe’.

2. Chase clarity over being liked

Perché è così difficile guardare al di là del silenzio e continuare a seguire finché non si riesce a contattare qualcuno?

You’re afraid of being annoying.

Well, guess what: you’re not in high school anymore. Being popular isn’t going to make your business grow. Sales are.

In altre parole: puntate a sette persone che non vi apprezzano e tre che fanno affari con voi, piuttosto che a dieci persone che vi apprezzano e zero che fanno affari con voi.

The seven that are turned off by you because you’re trying to bring them value don’t deserve your energy anyway. Invest that energy in the people that do matter.

3. Know when to stop

Some people do use silence to tell you they’re not interested.

As a rule of thumb, five reach-outs without a reply equals ‘no’. You can safely assume they’re not interested in the value you have to offer and invest your energy on someone else.

Un'altra grande idea può essere quella di fare un passo indietro quando si tratta di vendere e chiedere prima la loro opinione su qualcosa. Potrebbe trattarsi di una semplice domanda personale, oppure potrebbe essere un po' più formale e automatizzata utilizzando una piattaforma specializzata per il feedback degli utenti, come Mopinion, dove è possibile raccogliere il feedback via e-mail.

4. Be present without being stalky

A quali intervalli di tempo si dovrebbe fare un follow-up dopo aver inviato la prima e-mail?

Start off strong and decrease frequency over time. The longer a prospect doesn’t reply, the more likely it becomes the span of timing not being right is significant.

Here’s a general outline to start from:

• Giorno 1: 1° email di follow-up
• Giorno 3: 2° follow-up
• Giorno 7: follow-up in 3D
• 14° giorno: 4° follow-up
• Giorno 25: 5° follow-up
• Dopo: una volta al mese

Se avete stabilito un legame con il vostro prospect senza che sia immediatamente interessato al vostro prodotto, ha comunque senso seguirlo una volta al mese, solo per mantenere il rapporto. Giocate a lungo termine. La vostra rete è il vostro valore netto, non sapete mai quali vantaggi può portare una connessione.

Per quanto riguarda il cold outreach, potete facilmente automatizzarlo utilizzando le sequenze del vostro strumento di automazione delle e-mail.

You can perfectly replicate your follow-up routine in a Salesflare email workflow and even add some flexibility to it. Say there’s a link to your calendar in your email for prospects to book a call with you: you can have the sequence break off when they click that link too.

5. Utilizzare promemoria di follow-up

Follow-ups aren’t just needed when doing cold outreach. You may already have made some progress with a prospect, but lines go cold again before you know it. It’s your job to keep the relationship alive. Remember: you aren’t entitled to anything.

“I don’t have to write that down, I’ll remember it.”

– No, you won’t.

Your brain isn’t a safe to store data in, there’s technology for that. There’s no way you won’t make mistakes having to keep track of following up on multiple opportunities at the same time. You’ll forget to follow up and miss out on sales.

È qui che entra in gioco il vostro CRM. Fatevi dire quando dovete fare un follow-up, creando attività semplici e/o promemoria, in modo da poter concentrare le vostre forze su ciò che conta: scrivere e-mail di successo per costruire relazioni.

Per creare un'attività nell'Salesflare, utilizzare la casella superiore della schermata Attività.

We wouldn’t be Salesflare if we wouldn’t have some automation powers up our sleeves. Next to Tasks, we’ll also make sure you keep your eyes on the ball with automatic inactivity reminders. These will be triggered after 10 days of inactivity on opportunities in your sales pipeline.

10 giorni è l'impostazione standard, ma è possibile personalizzare queste tempistiche in base alle fasi della pipeline di vendita. Basta andare in Impostazioni > Personalizza pipeline, fare clic sulla matita per modificare e impostare un numero di giorni personalizzato per i promemoria di inattività.

There’s even more…

In Salesflare, you’re also able to send out automatic follow-up emails based on triggers such as stage changes.

Esempi:

• Un lead ha risposto alla vostra e-mail e ha prenotato una telefonata con voi. Poiché questo lead viene automaticamente spinto dal pianificatore di incontri alla pipeline di vendita nel vostro CRM, viene inviata automaticamente un'e-mail per confermare la telefonata. Rendetela ancora più speciale inviando un contenuto rilevante.
• La telefonata è andata bene e il lead è passato alla fase successiva della pipeline. Questo fa scattare un'e-mail che invita il lead alla vostra community di Facebook per farlo sentire speciale.
• You’ve agreed on terms with a lead and as they move to the next stage in your pipeline, an automated proposal email is sent their way.
• You’re selling Saas. A lead’s trial is expired, without him taking action to start paying. As he moves to the ‘Lost’ — stage an email is triggered to convince him to subscribe or at least extend his trial.

6. It doesn’t always have to be email

Following up and email go hand in hand, but there’s more to the story.

Sebbene l'e-mail sia ancora la spina dorsale della comunicazione aziendale, altri mezzi di comunicazione possono offrire di più in termini di recapitabilità, rapidità di risposta ed effetto complessivo sul prospect.

Il gioco lungo: l'e-mail

Email is the safe and reliable option. It allows you to gently nudge your prospect multiple times without being intrusive. You leave the prospect in control over when and how they’ll respond, but it may also take you long to really get through and reach your goals.

Per una risposta più rapida: telefonare

Rispetto alle e-mail, una chiamata telefonica è più difficile da ignorare. Le persone sono più propense ad alzare il telefono che a rispondere alle vostre e-mail entro 2 minuti.

The same reason makes phone calls more intrusive than emails. We all prefer doing things on our own time and follow-up phone calls don’t really rhyme with that. The risk of turning a ‘maybe’ into a ‘no’ is higher for phone calls than it is for emails because the chance of coming across as annoying is higher.

Il fatto che siate fastidiosi o meno dipende sempre da voi. C'è una differenza tra chiamare qualcuno una volta o dieci volte al giorno. Il primo si chiama mostrare interesse, il secondo stalking. Siete stati avvertiti.

Il compromesso: SMS

If your prospects take too long to answer emails and don’t pick up their phones, you may want to have a go at SMS. As a medium, it’s not as cluttered as email and less intrusive than phone calls, which makes it rather effective to grab your lead’s attention.

You can automate sending SMS’s to your prospects similarly to how we automated emails before, linking your CRM to one of the many available SMS sending apps with Zapier.

Benvenuti nel 21° secolo: i social media

Le persone ricorrono sempre più spesso alle piattaforme dei social media e alle loro funzionalità di chat per comunicare, non solo nella vita privata. Ogni giorno le mie applicazioni LinkedIn e Facebook Messenger si riempiono di nuovi messaggi in arrivo da tutto il mondo.

Ha senso stabilire una relazione virtuale sui social media una volta che voi e il vostro potenziale cliente avete stabilito un primo contatto amichevole. Seguire il vostro potenziale cliente su Twitter e connettersi con lui su LinkedIn ridurrà la distanza nel vostro rapporto reciproco, soprattutto se riuscirete ad affermarvi come persona affidabile apportando valore su queste piattaforme.

If you don’t throw a sales pitch in their faces. But I assume you already got that by now.

Social selling works because communication on social platforms tends to be much more swift, informal and personal. Its easier to become friends here than it is via email and what do you know: friends buy from friends — people they know, like and trust.

Whether it’s chatting one-on-one or sending out little nudges by liking and sharing posts, building relations with your prospects on social media has little to no downsides — though the extent to which you can do it depends on industry, company size, role and age of the prospect. Sixty-year-old managers of big accounting firms are less likely to chat than twenty-five-year-old startup marketers.

In Salesflare, i vostri contatti saranno automaticamente arricchiti con gli account dei social media, in modo da poter passare dal vostro CRM direttamente ai loro profili LinkedIn.

Per ulteriori ispirazioni sul social selling, consultate i nostri Playbook per LinkedIn e Facebook.

Per far sentire speciale il vostro interlocutore: biglietti scritti a mano

In sales and marketing: the more a tactic is used, the more its effect will wear off. The reason email has lost its effectiveness over the years is because we get hundreds of them a day. To really grab your contact’s attention, do something that stands out.

Over time, all marketing strategies result in sh*££y clickthrough rates.

We were happy to trade in letters for email because of efficiency. Writing letters takes time, sending them possibly even more. Email was a gift from heaven for its speed, scalability and efficiency. Today, we miss handwritten letters for exactly the same reasons. There’s something special and authentic to it. Because so few are sent, getting a letter has once again became a unique experience.

Può sembrare controintuitivo, ma è possibile farlo in scala. Maillift è un servizio che scrive le vostre lettere a mano per voi. Hanno una integrazione con Zapier, il che significa che potete anche automatizzare questa operazione.

Niente batte la vita reale

“I was in the area, so I thought I’d drop by real quick and see what’s up.”

It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book and it’s not hard to see why.

Se volete fare colpo e ottenere le risposte più concrete: andate laggiù. Fare o morire, non ci sono tentativi.

7. Adottare un approccio individuale

The key to winning at follow-ups or any sales/marketing tactic that involves scale and automation is to go out of your way to make your prospect feel like you’re personally involved into solving his or her problems.

This starts with your initial outreach. Don’t settle for just getting first name right, make sure your value and message are tailored to the people you’re sending emails to. Role, industry, company size and geography are all variables you can take into account when crafting your message. If you really want to take it up a notch, use a tool like CrystalKnows to find out personality types of your prospects and create different types of copy to allow your message to land in the best way possible.

You can use Crystal’s data to create a variety of personality aligned cold emails and/or use it in your follow-ups as soon as a lead has entered your sales pipeline. If you want to know how to automate sourcing personality data from LinkedIn profiles with Crystal, hit me up on Messenger.

From the moment you’re in follow-up mode, it’s all about context. Getting this right takes all the empathy and diligence you can bring to the table.

Whether you follow up two or seven times, whether you do it every day or every week, whether you stick to email or use a variety of media — it all depends on the situation your prospect is in plus the relationship and interactions you had with him/her. It’s all about context.

You don’t follow up with a CEO of a Fortune 500 company the same way you do with a millennial marketer of a SaaS startup. The first one gets thousands of emails everyday, the second one will probably reply within ten minutes and then send you a connection request on LinkedIn.

8. Keep it short, sweet, slick, succinct and specific

Don’t waste time. Not yours and not your prospect’s.

We know you’re in love with your product but describing why in three long-winded paragraphs isn’t going to make your prospect get that same feeling. They may not even end up reading it. When I open an email and see a chunk of text, my reflex is to trash it instantly. Can’t help it, it just happens.

You can’t force nor control people’s feelings and convictions. Overtly losing yourself in product pitches shows a lack of empathy and will throw your prospect off rather than draw them in. Get to the point, address the pain or problem they’re struggling with and show how you can solve that in a way that triggers their curiosity.

This little interaction here is not about you, it’s about them and how you can help them. Dedicate your words to a story that has your recipient as the hero and make it compelling enough for them to want to know what comes next — make them click that CTA that sees them going to your website or schedule a call with you.

9. Aiutate il vostro potenziale cliente ad andare avanti con le Call-To-Action

CTA’s are crucial to ensure a steady flow going back and forth. You should have a goal with every follow-up email you send and make it easy for your prospect to get in on that goal. It’s not up to them to make out what comes next.

Invitateli a iniziare la vostra prova, offrite il download del vostro ultimo ebook, inviate un link al vostro calendario, invitateli nel vostro gruppo Facebook. Dovete avere un'idea chiara di ciò che volete ottenere in quale fase dell'imbuto di vendita e avere CTA specifiche per indurre i vostri clienti a salire nell'imbuto.

10. Add a pinch of funny

Poche cose al mondo sono così contagiose e comunicative come il buon umore.

If you yourself have been followed up on before, you know how little impact the one millionth ‘just checking in’ email has. But what if the person on the other side adds in Spongebob Squarepants to break through the boredom.

O questa giraffa impaziente.

The best example of a funny email follow-up I’ve ever come across, is the baby ducklings email:

There’s tons of stuff you can do with GIFs, memes and just good old copy. Just get creative and see what sticks.

Making someone laugh is the shortest way to connecting with someone, it will set you apart from every ‘just making sure you’re still interested in this’ email out there.

11. Put on your prettiest virtual smile at all times

For most people, their email inbox is a never-ending flow of frustration. Overflowing with unread emails, it’s a never-ending to-do list.

Don’t fuel their feeling of unease by calling them out on not responding to you. Stuff like ‘I’ve already sent you 3 emails’ or ‘just tell me you’re not interested already’ will only backfire. Your prospect likely already feels guilty for not replying to you, making them feel extra bad about it isn’t going to turn the situation around.

Change things up and approach this feeling of anxiety as an opportunity. Be the bigger man and just act indifferent to having been ‘ignored’ before. Keep on giving off a vibe of positivity and availability. Your prospect will develop positive feelings towards you if you can make them feel comfortable when before they felt anxious.

Trattate ogni interazione come una nuova occasione per stabilire una relazione, essendo sempre positivi.

Ricapitolazione

Whether you’re doing it on cold leads or throughout your sales process: following up will get you more sales.

1. Actually doing it is the single most important thing. Don’t take silence for rejection. The game can only end with ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Everything else is you giving up.
2. To do more, automate everything that doesn’t need your human touch and use an efficient CRM tool so you can stay on top of your game. Every single prospect deserves your uttermost patience, empathy and availability and you can’t give them that if you’re stuck doing mindless admin work the whole time.
3. Stay on top of your game but know when to stop. Three times silence doesn’t necessarily equal rejection, but five times most likely does. It’s not about you not annoying your prospect, it’s about dedicating your time to more qualified ones
4. Decrease the frequency of your emails as time progresses. If your prospect hasn’t replied to the first three email follow-ups in a week, they’re likely not in the situation to connect with you at that time. Sending a fourth email shortly after will rather annoy them than change things up.
5. Giocate però a lungo termine. Come dice il proverbio: il vostro valore netto è la vostra rete. Anche se il vostro valore non è immediatamente rilevante per un potenziale cliente, non si sa mai come potreste aiutarvi a vicenda in futuro. Le relazioni significative vi porteranno avanti, negli affari e nella vita.
6. Don’t trust your brain to remember when to follow up, it will fail you. Set follow-up reminders instead and automate routine emails altogether.
7. Usate il cervello per comunicare con i vostri clienti. Scoprite cosa li fa emozionare, create il vostro messaggio per adattarlo al loro caso specifico e usate l'umorismo per distinguervi dal rumore. Guidateli nella loro narrazione e verso obiettivi intermittenti.
8. Finally, don’t limit yourself to email to build rapport with some. There’s so much more.

The person on the other side is a human being just like you. If you’re able to put yourself in their shoes and provide relevant value, you shouldn’t let anything discourage you from following-up. Never feel bad for being in the business of helping people.