Nothing is more disastrous than a hot lead slipping through the cracks for a business. It does not just indicate the loss associated with losing a qualified prospect but several leads that the client can refer in future.

Handling phone calls, convincing clients, having a record of each lead, filtering best prospects and a bunch of other things can make you easily frustrated, and you can end up with missed follow-ups on the best leads.

Business is all about money, and once you lose an opportunity, you lose money. Of course, you cannot control the results, but you can manage your actions. You cannot have all leads converted into sales, but it does not mean that you will overlook the outcome out of your actions.

You do not have control over if customers will buy and when they will buy, but you can control over when and how you follow up. Here is how you can easily follow up:

Make it your sales process as simple as possible

You all know that the entire sales process includes five steps: contacting a customer, their needs discovery, offering a solution, follow-ups, and closing the deal, but the way you use to perform all these steps is no longer simplified. Contacting as many leads as possible is generally treated an excellent way to increase money, but this approach will derive only short-term benefits.

If you tie yourself with every lead, you will end up with no sales. It happens because you fail to prepare yourself for effectively pitching your client. As a sales executive, you need to understand you cannot convert each lead, or not all of them are genuine prospects. You should focus on the best opportunities.

Now the question is how to do that. First off, you will have to assess your current sales process. You cannot make changes to improve unless you know where you are currently. It is why you must know some necessary information like the total number of deals, the percentage of closed deals, and the time it takes to close.

Try to divide all of your leads based on the parameter mentioned above and prioritise your prospects accordingly. Try to identify the motivation, encouragement and interest in the tone of your prospects, and if they sound uninteresting, you do not need to put much effort into them. Focus on best leads. If you have already filtered your leads, there will be fewer chances of missed follow-ups.

Automate monotonous work

As a sales executive, your entire focus should be on your clients. If you tie yourself with admin work like handling all the record of leads and their status throughout the day, you will get puzzled and frustrated. You can automate such tasks using advanced software.

You can automate tasks like invoicing, sales orders, customer support, lead status, and the like. Do not ignore it just because you do not have enough money to buy the software. You can take out cash loan in 1 hour in Ireland to fill the monetary gap.

Set a follow-up schedule smartly

After automating the admin task, you have much more time to focus on your best prospects. Even though they are much interested in your product, it can take a month or more to clinch a deal. Once you have briefed how your product can help them, you need to keep chasing them up to make sure that they do not change their mind.

When it comes to making follow-ups, you are either too frequent or too sluggish. Too regular follow-ups can make your prospect drive away and not sufficient follow-ups will call your skills into question and make your prospects disappointed. The first follow-up will be after a day or two, and then the second follow-up will be two days later, the first follow-up. As a result, the gap will keep increasing, by 4, 7, 14, 20 days.

If it extends up to a very long time, you can stop there and then. Send them an email about the closing of the lead. However, you do not need to be harsh. You can express hope to work together down the road.

If you want to grow your business, you will have to focus on your genuine prospects as much as possible. Make sure that you follow them up smartly. Try to resolve all of their doubts and queries so they can make a buying decision as quickly as possible. Invest in CRM software to free yourself of monotonous tasks. To make a fair amount of profits, you cannot afford to miss on follow-ups.