How To Follow Up With Your Lead Using LaGrowthMachine?

What is lead follow-up?

Basically, for growth marketers or B2B salespeople, following up with your leads is the process of sending another sales message when your lead didn’t reply to the first one.

In B2B, these sales messages can be sent through different sales channels, such as:

• Sales emails
• LinkedIn sales messages
• Cold calling
• Twitter sales messages
• etc…

In other terms, a follow-up email is an email that you send after sending an introduction email.

Note that you can, and should – we’re going to go further on this later in this post – follow up with your lead using a different channel.

Why do you need to follow up with your leads?

Following up with your B2B leads should be one of your priorities as salespeople. I mean, definitely.

Check out these compelling statistics below:

• 44% of salespeople give up after one follow-up attempt
• 95% of all converted leads are reached by the sixth call attempt
• 60% of customers say no four times before saying yes
• If you follow up with your lead within 5 minutes, you’re 9x more likely to convert them!

There are much more stats like this, but you got the idea. You can check them all from this resource: https://ircsalessolutions.com/insights/sales-follow-up-statistics/

So, why lead follow-up is important?

Well, simply because it will help you drive more sales. But also to increase customer retention in time, improve your performance thanks to your customer’s feedback, get testimonials that can be used for brand image, etc…

After all, just by creating some easy processes, you can get very good results with your lead follow-up!

The simple fact of following up is not enough. You need to do it great, and there’s a method to do it. That’s what we’re going to see in the next part of this post.

How to follow up with your leads?

In this paragraph, we’ll focus on the process of following up with leads. Even if it seems easy, writing follow-ups requires methods and skills you can only gain with experience as a sales.

You’ll see that it’s definitely not the same!

What are the stages of follow-up?

First, you need to understand that following up on your lead can be designed as a 4 stage process:

• Stage 1: Create a directory of all your leads inside. With this knowledge, you’ll be able to determine the leads that require follow-up.
• Stage 2: Create a timeline or a roadmap to know exactly when each prospect will need a follow-up message.
• Stage 3: For each prospect, identify their interest Your follow-up will be more effective if it triggers your lead, showing him the ROI behind all of this.
• Stage 4: Sending your follow-up.

This quick 4 stages process can help you to get a clearer vision of your global follow-up flow and will make it much more effective.

With the help of automation, you can do all of this even more quickly. That’s what we’re doing at LaGrowthMachine, but we’ll talk to you about this process further in the post.

How quickly should a lead be followed up with?

Two things to understand here:

• If your lead sends you a message, the quicker you’re answering, the best! Studies are showing that when you’re answering more than 1 hour later, your conversion declines drastically. Why? Because when your lead is writing to you – especially inbound ones – it’s like a warm-up time, they’re already ready to talk. If you miss this chance, they might talk to one of your competitors, are think of alternative solutions. It really is a matter of time here.
• If you’ve sent a message to your leads, you’re in an outbound scheme. This means that you need to take care about not frustrating your lead, but also not letting him escape from your sequence. In B2B, the best time frame to follow up with your lead is to send him a message every 3 or 4 days.

Your industry will also impact the frequency of your follow-up. Some industries require you to use a softer approach, sending messages at longer intervals, while others might require you to be more persistent and send daily emails.

How often should a lead be followed up with?

In B2B, the sales cycle used to be longer than in B2C and will always require human sales contact. Hence, cultivating relationships is paramount in this journey.

Relationships start from your brand image, the first messages you’re sending to your lead, and end at the moment you’re client is leaving you.

During the prospecting phase, you must take care about the time you’re making to answer your lead (see paragraph above) but also how often you’re sending him messages.

At LaGrowthMachine, we recommend:

• To follow up with him every 3 or 4 days – using various channels and message formats
• Not to exceed 3 follow-ups. If after 3 great follow-up messages from various channels, your lead didn’t answer, this means that your segmentation needs to be improved or simply that he’s not interested in what you’re saying – this happens every day, after all.

But this also depends on the channel you’re using! Prospecting on LinkedIn, via email, or through cold calling operates under different principles. That’s what we’re going to see next.

How to follow up with your lead by email?

The main channel for B2B prospecting remains cold emailing. To optimize your email follow-up, we recommend that you:

• Answer in the same email loop as your introduction email, so your lead can have access to the whole history of the conversation pretty easily
• Your answer refers to the previous message you sent
• You use a friendly, personalized, natural tone in your message
• You use various email subjects to highlight the fact that it is a follow-up. It creates a psychological connexion saying “Hey, someone is relying on you to deliver, and yet you have kept them waiting.”
• Your follow-up always remains short!

It’s also important to keep a good structure even in your follow-up emails. If your follow-up emails are well structured, your leads can understand what you’re asking or saying.

A good structure would be something like this:

• Saying hello: “Hey there” or “Hey {{firstname}}” if you’re in the tech or marketing industry. Something more formal if you work in a formal industry, like finance, accounting, and so on.
• Introduction: A brief reminder of the context and why you reached out
• The Value You Provide: Outline the value your product or services bring to them
• Why They Should Act Now: Explain why they should act now and what will happen if they don’t take action
• Your Call-to-Action/ending: a sentence like “What do you think” can be enough for this.
• You best signature.

And if we’d turn this into an example, this would look like this:

If you’re already one of our customers, we’ll gladly help with the copywriting of your emails and other sales messages, which has a strong impact on your conversion rate!

How to follow up with your lead using LinkedIn?

One of the main channels for B2B prospecting is LinkedIn – which is the largest sales lead database worldwide.

As you’ll notice below, following up with your leads on LinkedIn is a bit of a different process:

• Your follow-up must be even shorter than for email
• You can introduce smileys, as LinkedIn comes from a social media approach, with different usage
• The tone of voice can be cooler (again, depending on the industry)
• You’ll usually end your message with something like “Let me know what you think!” or “Would love to hear from you!”
• Don’t EVER sign in a LinkedIn message. As you send the message, people will already know that it’s you talking. No need to sign it, it would look weird.
• Feel free to play with links, videos, or images, which can bring something different than emails.

LinkedIn perfect message structure is to look destructured. To sound natural, you should write as if it was something quick as if you didn’t have the time to think about it. It’s a much different approach than in emails.

Here’s an example of copywriting for a LinkedIn follow-up message:

And that’s it. No need to do more than this. Again, if you’re not sure about it, LaGrowthMachine can help you with your copywriting.

How to follow up with your leads using LaGrowthMachine?

We’ve been covering everything about lead follow-up since the beginning of this post. We’ve listed a lot of methods, benefits, and examples to guide you through this process.

However, we’d like to talk to you about another technique, using LaGrowthMachine. This method allows you to:

• Reduce the human mistakes for follow-up (writing to the wrong lead, i.e.)
• Get a much more scalable workflow
• Save an enormous amount of time (and money as well!)
• Be much more accurate with your lead follow-ups
• Generate way more leads.

So now that you’re teased, how does it work?

Follow these quick steps to get the best out of it.

Step 1: Add some leads into LaGrowthMachine

LaGrowthMachine allows you to add some B2B leads from LinkedIn, CSV, or manually. The more lead data you provide, the better!

However, LaGrowthMachine can also enrich your leads automatically.

Enrichment is a key process here: thanks to this feature, you’ll be able to set up a multichannel selling sequence, using channels such as LinkedIn, Email, and Twitter.

That’s what we’re going to explain next.

Step 2: Set up your campaign with LaGrowthMachine

The second part of this process is to use the data you’ve been collecting in the previous stage to create a multichannel sales sequence.

To do so, you can follow these few steps:

• Create your campaign from scratch (if you’re using the business pack) by selecting one, two, or three different sales channels
• Select the audience you’ll be working on (we’re assuming you’ve already done your segmenting earlier, here)
• Create all of your actions manually with our drag & drop system. An action through LinkedIn could be to visit your lead profile, for example. When you begin to write messages to your leads (by email or LinkedIn), you can edit your copywriting using our variables. This makes your large-scale sales campaign look personalized as if you were conversing with an individual customer at a time.
• Create your follow-up messages and add a time parameter. For example, you can follow up on LinkedIn in 3, 4, or 5 days – it’s your call, really – after having sent your first message. Then, you can follow up by email if your lead didn’t answer your LinkedIn follow-up.

Remember that if a lead answers at any point during your sequence, the loop will be interrupted.

What to do next?

Step 3: Use LaGrowthMachine’s sales inbox feature

Congratulations! Your lead responded to one of your follow-ups.

Now, your main goal will be to close the deal and generate a client. With LaGrowthMachine, you can send thousands of messages on different channels…

With this, your B2B prospecting is incredibly effective — but it could also be a bit chaotic… Fortunately, our sales inbox feature ensures that isn’t the case!

With the sales inbox feature, you can dialogue with your leads, sending an email or LinkedIn messages directly into a single interface.

In this way, you gain all-encompassing access to the history of your conversations and potential customers. This is also a huge help to get an accurate vision of your prospecting and save a lot of time.

Step 4 (Optional): Connect LaGrowthMachine with your CRM

This stage is optional, but we strongly recommend that you use it, as it can be very effective to centralize your data and manage other actions such as customer relationships.

You can plug LaGrowthMachine into any CRM of your choice! You have 2 types of integrations:

• Native: with Hubspot and Pipedrive
• Using Zapier: for almost any CRM.

Connecting your CRM solution with LaGrowthMachine will give you the ability to centralize all your data into your CRM. Also, you can choose to set up triggers into LaGrowthMachine to qualify your lead directly into your CRM!

Conclusion

As you can see, LaGrowthMachine is a powerful tool for B2B lead generation. You can use it to collect leads from different sources and with the help of its features, set up an effective multichannel sales sequence.

And with our integrations available, you have all the tools in hand to contact your prospects and convert them into customers! Try it out today and watch your B2B business grow!