You’re a salesperson, or in business development, or you’re a revenue officer, or maybe any number of other fancy terms for it. But the main thing that makes you great at what you do is the relationships that you have, and knowing how to be in the right place at the right time. It sounds simple, right? But those relationships have been built over years of hard work. And most great salespeople have a system.

It goes a little like this.

You make an outreach call. The prospect tells you to follow up in a few months. Sometimes this is legitimate – they actually can’t talk then, or budgets have been spoken for, or they don’t have a need yet. And sometimes it’s a delay tactic or a dodge. But regardless, the sale is very rarely made on the first contact. The difference between a mediocre and great salesperson is in that middle ground – the ground of follow-up. This means staying top of mind while not being in the forefront. I will never forget one of my sales team walking into my office and showing me a prospect in the CRM who had just inked a big deal. “See that? 32 times! 32 times after the initial contact!” If he stopped at 31… no deal. There’s no magic number. Pharmaceutical reps will tell you that you need to tell a doc the same message 16 times for them to actually hear it.

So how do you follow up? Most of us:

• Make the initial call or email

• Add the follow-up to the task list

• Check the task list daily

• Perform whatever follow-ups we can on any given day, pushing some follow-ups out to future days, resulting in a domino effect

• Add a second follow-up to the task list

• Rinse and repeat

As you can see with all of this, if you make the initial call, but only get 50% of your follow-ups onto a task list, then only check the task list 50% of the time, then only hit 50% of your follow-ups on a day, then only add 50% of those subsequent follow-ups to a task list, then only check the task list 50% of the time, then only complete 50% of those follow-ups… after two rounds, you are actively engaged with 1.56% of the people you started with. That’s somewhere between 1 and 2 of 100 initial touches getting past round 2.

So now let’s say you had a way to get 50% of your follow-ups into a system, and from there, they just sent automatically. Now you’ve got 50% of your follow-ups getting past round 2. If the system allows you to customize emails – so you can sell instead of market – now we’re cooking.

We developed Maverick to help you take the task list out of your process. The task list, as much as we love it and it’s useful, is truly where sales go to die. By creating a system where all of your outreach can be placed into fully customizable maneuvers, we have beautifully combined personalized selling with automation. You will find that your sales team is now much better at following up – because the process is way simpler.

Contact us to learn more about how we can get the task list out of your sales process.