I was talking to one of my students from my offline mentoring program today, and he was expressing frustration that he had been in touch with several prospective clients who were on the verge of committing to buy from him, and yet he couldn’t seem to nail down the final sale.  He’s shown them everything he could do for them, given them pricing and a timeline, and they are ready to commit – only they haven’t yet.

Understandably, he doesn’t want to bother them by contacting them repeatedly, but he doesn’t want to lose out on what seems like a sure sale because they’ve forgotten about him for whatever reason.

As someone who sells websites and web services for a living, as well as a full-time small business owner, I can see this from both sides.  Business owners have a million things on their plate at once, and there are always fires to put out.  Though we all know that changing a business’ website can have fantastic effects to their bottom line, it’s not exactly an “emergency” to the business owner, so they allow everything else to take precedence over it – and it’s hard to blame them.

What we can do on our end is follow up consistently, politely, and not so frequently that we start to annoy our prospect.  Calling someone once per day (until we are able to get in touch with them) if they have already made it clear that they are interested in working with us isn’t too much, in my opinion.

As I’ve mentioned many times, I’m not a good salesman, and I’m actually terrible at following up.  If I couldn’t get in touch with someone for a few days, I’m the type that would stop calling, and then forget about the prospect altogether.  Of course, this is a terrible way to make sales, but I’m working on getting better.

My initial sales strategy needs more follow-up too.  I contacted prospects via email, and if they didn’t get back to me, that was the end.  Following up with a simple reminder a week later can convert dozens of additional clients, yet I just didn’t make the effort.

Once I changed my strategy, and followed up with clients, in a non-aggressive way, it really made a huge difference to my bottom line.

By the way, if you’re interested in building a local business of your own, with very little risk, check out my mentoring program.  I’ll come to your city, build your website, and find you clients, until you turn a profit!  Guaranteed!