Responsiveness in Sales Doesn’t (Only) Mean Fast

Being fast with no value has no value to your buyer.

Here’s a real life example from a former client:

I worked with a client who was successfully generating a ton of targeted inbound leads. However, their follow-up stunk.

They were taking three business days on average to follow up a lead. In other words, they were completely unresponsive to their prospects.

Over a period of a few weeks I worked with the CEO and sales team to evolve their follow-up process to the point where all leads received a phone call from an account exec within 30 minutes of being received.

Transformation began instantly. Suddenly, sellers were able to reach a significantly larger fraction of buyers on the phone.

I trained the inside sales team how to effectively take the prospect through discovery, qualification and a software demo within 45 minutes.

Since my client’s competitors were still taking 2-3 days to respond to leads, by the time they got around to calling the prospect, my client had already closed the deal.

They grew like crazy, taking market share away from their competition.

So, what are buyers trying to accomplish? They are trying to quickly gather the information they need to make a good decision with the least investment of time and money possible.

If you want to truly differentiate yourself from your competition, make responsiveness a priority.

This takes some investment on your part.

Your goal becomes learning as much as you can to minimize the number of times you have to tell a buyer “I’ll have to get back to you” with that information.

Responsiveness requires you…

• Unleash your curiosity
• Perfect your product knowledge.
• Know your customers.
• Learn how they will derive value from a product like yours.
• Possess an informed awareness of the business environment they operate in.
• Master the skill and art of building trust-based relationships with buyers.
• Triage your emails and messages to prioritize responsiveness to customers
• Establish a metric for your personal responsiveness.

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