Your website should be a tool that you steer all contacts to, especially the direct contacts!

These are people you do not have time to tell them everything about your business. You’d bore them to death as they politely smile and look around for the exit or perhaps a distraction they can throw at you and run. You can feel around for what they are looking for or allow them to direct their own tour based on what they see as important.

Your sales person could say

“I could take so much of your time and bore you to death with all of the facts and figures. I don’t want to pressure you into a decision right now. I’d like to make sure you have all of the information you need to make a well thought out decision you can be comfortable with. What might work better for you is if I send you some links to articles that really cover the depth of what you’re looking for. I’d like to follow up with you and make sure that I can answer any questions you have then or get you the answers. What is the best email to send it to?”

Everything there, particularly the bolded portion speaks directly to the customer’s needs and places them ahead of the business and the salesperson’s needs and wants. That alone will separate you from the so called competition as it seems antithetical to all of the sales training drummed into the staff from the get go.

You too may be looking at this and thinking “It makes no sense to let them go when we have them right where we want them, in our web!” That type of spider and fly mentality is what your customer hates. Let’s put it this way. You are going to drive people away from your store with the old way of thinking. (You don’t close 100% of walk-ins, do you?) Why would you drive them away just to go to your competitor who will treat them like gold when they learn you blew them out? You know that’s what happens because you get the same type of customer running away from your competitors coming to you.

Stop driving them away!
Like I said, they’re going to leave regardless. Don’t drive them away. Send them back with an assignment, to get the information they need to make a qualified decision to choose you.

You or your salesperson will want to change that script above into their own wording but the points you want to make are:

1. You respect the prospect’s time.
2. You are not trying to make the sale before they leave. You’re not taking the “Nobody gets out of here without buying” approach that people hate.
3. You let them know you will follow up with them personally.
4. This is really the most important: You get their contact information and put them into the funnel!

Enter them into the list confirmation with subject “[firstname] I’d like to confirm your request for information”

Once they confirm, you can send them an email as a “one off” with their specific info. Then set the other messages to fire off after. You do this by customizing the welcome message.

This is not the general list. This is a list you have specifically set up to add people with specific requests for information. They can’t sign up on this list, you manually add them. That way you don’t have to worry about “What if someone signs up on this list and gets the wrong personal message?”

It doesn’t happen because you lay out the welcome message before adding them and reset it before signing out. It’s largely copy and paste. All of this can be done rather quickly in your downtime to make your time use more effective.

You have specific information and this list is geared for that segment. If you invest the time in setting up a list for each personality, it can pay off even more. The more you can narrow your focus to speak directly to the individual person, the greater your conversion rate will be.

There’s a bonus in writing these personalized messages. You’ll be addressing their specific questions. If it’s something that hasn’t come up in the past, this message can be used as a base for your next general message.

When you have people in your funnel, you can see the path that people take and use that information to make your sales staff more effective in their face to face time.

Two last points I’d like to make: Open your follow up messages on this list with a casual opening. Use something to the effect of “Hey [firstname], this is [your name]. I ran across this and thought you find it helpful.” Taking that step on at least the first few emails will help keep unsubscribes down. You also want to set up a way to move them from this list and on to a more targeted list that they choose automatically.