About 2 years ago I became fascinated with tracking my sales and conversion metrics. We are all aware of the fact that the truly successful sales professionals track their numbers and watch them closely. It only makes sense right?

If you don’t watch your numbers closely, how can you tell what works, and what is a waste of your time and/or money? Moving on, I started out using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, and entered not just my sales and prospecting efforts for the day, but I also included notes as to how many calls were first time prospecting efforts compared to follow ups.

A funny pattern emerged when I sat down at the end of the quarter to review my efforts. Nearly 89% of my sales required 9 or more follow-up calls to close. Now before you throw your hands in the air thinking “That’s it! This guy is the worst salesman on the planet!” let me explain.

Selling to loan officers, real estate agents, or any other business to business call efforts is often an uphill battle. Calling someone at work is naturally a hit or miss operation since the person will likely be busy. Tracking my numbers, I found that out of my 9 call average, 4 of them were listed as “no answer” or “got the voice-mail.”

But, (Now we’re about to get to the good stuff) the remaining 5 calls were littered with notes such as “wants me to call back tomorrow” or “too busy this week, call end of month.” At first glance, many of us would look at these statements as delay tactics, or put offs from a person who is too afraid to say no.

Yet, it’s amazing just how often I have not heard from someone for 3 or 4 weeks, who originally claimed they were itching to buy, then suddenly a phone call lands me on the phone with this prospect who is now telling me “Oh yea! I completely forgot about this! Let me go get my credit card…”

The point here is that I’ve seen so many loan officers and real estate agents get discouraged when someone they thought was a good prospect suddenly blows them off. Hey it’s human nature to be disappointed right?

But please, do yourself a favor and step back to view at the bigger picture. Life is so unpredictable, you can go from having the best week of your life on Monday and Tuesday, to a living nightmare on Wednesday and Thursday…. and back again!

Your prospect may have just received bad news at work, or is smack in the middle of a family emergency.(I once was in the middle of taking an order when my client asked me to hold… He returned to tell me he had to go as he was just informed his son passed away…)

Life is hectic, and despite our thoughts to the contrary, more often than not we are not the first thing our customers think of when they wake up in the morning! As difficult as it often was for me to accept that all these prospects kept “forgetting” about our phone appointment, or that they promised to place an order this morning and didn’t, the bottom line is that they quite likely did get caught up in the rush – rush atmosphere of daily work.

How many times have you and I forgotten an appointment, a phone call, or to run an errand? Since these appointments mean the difference between a paycheck or not for us, it is definitely a level 10 priority for us. For a buyer, he/she will move forward at his own pace.

So what am I getting at with all these examples and analogies? Mainly this… Follow up, follow-up again, and follow-up some more! Of course you want to apply common sense as to who you spend time with, and who is a priority, but if you have built an automated follow-up mechanism for yourself (Auto-responders for example), then you can set your drip marketing campaigns in motion with very little time or effort on your part.

Building a database for myself allowed me to see just how much money went down the tubes due to my lack of an automated touch-point to keep my name in front of prospects.

My sales increased nearly 30% when I began asking every person I spoke to for their email address, and permission to send useful information once a month. (Yes, some recommend more frequency, A/B split test your own database to see which frequency works best for you)

Before I go, let me show you one final example that will hit much closer to home. Call capture was a technology I was quite fond of. I used it in my own career as a loan officer, nd showed the real estate agents i worked with how to use it the right way. As part of my marketing plan to generate more referral business working with real estate professionals, I contacted more than 46 local real estate agents who were currently using call capture.

Funny thing is, 45 out of the 46 I spoke with told me they only followed up with callers who dialed “0″ to speak with them directly… Why? Well, they told me that anyone who did not wish to talk with them right away was not a serious prospect! Wow! People, I thought we were sales people here, not order takers!

My group and I then conducted a test. We worked our call capture leads immediately, and then placed them in a drip campaign. 90 – 120 days later, we contacted the list via phone to follow up. We found that more than 36% of the callers had already closed on a new home, or now had a contract with a buyers agent.

That’s a lot of business to walk away from. Where else can you find those odds of 1 in 3 are serious enough to buy in 3 – 4 months? Sure, many of those same people will blow you off when you first call, but that’s to be expected. Maybe it’s too early for them to take you seriously yet. Maybe they’re having a bad day, or maybe you just interrupted something important.

Follow-up, remain professionally persistent, and watch your pipeline grow, even in a down market. Make it a profitable day!