Following up is arguably the most critical yet painstaking part of closing any transaction. Almost always, the first interaction never results in a sale or a closed deal. On average, it takes marketers and salespeople about 8 touch-points to get a meeting with a prospect. So except for the first touch-point, all the 7 touch points are just some form of follow-up. That clearly shows why a follow-up email strategy plays a make-or-break role in your sales success.

This blog discusses everything about follow-up emails, such as the definition, components of a good follow-up email, and some templates you can replicate. 

Note: This blog does not cover following up with internal stakeholders.

What are follow-up emails?

A follow-up email is an email sent to a recipient who has previously been contacted at least once. The email aims to persuade the receiver to either take some action or bring them closer to taking the desired action. Here’s the funny part, whether prospects engaged with your first touch content or not, the second email is still considered a follow-up email. 

Follow-up emails get sent for multiple reasons:

1. Summing up after a cold call or letting the prospect know you tried contacting them.
2. Re-engaging prospects after initial contact if they went cold.
3. Requesting more information from prospects.
4. Giving prospects information they require.
5. Informing prospects about a major change like acquisition or mergers.
6. Following up on decision or next steps after the demo.
7. Getting feedback after prospects become customers.

At whichever stage of the sales process you are at with your prospect, following up is your elevator to the next level.

Follow-up email hygiene – A 5-point checklist

Follow-up emails work better when personalized according to context. There are no one-size fits all strategy when it comes to following up. However, a few practices can be adopted to ensure your follow-up emails are not pushy or irrelevant.

Here’s a 5-step checklist you can use to ensure your follow-up emails communicate well.

• Is the objective of the follow-up email decided?
• Does the email reference the previous conversation or touch-point for context?
• Does the email have a personal touch that appeals to the prospect? No, using dynamic tags or asking about the weather is no longer considered personalization.
• Does the email explain why you’re reaching out and have a clear call to action that aligns with the objective?
• Does the closing/signature part of the email re-iterate that the prospect can reach out to you or contact you for further questions?

If your email checks all these boxes, it is already better than most half-baked follow-up attempts. 

An average professional receives 121 emails every day. If your mail does not stand out, it is impossible to get a response from prospects. So if every aspect of your follow-up email is not written carefully, chances are they will lose out to a better-written email from your competitor.  

A follow-up email can be broken down into 5 components:

1. The subject line and header
2. Greeting
3. Personalized content
4. Call to action (CTA)
5. Signature

Each of these parts has to be adapted according to the context of your follow-up strategy.

1. Subject Line

The goal of the subject line is to get the prospect to open the email – that’s it. Short, witty subject lines that evoke curiosity work the best. Research shows that shorter subject lines with only four words have the highest open rates. It makes sense when you also learn that two-thirds of emails get read on mobile devices. The email content has to be in line with the subject line and should not just be a ‘Bait & Sell’ strategy.

Source: Harvard Business Review

Take care not to use words that trigger spam filters on your subject lines such as 100% free, Sale, No-strings-attached, You have won, etc. Apart from landing your email in the spam folder, email service providers will be quick to lower your domain reputation. Once your domain reputation falls, you can say goodbye to your email landing anywhere other than the spam or the trash folder of your prospects’ inboxes.

2. Greeting

The greeting is the first thing prospects read in the body of your email. It creates the first impression. Using common filler tags such as “Hey there,” or beginning emails with no greeting is never a good idea. Ideally, the greeting should be the prospect’s first name with a salutation. Hey <John>, Good Day <Serena> are good examples. 

Of course, take care to use the correct spelling of their names – Messi is a footballer, but Messie could mean a God. A little bit of online research about your prospect instead of just relying on form-filled or prospect-filled data before following up could go a long way.

3. Personalized, contextual content

Content is where the actual game begins. The first step is to ensure your content is in sync with your subject. Then, with just a few words, the body of your email should reference your previous touch-point, give context, and nudge prospects to take action – all without sounding desperate or pushy. One of the easiest ways to personalize is to summarize your previous conversation. In case your last touch-point was a cold outreach, you can add a line about the prospects’ recent achievements or some big news about their company.

• I saw your Linkedin post on <Topic> and really liked it. 
• Congratulations on your promotion to <Designation>.
• Congratulations on <Company’s> Series<N> funding.

Tying the personalized line to your content and showing prospects how your offering can help them with their objectives is a healthy way to get the conversation moving. Maintaining a positive tone and subtle flattery of the prospect helps improves the response rates by 10-15%.

Rafiki, an enhanced conversation intelligence platform allows video snippets of key meeting discussions to be used in follow-up emails. So prospects can review their meetings with complete context for reference. But more on that later.

4. Call to action

A call to action is the portion of your email that asks prospects to make a decision. The objective of your CTA is to get the prospect to decide in your favor. A direct, simple CTA usually does the job. Prospects should not have to make the decision of which CTA to choose. Having CTAs for a free trial, a demo, a video, and a discovery call in the same email is asking for trouble.

You can have multiple ways for prospects to do the desired action, but the end goal should not vary. Including just three questions as CTAs in your email can increase your chances of getting a response by 50%. For example, you can ask prospects to reply with a convenient time or give them a scheduling link to book a time with you. In both cases, the desired action is fixing up a meeting, but the methods vary.

5. Signature

The email signature is your space to add a bit of personality. Along with sharing your contact details and company website, you can choose to share a resource that will help people you are contacting, a tagline about yourself, or a feel-good quote. It just adds a bit of a personal touch to the emails your send.

The Ideal length of a follow-up email

Nobody reads through a lengthy follow-up email and acts on it. Your follow-up email should be crisp, to the point, and professional. Emails having 75 to 100 words yield the highest response rate of 51%.

Incorporating video in your follow-up email strategy is a great idea. 

Videos are more engaging, easy to consume, and pack a lot of information in just a few minutes. They are a fantastic alternative to plain text emails, offer significant advantages, and can be implemented in just a few clicks if you have the right tool.

Rafiki offers an exclusive follow-up module where you can snippet and send videos of key meeting moments in your follow-up email. Prospects receive complete context of the information shared and are free to share the same snippets with their stakeholders or decision makers without any information leak.

The best part? Rafiki tracks link shares and opens and alerts the rep when meeting snippets get opened. Reps can get on an in-app chat and engage prospects instantly when prospects are interested. Here’s how following up on Rafiki works.

Companies like Hippo Video specialize specifically in sales engagement videos. Incidentally, they are also Rafiki customers.

When to send follow-up emails

The right time to send a follow-up email varies according to the context. Sending a follow-up email within 12 hours of a demo meeting is recommended, whereas a gap of at least 2 to 3 days is the recommended time gap if the follow-up is to a previous email. There is no right time or number set for follow-up emails. 80% of sales require at least 5 follow-ups. So the ideal follow-up sequence should have 5-7 spaced-out emails that try to engage the prospect, nudge them to take the desired action, or give them an out. Giving them an out ensures that you can contact them at a later time instead of them having to block your email or unsubscribe to your domain – effectively blocking out all your future chances.

A tool like Rafiki enables reps to see the entire thread of deal activity such as meetings, calls, and emails on a single screen. The data gets synced directly from your CRM, so you know precisely what happened on each deal and can send out follow-up emails accordingly. Rafiki also alerts you for warnings like idle deals, ghosted accounts, single-threaded communication, etc., so you can take control of deals not moving forward, re-kindle prospect interest, and close more deals.

Some Templates Of Good Follow-up Emails

Template 1 – Follow-up to a cold email or cold call

Sub: Solve <Business Pain Point>

Hello <First Name>,

<Personal Line such as Congratulations on your funding or great post on Twitter about topic>

I tried reaching you a couple of days back but looks like you were busy. I am <Name> from <company>. I’m mailing you again as I believe we have a solution to your <Business Pain point>.

<Your Company> helps solve <pain-point> for <prospect designation> at customer company 1, 2.. Etc by <doing solution>. Is that something you’re interested to explore?

Thanks,

<Name>

<Designation>

Template 2 – Post-demo follow up

Sub: Thanks for your time
Here’s how your email body will look when a follow-up gets sent from Rafiki with time-stamped comments

Prospects can directly click the links to view their meeting and collateral shared in context of the discussion.

Template – 3 – Following up after product evaluation/trial

Sub: Love using <product>?
Hello <First.Name>,

Love using <Product>? You have used <product feature metric> <X> times. 

For example, Words checked for Grammarly, videos tracked with Wistia, etc.

If you’d like to continue having access to our premium features, please upgrade to <Plan> by <Trial end date>.

<Discount Line with urgency> 

For example Psst… I can get you an additional discount of 20% if you purchase at least 3 licenses before <trial end date>. Just reply to this email and I will share the code with you.

Thanks,

<Name>

<Designation>

<Company>

<Optional Quote/Resource>

You could use any of these templates or 1000s of others available and adapt them to the follow-up context and strategy you want to pursue. Be careful to give enough thought and run through hygiene checklists before configuring follow-up sequences to ensure you offer your first meeting a chance to see the finish line!

Oh, and feel free to share this article with your friends looking to set up a follow-up email strategy. Let us know which template you like the most. Our favorite is number 2! 

Want to try out Rafiki for your organization? Book a personalized demo or drop a line to sales@getrafiki.ai.

The goal of any sale is a favorable exchange of value or service for monetary compensation. The sales models vary across industry, deal-stage, or designation, but the framework of value exchange remains the same. This blog discusses talk tracks, a conversation structure used by salespersons to favorably navigate their sales interactions with prospects, customers, or other stakeholders, and how to build winning ones.

What are talk tracks?

Simply put, a talk track is a conversation structure designed to assist salespeople while they converse with prospects and stakeholders. The goal of a talk track is to help the sales person push communication with prospects towards closing by gathering required information (qualification), communicating the value of their offering (pitch), and answering questions or concerns potential customers might have (objection handling). 

How are they different from a script?

Call scripts offer little flexibility to the salesperson to take control of the conversation. Call scripts take a one-size-fits-all approach. All reps must do is stick to the call script no matter what prospects say. It is assumed that this call script will give the highest success rate. 

On the other hand, talk tracks only give a direction for sales reps to follow. They are a set of conversational cues listed together to help salespeople set the tone, and take control of the conversation. The sales reps can steer the conversation as they fit after considering their prospects’ inputs. They enable reps to take more of a customizable approach to selling.

Key Differences

Talk tracks suit companies that have not yet nailed their pitch, whereas call scripts are better for companies that have their pitch locked in and want to scale their selling efforts. With the sales landscape shifting almost every day, no company should rely on just one approach.

Framework to build talk tracks that win

1. Listen to your customer calls/ user research
   Good talk tracks rely on ground data and not on assumptions. The first step is to listen to your team’s calls with prospects, users, and other stakeholders. These calls will help you spot emerging patterns of objections, comments, and feedback from both successful and unsuccessful calls. If you are not already recording and transcribing your customer-facing conversations and syncing with your CRM, you lack the foundation piece for building a successful talk track.

2. Incorporate learning from step 1 and build a draft
   Once you have reviewed conversation feedback, build talk tracks that address pain points unearthed from step 1. Bucket pain points in broader categories such as budget, features, authority, and competitors. When you can bucket the issues and discussions discovered in step 1 into a set of issue categories, write down conversation cues that will help reps handle each of those categories in a real call. Take care to pre-empt questions or concerns a prospect may have while discussing your product, and also add questions that will help reps understand the prospects’ concerns. Here’s a step-by-step video of how you can use insights from Rafiki to build data-backed talk tracks.

3. Discuss with your team and iterate but leave room for personalization
   Once you have a talk track draft built, discuss it with your team and iterate it a couple more times. Don’t get to the specifics and leave some room for the reps to take control when they see fit. The key is to find an optimal middle ground between reps ‘winging it’ and following a rule book. The talk tracks must have buy-in from your team and are adopting it on their calls, or else the whole exercise is useless.

4. Coach your team with a conversation intelligence platform to perform with the talk tracks
   Don’t just rely on dry runs to coach. Monitor how reps are performing with the talk tracks on their customer calls. Actively review their conversation metrics such as talk-listen ratio, interactivity, question rate, sequence of topics discussed, and duration of each conversation topic discussed to understand the quality of their conversation and how that impacts their win rates. Appreciate when they do well with the talk track and give feedback when you feel they could improve something. Continuous training improves net sales per employee by 50%. Again, it is futile to rely on subjective opinions to build a robust talk track strategy – a conversation intelligence platform is a must-have to coach your team to be winners.

5. Improve the talk tracks continuously and don’t ignore follow-ups
   While getting out a successful talk track that is winning you demos and subsequent deals is commendable, the dynamics of your market can change in a snap. Also, having talk tracks or email templates ready for following-up post meetings is critical to retaining prospects’ interest and seeing through the deal until closing. Only 1 in 4 demos result in a conversion. A deal failing one step away from purchase is still a LOST DEAL. 

Potholes to avoid while building sales talk tracks

Feature-dumping

Making talk tracks about features and product-specific jargon without leaving space to assess prospect needs or interest is detrimental to the objective of talk tracks. The idea is to communicate value organically with use-cases as the foundation, not product engineering. 

Information overloading

Considering your reps have done solid prospecting, the talk tracks should tie value to prospects’ needs. Talking about multiple features to any prospect who has come looking for a niche functionality to solve their business problem may come off as bragging and hinder purchase decisions.

Not having a call to action

Talk tracks should incorporate a call to action for both reps and customers. Whether it is setting up the next meeting, sharing collateral, or following up, if talk tracks do not contain a call to action, the purpose of creating them is defeated. The goal is for sales reps to take control of the conversation and steer the conversation to closing.

Relying on opinions and not ground-reality

Talk tracks must be built on thorough research, data, and collaboration – not on hear-say! With plenty of conversation intelligence tools available in the market and tools such as Rafiki bringing conversation and revenue intelligence to affordable prices, not investing in such a solution is similar to handicapping yourself in a business context.

How Rafiki can help you build adaptive talk tracks

Rafiki helps you understand the ground reality of your customer conversations. It alerts you for deal risks such as competitor mentions, ghosted accounts, single-threaded conversations, and more so you can take corrective action and never miss a winnable deal. Unlike traditional conversation intelligence solutions that stop at demo analysis, Rafiki helps you contextually follow up with prospects post-demo, and ensure that your deals close.

You can build successful talk tracks by leveraging Rafiki’s AI-generated topic tracks for each meeting to ensure your reps are saying the right things at the right time.

With Rafiki’s topic search across meetings, notes, deals, and emails, you can spot emerging patterns, tweak your talk tracks, and stay ahead of the curve.

Get Rafiki today and build deal-winning talk tracks in days, not months! Want to know more about how you can leverage customer conversations to win more deals? Reach us at sales@getrafiki.ai for a free consultation with our sales experts.

Not all well-done demo meetings convert to closed deals. According to a published Softletter report, SaaS companies report trial-conversion rates of 25%. At that rate, your business is losing 3 out of 4 prospects with ‘buying intent’. While there could be many reasons, the advent of remote selling has resulted in shrinking attention spans and an information hoard in buyers’ inboxes. Reps in 2022 who still follow typical sales follow-up strategies to get the attention of their prospects after demos are seriously underequipped. Legacy sales follow-up strategies that rely on templated email sequences at best delay deal closings and at worst bust winnable deals. A critical gap in the effectiveness of typical B2B sales follow-up approaches becomes evident when they get put through the numbers test. This gap of ineffective post-demo sales follow-up acts as a silent killer of revenue. 

This blog sheds light on FIVE reasons why legacy sales follow-up strategies are ineffective in the B2B selling landscape of 2022.

1. Missed points during demos due to limited attention span

Reps do all the hard work of getting the demo with prospects and delivering pitches that they have rehearsed multiple times. But they can not always communicate all the key selling points in a meeting, either due to lack of time or not having appropriate information ready to respond to the plethora of questions from prospects about the service. Even if they somehow manage to squeeze in all of the critical points whether those points stick with prospects is a serious question. A recent study by Microsoft concluded that the human attention span has dropped to eight seconds – shrinking nearly 25% in just a few years. The undelivered selling points and key factors that prospects misconceive, along with their distracted attention spans grievously stall the flow from demo to deal.

2. Ineffective follow-up methods

As a standard practice, most sales follow-ups boil down to creating and automating an email sequence or using a typical email recap of prior meetings with some action items. According to Gartner, ​​only 23.9% of sales emails get opened. The optimal number of follow-up emails to send is 2-3.

Reps must capture the attention of prospects and keep their interest alive within these 2-3 spaced-out emails. If not, they stand to lose winnable deals despite doing the hard work of capturing attention and delivering a good pitch. Just spaced out, old-school text emails do not cut it anymore. Reps need to reinforce their follow-up message with compelling, personalized content that cuts through the noise of inundated inboxes.

3. Surface-level personalization without context

“Hey {first.name}, how’s the weather at {city}?” is no longer active personalization. Emails with “Circling back”, “Touch-base” and other such jargon find themselves in the trash folder. They are perceived as mere sales attempts by prospects and not as value-add emails to follow up. Typical personalized messages as part of follow-up sequences, even after a great demo meeting, still do not have the desired effect on prospects because they offer no context of prior meetings.

To offer complete context, throwbacks in the emails must refer to key demo moments with the prospect.

However, the throwback references make the emails much longer to create, and generic links to the entire meeting from a typical conversation intelligence tool stand to lose prospect attention. Who has the time to review the whole meeting looking for context? Reps get caught in a catch-22 situation that hinders them from taking their deal forward – despite having the recording from legacy conversation intelligence tools if at all they have one.

4. Non-centralized information

Even in the rare case that reps have delivered all value-adding points, followed up with the whole context, and sent all persuasive material to their prospects, the lack of centralized information comes back to bite them. The prospects have to sift through lengthy email threads, and application-hop to find collateral, and validate their purchase recommendation to multiple sources to their higher-ups. The lack of centralized information on the deal hurts the deal itself.

77% of B2B buyers say their latest purchase was either “Difficult” or “Very Complex”. They have to hop across meeting videos, phone calls, battle cards, pricing sheets, and chats with reps to consolidate information. They have no incentive to put in additional effort to prove a certain offering is better, especially when they are pressed with their daily organizational duties. It is fair to assume, they are unlikely to do a thorough job!

According to Forbes, 67% of B2B buyers say easy access to pricing and competitive information is vital to their purchase decision, and 75% say it is very important for vendors to share relevant content that speaks directly to their needs. Prospects would choose a solution that offers them consolidated information. While the lack of unified information causes the prospects’ side to take a ‘less-than-best’ decision, it also ends up undoing all the hard work of reps close to closing the deal.

5. No one buys alone. Multiple decision-making stakeholders looped in late

According to Forbes, “The B2B buying group consists of 6 to 10 decision-makers, each armed with four to five pieces of information they have gathered independently, and all must communicate with one another to figure out whether they should buy the solution.” The buyer enablement material reps share with prospects should cater to each buyer-side stakeholder’s information requirements. In many cases, the decision-makers are looped in at later stages and have to make decisions based on the recommendation of juniors without much information or context. The onus once again falls on the reps to deliver centralized information, with the whole meeting context to all cadres of decision-makers, and enable them to make purchases best suited to their needs.

The solution to follow-up better and close deals faster

Reps need to have better post-meeting sales engagement tools that are game-changers to truly help them to reach out to prospects with the whole meeting and communication context, answer their questions in reference to their meetings, offer a centralized source of information, and can act as an information trove for stakeholders looped in late to the party. Such needs had to be fulfilled by different applications serving specific purposes before Rafiki!

Rafiki is an AI-powered sales engagement intelligence platform that enables sales teams to close deals 20% faster. With Rafiki, reps can record & transcribe meetings, create video snippets of key meeting moments flagged by Rafiki’s AI, add in-line comments to the snippets and share them with prospects through a deal-exclusive communication channel. Rafiki enables reps to share meeting information and address prospects’ questions async with the whole meeting context. Rafiki helps reps act as a concierge service throughout the prospects’ buying journey and deliver a great buying experience. By enabling reps to give a cohesive buying experience, Rafiki helps accelerate the process from demo to deal and ensures that winnable deals never slip out of reps’ hands.