Resisting the Urge to Repeat? Not!

Ask a question and wait for a response, no matter how long it takes, is one piece of advice given to newbie salespeople. In other words, resist the urge to repeat your question, instead waiting- wait for an answer. Your prospect will inevitably feel moved to fill the silence, is the theory. Some health experts agree, citing repetition compulsion, or called trauma reenactment, which involves repeating physically or emotionally painful situations that happened in the past.

Not all sales trainers are on board with the advice about waiting for prospects to respond. “The mistake many people make–including me–is not following up often enough,” Minda Zetlin writes in Inc. Magazine. “When customers don’t hear from you for a while, they’re liable to forget you just at the moment when you want to be top of mind,” she says. Ask yourself, Zetlin advises, if there’s a follow-up note you can send with additional metrics or other information that will help your potential customer make a decision. Meanwhile, the trainer adds, “You don’t want to make the classic mistake of losing customers you already have while you’re busy landing new business.”

Hubspot agrees with Zetlin’s approach, saying that following up on a sales call or email significantly increases your chances of getting a response. Research shows that if you add just one more follow-up email, you can increase your average reply rate by eleven percentage points. In fact, first followup emails show. a 40%-increase in reply rate in comparison to the first email.

At Say It For You, after years of being involved in all aspects of blog writing and blogging training, one irony I’ve found is that business owners who “follow up” with new content on their websites are rare. There’s a tremendous fall-off rate, with most blogs abandoned months or even weeks after they’re begun. Blog marketing maven Neil Patel reminds business owners and practitioners that “Google isn’t shy about rewarding websites that publish regular, high-quality content.” The “frequency illusion”, Mark Zimmer adds, means that each time a customer is exposed to the message there is a sense of omnipresence.

At least when it comes to blogging for business, resisting the urge to repeat is not the way to go!