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Fear & Loathing of the Customer Follow Up

It can be hard to manage a marketing strategy with your head in the sand, yet it is amazing how many sales and marketing directors don't know, or perhaps don't want to know what happens when their person goes on a sales appointment.

Achieving Quality Leads arranges B2B appointments for our clients. These are carefully qualified and confirmed. Our clients make a big investment in our work. But with some, when we ask them what happened on a sales appointment, they can't tell us.

For example, following a major B2B campaign during which we arranged over a 100 appointments for a company, we offered to do post-appointment phoning to find out how it went? Did the salesperson show up on time, or even show up? Did the prospect get the information they wanted? We would then determine the likelihood of doing business. Well, we were asked NOT to carry out this customer follow up, and were told "Off the record, I shudder to find out the truth."

How can you expect to have customer retention, if you fear the basics of customer acquisition?

The customer relationship began with our call, where did it go from there?

Also, companies often let themselves down when they don't do immediate customer follow up after taking a stand at an exhibition. Those business cards that cost so much to collect, end up shoved to the back of the sales person's drawer, only to be pulled out after so much time that whatever warmth the lead once had it had turned stone cold.

The marketing strategy was to invest in the exhibition one would presume because there was a prospect of gain, yet where was the strategy for customer follow up? Perhaps the saddest case AQL has come across is that of a name brand electronics company that ended an exhibition with a business card-filled shoebox. Instead of putting together a marketing strategy with those very warm leads, that would lead to customer retention, the shoebox was packed away in the storeroom with the stand. It was only discovered the following year when it was time to use the stand again. Clearly, no post-exhibition marketing strategy or customer follow up there. And no one asked the simple question," What was our return on investment from that expensive exhibition we did?" They were too busy with their head in the sand and didn't want to know. Instead of being in the sand, their head should have been on the chopping block. No doubt the executive responsible got promoted.

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