7 Effective Follow-Up Techniques to Close More Sales
So you aced your first outreach email. That’s great news. But now what?
Do you wait a few days or follow up instantly?
Email, phone call, or LinkedIn?
And what should you say?
Yes, your initial message matters. But your next move strengthens the relationship, keeps you top-of-mind, and proves your worth.
Let’s look at exactly how to bag that lead with strategic follow-up.
Why Sales Follow-Ups Matter
A sales follow-up is any message sent to prospects after your outreach message and before closing.
Most sales teams use follow-up sequences. The only real alternative is sitting back and waiting for a response—but that’s a fast track to being forgotten. Once you’re out of sight, you’re usually out of mind.
A report by Belkins found that sending three cold emails is the approach most likely to generate a lead.
You need to stay consistent and continually establish value to get the deal.
Here are some common bad habits you’ll see in follow-up strategies:
Giving up too early
Over messaging
Getting stuck in one channel
Sending generic messages
Poor timing
Just to be clear, any follow-up is better than none. Often, leads disengage because they’re busy. Perhaps your email got buried, or a more urgent message grabbed their attention.
In these cases, even an average follow-up introduces an additional touchpoint and replants you in their minds.
But that leaves a lot on the table. And so-so messaging will not convince cold or uncertain leads to buy. It may even put them off.
So how do you find the sweet spot to win more deals? The answer is taking a measured approach with regular check-ins without going overboard.
Here are a few examples of scenarios where follow-ups improve the sales process:
Initial phone call:
Scenario: You call a potential client. The sales pitch goes well, but the lead says they need to speak with their business partner before deciding.
Follow-up: If you don’t follow up, any concerns the partner shares may fester. Instead, send a brief text or email. Attach a case study that shows how your product helped a similar business overcome a pain point they’re facing.
Demo:
Scenario: You run a great demo. The potential customer enjoys it and promises to “get in touch soon,” but you never hear back.
Follow-up: Here, the lead likely forgot to respond due to their busy schedule. If you don’t reply, they’re lost. But if you follow up with a quick text message, email, or phone call, you remind them of your offer and prompt them to close the deal.
Cold email:
Scenario: You send an outreach email to a sales lead who perfectly matches your ICP but do not receive a response.
Follow-up: Rather than stopping there, you send a personalized LinkedIn message reacting to recent company news.
In each example, the sales cycle could have ended after the initial contact. Instead, you grabbed and held the prospect’s attention by adding value, keeping the conversation alive.
If you’d like to see how Ava, Artisan’s AI business development rep (BDR), automates personalized follow-up at scale, get in touch to arrange a demo.
7 Proven Follow-Up Techniques to Boost Sales Success
Excelling at follow-up is about implementing a proven system and refining it to align with the nuances of your business.
Let’s look at the seven techniques that underlie successful follow-up campaigns.
1. Personalize Your Approach
So you write follow-up messages like, “Hi, I just thought I’d check in and ask how things were going,” but you don’t get a response?
Here’s the issue: these are generic statements that prospects have seen many, many times before.
To build trust, shift the focus from your goals to the prospect’s. This means increasing relevance through personalization. Tailoring messages is now the norm, and 67% of B2B buyers get frustrated when messages aren’t personalized.
Inject personalized details into your follow-up efforts by mentioning:
Names
Pain points
The most relevant product features and benefits
Recent company news
Website activity
Success stories from similar customers
You may not have all the data you need to tailor messages, especially if you’re following up after a cold email. The good news, however, is that you can access databases that scrape insights from many sources.
An effective sales tool will provide easy access to the data you need to personalize messages, including real-time company updates, demographics, and firmographics.
For example, Artisan’s Data Miner scrapes data from multiple sources. It checks the accuracy of this data and uses it to automatically personalize follow-up messages.
2. Recognize That Timing is Everything
You need to find that Goldilocks zone between annoying the prospect and losing their interest.
Research by Belkins shows that the first B2B cold email follow-up yields 31% more responses at the three-day point. Waiting longer than five days lowers the likelihood of a reply to 24%. Even worse, a shotgun follow-up within 24 hours leaves you at just 20%.
If you don’t get a response after the first follow-up, it’s time to take an asynchronous approach. Leave a little more time after each message so you don’t overwhelm the prospect.
Here’s an example follow-up schedule for a prospect who doesn’t engage:
Outreach message: Day 1
First follow-up: Day 4
Second follow-up: Day 8
Third follow-up: Day 14
Fourth follow-up: Day 21
While you need to slow your approach for leads who don’t engage, positive responses like “Sounds good! I’d love to hear more” require quick reactions. Follow up within 12-24 hours, and be sure your notifications are on.
In addition to spacing, consider the time of day you want to send your message or call. Perhaps your prospect tends to have meetings in the morning or take long lunch breaks.
As a rule of thumb, cold emails have the highest response rates on Wednesday mornings between 7 am and 11 am.
3. Use Multiple Channels Effectively
Don’t get stuck in one channel. If you’ve sent several emails and haven’t received a reply, follow up with a phone call or social media message.
Of course, there’s a limit. You don’t want to call, text, and email the same prospect every day. But there’s no need for channel exclusivity at this stage of the relationship! You likely don’t know the lead's preferred means of communication at this point.
Here's how sales reps should write messages for each channel:
This is the most conventional follow-up channel, and leads expect to be contacted.
The upside? You’re less invasive. The downside? You’re competing with hundreds of messages.
Keep it brief and positive. Hook them with a snappy, personalized subject line, and consider including visuals or video for extra engagement. But don’t expect quick responses.
Phone
Sales prospecting by phone allows the salesperson to talk through the prospect’s concerns and build a relationship.
When the lead doesn’t pick up a follow-up call, a short voicemail is the next step. Remember to prepare a script and be ready to respond to typical pushbacks.
SMS and WhatsApp Messages
These channels are for warm leads. SMS and WhatsApp are personal spaces where prospects also speak to friends and family, so you shouldn’t go overboard.
Keep messages ultra-short, ask permission first, and always offer opt-outs. The beauty of SMS and chat apps is that you can send quicker follow-ups and enjoy a more fluid conversation.
Stay conversational on this channel and capitalize on shared connections. It’s also a natural place to mention company updates. Be engaging and end with an open question like “Would you like to learn more?” as the CTA.
Combining Multiple Channels
Consistency is key when using multiple channels at the same time. Focus on the same pain points, solutions, and CTAs.
Here’s what a multichannel follow-up sequence looks like in practice:
Send a personalized sales email highlighting relevant product benefits.
Call the prospect to explain how your product can help with a specific pain point and ask if they’d like more information.
Follow up by email again to share a story of a similar customer that overcame the pain point previously mentioned.
Send a LinkedIn message celebrating some company news and reiterating your product benefits.
When in doubt, prioritize email. Prospects expect follow-ups in their inbox, so messages feel less intrusive.
However, there’s another vital point to keep in mind. If a lead specifically shares that they hate WhatsApp messages or phone calls, listen. And when things are going well and you have an active conversation on one channel, stick to it. Don’t fix what ain’t broke.
4. Use Follow-Up Templates
Writing a good follow-up message takes time. Don’t make reps choose between sending a compelling message and completing other important tasks.
Like a cold email template, a follow-up template speeds up responses. It saves time, allowing you to focus on personalization and in-person meetings. You’ll benefit from using different templates for different scenarios.
Here are several templates for key follow-up moments:
Template for following up after a discovery call:
Hi [first name], I wanted to touch base after our call yesterday. Would you like me to send a personalized plan for [business name], including [relevant features]?”
Template for following up after a proposal:
Hi [first name], I am checking in about the proposal sent on [date] for [product name]. Do you need any more information about how [solution] will [list key benefits]?
Template for re-engaging a dormant lead:
Hi [first name], We've added some huge updates to [product] that we think you'll value. Our new feature [feature name] will [feature benefits]. Just click reply if you’d like more info.”
Regardless of the situation, always end a cold email or follow up with a clear CTA. Keep it low-pressure and open-ended to encourage them to seek more information.
Want to cut even more time from the follow-up process? Use an AI tool like Artisan, which automatically personalizes tested templates and sends follow-ups when prospects are most likely to respond.
If you’d like to see Artisan’s AI BDR in action, connecting with and converting your ideal prospects, get in touch to schedule a demo.
5. Offer Value with Every Interaction
Sales follow-ups are best kept at 25 to 50 words. But that doesn’t mean you can’t offer value.
Consider sending additional resources:
Infographics
Customer stories
Guides
Reports
Industry insights
Tailor each piece of information to prospects’ goals and concerns. A
Are they struggling with their budget? Explain how your product provides a good return on investment.
Are they short-staffed and overwhelmed? Demonstrate how your product will save team members’ time.
The more you know, the better you can empathize, share relevant examples, and provide convincing data. So ask prospective clients what they're struggling with to gain a clearer picture wherever possible.
And once they’ve requested more insights, respond quickly to maintain momentum.
6. Invest in Automation Tools
Sales reps spend less than 30% of their time actually selling. Automation isn’t just a nice thing to have. It’s a necessity.
With follow-up, a template is a good start. But tools take scalability and efficiency to the next level.
But it’s not just scale that improves. You also send better messages. Cold email marketing software has advanced reporting that optimizes your schedule and content.
And before you say anything – automated messaging doesn’t equal boring, ChatGPTisms a savvy prospect will spot a mile off.
For example, Artisan’s AI BDR Ava constantly analyzes which messages have the highest engagement and conversion rates for each customer segment.
AI BDR Ava provides the following features that support personalized, effective follow-up:
Database of over 300 million B2B leads
Extensive scraping with the innovative AI Data Miner feature
Ongoing data enrichment and hygiene monitoring
Email warmup to optimize deliverability
Real-time reporting and A/B testing of message elements
Artisan enables reps to scale messaging without losing the human touch. If you’d like to see how all of these features and more can work for your business, get in touch to schedule a demo.
7. Know When to Persist and When to Move On
Despite your best efforts, not every lead will evolve into a customer. You need to know when to call it quits. Cold email follow-up messages can’t continue indefinitely.
So how do you know when to push on or let go?
Signs That Leads Aren’t Interested
Here are common signs a potential customer is no longer interested:
No response
Emails left unopened
No website visits
Continued postponing
In the worst-case scenario, asking to end contact or marking you as spam
If you’re seeing these signs or getting no response after two to four follow-ups, it’s time to move on.
But there’s a big caveat. Don’t give up too early.
Signs That Leads Might Still Be Interested
Here are positive signs that a partially unresponsive lead is still interested:
Providing exact dates for a next meeting (even if they don’t respond subsequently)
Generally responding, albeit with long delays
Reaching out (especially without request) after a period of no contact
Accessing your website and resources
If you’re still seeing some of these behaviors, send a follow-up email asking if they need more information. There’s still a chance of closing a deal.
How to Say “Goodbye” to a Lead
If it’s looking like leads are nonresponsive, send a goodbye message (no need for tears) and let them know you’ll be back in a year or six months. This leaves the door open for coming back, especially for high-quality leads.
Things to include in a “goodbye for now” message:
Add urgency with a “last chance” style follow-up
Mention your key benefit again
Include an option for them to get back in touch
Give the length of time until your re-engagement email
Ironically, stopping contact is one of the best ways to elicit a response from a disengaged lead. It may inspire them to reconnect as they don’t want to lose the opportunity.
When it comes to cold email sequences, the “goodbye message” should be part of a structured schedule for non-responders.
Here is a sample follow-up sequence that ends in a goodbye:
Cold outreach email
Value-adding follow-up via email
Phone call, plus voicemail
LinkedIn message mentioning a mutual connection
Penultimate email
Farewell email
Don’t be afraid to get back in touch down the line. The landscape changes, and it’s possible that the disengaged prospect will be interested in the future.
Send High-Quality Follow-Ups at Scale With AI
Successful follow-up sequences require consistency and value. You need to send at least four messages, staggered over two weeks, to every lead. All while ensuring they’re laser-focused on your clients' pain points.
However, this type of quality follow-up takes time. That’s why sales teams are increasingly turning to AI to automate and scale their campaigns. A platform like Artisan sends hundreds of deeply personalized follow-ups a day.
Want to see how Artisan and AI BDR Ava can transform your whole outbound sales cycle? Get in touch to arrange a demo.
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