Once you have solved the first challenge, that is: attracting prospects to our web site, the challenge lies in generating the most profit from the existing flow of leads.

The typical marketer usually sends out a single brochure or catalog, make one sales follow up call, or send out one fax, and then sit back and wait...

He hopes the prospect will visit his web site, place orders, or e-mail with further questions. Even seasoned marketers sometimes neglect the crucial sales follow up activity. I've done it at times myself.

When you think of long distance phone and fax calls, and snail mail letters, then sales follow up can become expensive, but on line sales follow up through e-mail is extremely low cost, and could be considered the ideal sales follow up marketing tool.

Why Could You Need A Sales Follow Up?

Because it's a fact that most people typically don't buy as a result of marketing contact.

I suppose that you receive as much e-mail as I do, and read in magazines and newspapers as many ads as I do, and see in TV and even walking by the streets as many advertises as I do. Do you really pay attention to them? Do you believe them?

Well, I don't know which is your answer, but most of people don't. It's a studied case that people need to be exposed not less than 7 times to the same ad to start believing in it. So definitely success is in the sales follow up, not only because it will produce the sales you are waiting for but because it's not unusual for some sales follow up marketing contacts, to generate approximately the same percentage of sales or other desired action as the initial contact.

Why initial marketing contacts don't work? For many reasons like:

* A second marketing contact makes the prospect forget about your offer

* Procrastination makes that people misplace offers

* Prospect accidentally deletes your e-mail

* Prospect is so busy that although he likes your offer, now he hasn't enough time to consider it seriously

* Not yet decided

* Not yet enough information

* Not enough money at this time

* Your prospect haven't yet developed enough trust in you

* Etc.

So the more contacts you have with your prospects, the greater chance they will finally act on your offer.

But in a home business sales process there are many different stages, some of your prospects will need only a few contacts to act, others might need months of sales follow up. And the question is will you persist with your home business sales follow up long enough to motivate your real prospects to act on your offer?

If you want maximum sales, you should seriously consider implementing a systematic sales follow up system. Otherwise, you will most probably waste a significant percentage of resources you invest to acquire your leads.

Once your ads start pulling prospects to your web site, a good sales follow up is the most important task that you must assume. You have to convince your might be clients, that you have the best product or service there is, and that's only done with a good sales follow up.

Once one of your prospects visits your web site, or reads one of your ads, you need to obtain his e-mail address, in order to follow up showing him different benefits of your product/service, over the following weeks or months.

You can do the sales follow up of your prospects in three ways:

* By hand sales follow up.

* Autoresponder's sales follow up

* Full automatic marketing sales follow up

We will talk now about the first way, and you can read about the other two following the links

By Hand Sales Follow Up:

You have to open several files for the different sales follow up stages, your might be customers will go through, like:

* "e-mail addresses.txt": Here you will put every e-mail address that you harvest from the web

* "e-mail addresses2.txt" : Here you will put all the e-mail addresses of the people to whom you have already mailed your offer, to follow up them with a new offer after a while

* "e-mail addresses 3,4,5,6 etc.txt" : Here you will put e-mail addresses of the people that received your 3rd follow up offer e-mail, 4th follow up offer e-mail, etc.

* "prospects.txt": Here you have to put the e-mail addresses of the people that reply to your offer

* "prospects 2,3,4,5 etc.txt": For the different sales follow up messages you use

* "customers.txt" Here go the ones that finally bought from you. If you work a MLM Network you will call this follow up file downline.txt

* "customers or downline 2,3,4,5,etc.txt" For the sales follow up messages you will need to send offering new products to your customers, or training your downline

* "removes.txt": this is a VERY important file where you should put all those that asked you to remove them from your mailing lists.

And the way to use this sales follow up files is like this: Suppose you open "e-mail addresses.txt" and make a mailing with your mailing program. Once you finish the mailing you will have to "Save As" the file as "e-mail addresses2.txt" and erase all the e-mail list from e-mail addresses.txt

Every day you will have to check whom you have to make a sales follow up, with a new e-mail, and to do that you will need to have a spreadsheet with dates for every file with the following columns

* name of the file

* follow up date

* follow up date

* follow up date

* follow up date

* follow up date

Sales follow up is a job that will take time from you but, if you aren't very precise you will end sending the same message twice or not sending all the needed sales follow up messages, which will end up with no sales.

But if you want to have an easy home business, for your sales follow up, you must think in using an Autoresponder, or better a full automatic marketing follow up