Did you know, According to a study by Brevet, 80% of sales require an average of five sales follow-ups in order to close the deal?
However, 44% of sales reps follow up with a prospect only once before giving up. After four follow-ups, 94% of salespeople have given up.
We know what you’re thinking: five sales follow-ups seem like a lot. Especially since salespeople often get a reputation for being pushy and you don’t want to come across as annoying. But here’s why we recommend it…

Most people, especially professionals, have hundreds of emails flying through their inboxes each week. So it’s important to be tenacious if you want to grab their attention.
If you want to see your sales go up, be gutsy and increase your number of follow-ups.
Then, ask yourself: are your follow-ups as effective as they could be?
There’s more to mastering the art of following up than just following up often. For example, there are different ways you can do it which will determine whether you are ignored or whether you close the deal.
Here are four tips for making the most of your sales follow-ups:
1. Use a variety of sales follow-up methods
Don’t just stick to one mode of sales follow-up. After sending two emails and still getting no-where, pick up the phone and try giving your prospect a call. If you’re connected to LinkedIn, you could also try reaching them on there.
2. Always provide value
Each time you communicate with your prospects you should be giving them value. At the end of the day, the only thing that prospects care about is what’s in it for them. A rule of thumb to remember is that whenever you’re trying to sell, switch your perspective from “me” to “you”.
3. Space it out
Leave enough time between each follow-up so that your prospect doesn’t feel harassed, but not so much time that your competitors get to them first. Decision makers need to be given enough time to process the information, so make sure you’re not following up too close together.
4. Perfect your sales follow-up email subject line
The subject line will determine whether a prospect opens your sales follow-up email, so take time to perfect it. You should always go back to it at the end and make sure that you’re happy with it, never rush it and hope for the best.
Some tips to consider when crafting your subject line:
- Try and create urgency
- Questions cause intrigue
- Keep it short and sweet
- Make sure it’s relevant to the email
- Conversational tone is inviting
Do you feel like more clarity in your sales process would enable you to put these tips to good use?
We’ve worked with hundreds of businesses and we know that a key problem for many salespeople is lack of clarity. It’s impossible to sell at your best when you don’t know what your next steps are or which leads to prioritize your time on.
That’s where the Stack sales enablement tools such as our digital playbook can be really beneficial, as it provides a clear and structured breakdown of all the activities, next steps, and key messaging you need to perform at your best.
We’ve recorded a short demo to show you exactly how this works, you can access it for free here: