The Follow-Up Cliff: 80% of Sales Happen After Contact #5

Here's the mismatch that's killing your revenue:

80% of sales require 5+ follow-ups to close.

48% of salespeople never follow up once.

Of those who do, 44% quit after one attempt.

You're abandoning deals right before they would have closed.

I call it the "follow-up cliff" because that's what happens:

Most businesses fall off somewhere between 2 and 3.

They interpret silence as rejection.

It's not rejection. It's just silence.

When a lead goes quiet, your brain says: "They're not interested."

Here's what's actually happening:

They're busy. Average person gets 121 emails/day. Yours got buried.

They're not ready yet. They had motivation when they filled out your form. It faded. Problem still exists.

They forgot. Life happened. Kids. Work. Your business isn't on their radar until you put it there.

They don't trust you yet. Multiple touches from the same company builds familiarity.

None of these are "no."

They're "not yet."

If you're stopping at 2, you're capturing 5% of your potential.

Property client. Good leads. Experienced team.

Conversion: 23%.

We audited:

They were generating demand and handing it to competition.

We rebuilt the sequence:

Same leads. Same team.

Conversion: 68%.

The difference wasn't better leads.

It was not giving up.

Humans are terrible at systematic follow-up.

We get discouraged. Second no-response = "they're not interested."

We get busy. New leads come in. Old leads slip through.

We cherry-pick. We work "hot" leads and ignore "cold" ones.

We lose track. Did I call yesterday or 5 days ago?

This is why high-close-rate businesses take humans out of follow-up.

Systems do the follow-up.

Humans do the conversations.

Following up 7 times on the same channel isn't 7 follow-ups.

It's annoying them 7 times.

Real follow-up is multi-channel:

Each channel catches people in different contexts.

Our best sequences: 4+ channels, 12+ touches, first 30 days.

How many leads in your CRM got fewer than 5 follow-ups?

If you're like most businesses: over 90%.

Those aren't dead leads.

They're unconverted leads.

There's a difference.