QUESTION: After sending out bulk marketing email, what is the suggested timeframe for a first followup call and what simple verbiage would you use? – Lance

ANSWER: So I am assuming you are saying you sent out one, let us say on Monday, for those you did not hear back from, my second attempt would be an email.  Repetition is the mother of learning, so I would just forward the original one which is simply reminding them of the same message.   I think it is under the flag of persistence.

My email said,

In a recent engaged search I uncovered an individual that was 137% of quota with 80% of that revenue being new business development.

I am also going to leave that same message in a voicemail too.  If I am leaving a completely different message, I am not connecting all the dots of my persistence in trying to get a hold of them.  If you think about it, especially with email, sometimes if we forget to reply to an email within 24 hours, it is on page 3 of our inbox and we never get back to it.

The second email resets the clock with the people receiving the first email.  Some people are still more auditory than visual.  Eighty percent of the population is visual.

The third message is basically the same message in a voicemail that you sent in an email.  Somebody will think, “Oh, I did want to follow up with that”.  Every time you reset the clock, you give them another avenue to reply to you.  I would be doing it every two to three days, alternating voicemail and email with a very similar message.

The last message I would leave would be verbal and it would be,

Hey, same message, I have reached out to you a few times. Hey Lance, just as a matter of professional courtesy, if you could call me back at ___-___ I would greatly appreciate it.

Should there be a third call?  Yes, there should be five to seven attempts over three weeks.  It is not scientific and is not necessarily two emails, one voicemail, another email, and another voicemail.  Generally though, I was probably five or six on the marketing attempt side, especially by the way with prospects.

If they get a hold of you and they are mildly irritated, you go, you should see what we do to go after candidates.  In the market we are in, if it was easy as sending inmails to a bunch of LinkedIn profiles, which is what I am sure your internal recruiting is doing, you would have the job filled.

Not knocking your internal recruiting department, but we have the bandwidth based on the way we have engineered our search process to try and get a hold of these people five to seven times and it is the best candidates, the ones you are actually not going to have a lot of competition for that reply back to us after five or six attempts that are the ones you want to work with.  So if you are working with a hiring manager and you are making five to seven attempts over three weeks, use that as part of your persistence sales strategy with them on what you are going to do with candidates.  Great question.  Thank you for submitting it.