How to Increase Follow Up Rate Between Sales Calls

Between-call follow-up rate is the share of deals sitting between call one and call two that get at least one substantive contact from you. Lift it by putting call two in both diaries before call one ends, then sending a written recap inside 24 hours. Gong’s analysis of 28,833 closed deals found the fastest-closing deals spent 53% more first-meeting time on next steps than deals with a slow sales cycle.

• The metric: gap deals touched at least once within two business days ÷ all gap deals.
• The companion metric: diary coverage — the share of first calls that end with call two already scheduled.
• The failure sentence: “they said they’d get back to me.” That is not a pipeline status.
• The first lever: book call two in the room. Everything else in the gap is repair work.
• The stop rule: day 21. After that the record is long-term nurture, not an open deal.

How is follow-up rate between sales calls actually measured?

Almost nobody measures this stage, which is why almost nobody fixes it. Two numbers do the job.

Between-call follow-up rate = (gap deals that received at least one substantive outbound touch within two business days of call one) ÷ (all gap deals) × 100.

A gap deal is any opportunity that has completed call one and has no completed call two. A substantive touch references something specific from call one — a number the buyer gave you, a person they named, a deadline they mentioned. “Just checking in” does not count, and excluding it is the whole point: a metric that counts empty nudges reads 90% while the pipeline dies underneath it.

The second number is diary coverage: the share of first calls that end with call two already in both calendars. Track a third if you can — median gap length in days — and pull it from calendar timestamps rather than CRM activity logs, which are always optimistic.

The quotable version: if you cannot state your between-call follow-up rate to the nearest ten per cent, you do not have a follow-up problem, you have a measurement problem, and they are not the same repair.

Why do deals die between call one and call two?

Three causes, in rough order of frequency. Nothing was scheduled, so no event exists to force the deal forward. The buyer’s recall of call one decays fast, so the version of your pitch they carry into their internal conversation is a lossy summary. And the internal selling that decides the deal happens in the gap, in rooms you are not in.

The recall problem has real evidence behind it, though from an adjacent field. A review in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine found that 40–80% of medical information provided by practitioners is forgotten immediately, and almost half of what is remembered is remembered incorrectly (Kessels, 2003). That is a clinical consultation, not a sales call, and the numbers do not transfer cleanly. The mechanism does: a person leaves a high-information conversation holding much less of it than the person who ran it assumes.

The gap is where the buyer does the part of the buying you never see, and they do it holding whatever they can still remember of call one. Everything in the next section exists to replace that memory with something written down.

The Diary Test: is this still a deal, or is it a lead again?

Here is the decision rule we use, and it is the single most useful thing on this page.

The Diary Test: if call two is not in both diaries before call one ends, the deal is not in your pipeline — it is a lead again, and it should be worked at lead economics, not deal economics.

It is deliberately mechanical, because it changes three things at once. The forecast: a stage full of deals nobody has a date with is a wish list, not a stage. Ownership: gap deals get pulled into one queue with one named person accountable for the next touch, instead of sitting invisibly in a rep’s head. And cadence: a lead gets a defined sequence with a stop date, whereas a “deal” gets whatever the rep remembers to do on a slow Thursday.

Apply it out loud at the end of every first call: propose a specific day and time, send the invite while you are still on the line, and if the buyer cannot commit, record that. The deals that fail the Diary Test are exactly the ones that need the sequence below.

What should you send between call one and call two?

Most follow-up advice stops at “follow up more.” The purpose column matters more than the content column: each touch does one job, and a touch that tries to do two does neither. Days are calendar days from call one.

Seven touches over three weeks, each with a different job. After day 21 the record stops being a gap deal and becomes a nurture asset — different economics, different cadence, and the subject of our guide to long-term lead nurture with AI follow-up. Moving it there is not giving up; leaving it in the pipeline pretending is.

Which levers move between-call follow-up rate the most?

Ranked by effect on the metric, with our estimate of what each costs to install and run. The hours are operator estimates from delivery work, not a measured study, and assume a team of two to four sellers.

Change lever one first. It is the cheapest, the only one that costs nothing per deal to run, and it removes deals from the gap entirely rather than managing them inside it. Levers two to five are repair work for the deals it could not save — and there will always be some, because plenty of real buyers cannot commit to a date in the room.

A worked calculation on 100 first calls

Substitute your own numbers; the inputs below are illustrative, not measured. Say you run 100 first calls a quarter.

• 38 end with call two in both diaries. Diary coverage = 38%.
• 62 enter the gap. Of those, 19 get a substantive touch within two business days. Between-call follow-up rate = 19 ÷ 62 = 31%.
• Second calls close at 25% in this example, so 38 scheduled second calls produce roughly 9.5 closed deals, and the 62 gap deals produce whatever ad-hoc follow-up rescues — call it 8 second calls and 2 closes.
• Total: 11.5 closed deals per 100 first calls.

Now move lever one only. Diary coverage 38% → 60% puts 22 more first calls into the diary, which at the same 25% close rate is 5.5 closed deals — but that is the gross figure, and taking it as the gain is the error almost every version of this calculation makes. Those 22 deals came out of the 62-deal gap pool, where they were already producing something: at the baseline ad-hoc rescue rate of 8 second calls per 62 gap deals, 22 deals were worth 22 × (8 ÷ 62) × 25% = 0.71 closed deals. You have to net that off.

The corrected total: 60 scheduled second calls × 25% = 15.0 closes, plus the 40 deals left in the gap producing 40 × (8 ÷ 62) × 25% = 1.29 closes. 16.29 against a baseline of 11.5 — a gain of +4.8 closed deals per 100 first calls, or a 42% lift, without a single extra lead. Then lever two: of the 40 deals still in the gap, lifting between-call follow-up rate from 31% to 80% adds roughly 20 properly-worked gap deals.

At an average deal value of $8,000 — your number, not ours — the first lever alone is worth about $38,000 a quarter, and it costs one script change and a calendar link. That is why the between-call gap is the cheapest stage in the pipeline to fix and the least likely to be measured.

“They said they’d get back to me” — what that sentence actually means

It is the most expensive sentence in sales management, and it survives because it sounds like information. “They said they’d get back to me” is not a pipeline status — it is a description of who is doing the work, and the answer is nobody.

It transfers the next action to the person with the least incentive to take it: the buyer has a job, a queue and four other priorities, while you have one deal and a quarter. Rename every gap deal to something with a date attached — “awaiting reply, day 5 touch due Thursday” — because a status without a date cannot be managed and will not be.

In our own client work we typically see roughly a 3x lift in conversion for a business still running 2020-style operations — manual follow-up, no defined cadence, no measurement of the gaps — once the whole sequence is instrumented. Those are our operator numbers from delivery, not a study and not a guarantee, and there is no published n behind them. The roughly doubled contact rate we see from disciplined multi-channel outreach sits inside that 3x rather than on top of it: the components do not multiply out to 6x, because they overlap — faster, more consistent follow-up is part of how contact rate improves in the first place. The method behind our headline lift figure, including the fact that the average sits above the median, is published on our results methodology page. We have no measured figure for the between-call stage alone, so we are not printing one.

What running this yourself costs, and when it stops being worth doing by hand

The method above is complete and nothing in it needs software. A calendar, a recap template with five fields, a saved CRM view of gap deals and a person who opens that view every morning will beat most of the market. The question is what it costs at your volume.

That column is inflow, not stock: with 62% of first calls entering the gap and a 21-day stop rule, roughly three weeks’ worth are open at once, so ~6 new gap deals a week is about 18 live. Above roughly 30 first calls a week, one to two working days a week disappears into the gap, and it disappears in the least visible way possible — not as a missed task, but as a recap sent on day four instead of day one. That is where teams either hire for it or hand the mechanical parts over. Our AI appointment setting service runs the scheduled parts — the invite, the day 5 question, the day 8 obstacle message, the day 21 stop — across SMS, email and voice; we have booked 50,769+ sales appointments since 2017 doing this class of work.

The honest limitation: an automated sequence writes a worse recap than a salesperson who was on the call, and always will, because it was not in the conversation. What it does reliably is never miss day 1, day 5 and day 21 — and missing those is what kills deals, not prose quality. The sensible split is human recap, automated everything else. Our guide to AI SMS outbound automation covers the channel mechanics. This page is one stage of a pipeline-stage series: the stage before it is turning up to call one at all, covered in improving sales appointment show rates, and the stage after it is what you do on the second call.

Frequently asked questions

What is a good follow-up rate between sales calls?

There is no published industry benchmark for this stage, and anyone quoting one has invented it. Use two internal targets instead: diary coverage above 60%, and between-call follow-up rate above 80% on the deals that fail the Diary Test. The closest external evidence is Gong’s analysis of 28,833 closed deals, which found sellers in the fastest-closing deals spent 53% more first-meeting time discussing next steps than deals with a slow sales cycle. The same page states close rates decline 71% when next steps are not discussed on the first call, though Gong does not disclose a sample size for that particular figure.

Is it true that 80% of sales need five follow-ups?

No, and we cut that figure from this page rather than repeat it. The statistic is usually attributed to the “National Sales Executive Association”, and a VentureBeat investigation found that the organisation does not appear to exist. The trail that does exist is worse than no trail: SMEI’s own write-up dates the underlying survey to 1942, run by the Long Island chapter of what is now Sales & Marketing Executives International, with a sample of fewer than 40 people. Follow up because your buyers forget and get busy, which is demonstrable, not because of a number nobody can source.

How long should the gap between call one and call two be?

Short enough that recall is still working for you, long enough that any promised internal conversation can happen. Three to seven days suits most deals; beyond about ten days you are effectively re-running call one. The recall evidence sits in the adjacent clinical literature, where a review in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine reported that 40–80% of information is forgotten immediately. If the gap must be long, the written recap stops being polite and starts being load-bearing.

What should the day 1 recap email actually contain?

Five things and nothing else: the problem in the buyer’s own words, the numbers they gave you, the three things you agreed, anyone else who needs to see it, and the date and time of call two. It should be forwardable without editing, because that is what happens to it. Leave product features out; they were not why the buyer stayed on the call.

How many touches should I make before I stop?

Seven over 21 days, then stop and say you are stopping. The stop is the part teams skip, and skipping it is what produces a pipeline full of deals with no date and no owner. Moving a record to long-term nurture on day 21 costs nothing and makes the forecast honest.

Does this apply to inbound leads who booked themselves?

Yes, with one change: inbound buyers are usually further along, so the gap should be shorter and the day 2–3 artefact commercial rather than educational. The upstream constraint is different too — for a fresh enquiry it is response speed, not gap management, which we cover in our lead response time benchmarks for Australia.