Following Up Is Not a Strategy. Following Through Is.
Sep 09, 2026
A friend of mine — let's call her the vendor, because that's exactly what she became — recently went through two very different experiences in the space of a few months. In one, she was the buyer, shopping for an off-plan property in Spain. In the other, she was the seller, watching two different real estate agents handle the sale of her own home. Put side by side, those two experiences taught me more about the difference between following up and following through than any sales training ever has.
Start with the buyer side. When she inquired about that property in Spain, the salespeople were quick, prepared and completely on the ball. No email ping-pong, no “let me get back to you.” They called, they'd clearly done their homework on who she was, and they were straight with her: there was real demand for this property, it wouldn't last, and if she was serious, they'd need a formal expression of interest within 24 hours. That might sound like pressure. It wasn't — it was true, and it worked, because she and her partner are now the buyers of that property.
Now the seller side. When she listed her own property, the first agent got replaced partway through. His replacement was friendly, but she wasn't chasing anyone. She wasn't calling people the same day to ask how a viewing went. She wasn't reading the room. And when the first offer came in — an offer the vendor told me plainly she'd have accepted with only a little negotiation — the agent misread it completely, went back for more viewings instead of picking up the phone, and a deal that should have closed in days dragged on for months before it eventually fizzled.
Same person, selling and buying. Two completely different levels of professionalism. And the difference wasn't intelligence or likeability. It was follow-up versus follow-through.
Following up is what most salespeople do: email once, maybe twice, then default into waiting. Waiting for the client to call back, on the client's schedule rather than theirs. It feels professional. It usually isn't. It's whatever pace happens to suit the salesperson, dressed up as patience. Some clients move fast, want fast answers, expect you to keep pace with them. Others need more room. The job isn't to pick whichever pace is comfortable for you. It's to read the client and match theirs.
This is where I think most of us got taught the wrong rule early on. We were told to treat people the way we'd want to be treated. Nice idea. Wrong idea, in sales. If you go by the numbers, that only lands right about a quarter of the time, because most of the people you're dealing with don't want to be treated the way you do. They want to be treated the way they want to be treated. Small change in the words. Enormous change in your close rate.
Following through is the other half, and it's the part almost nobody sustains. It means you don't drop off when the deal gets slow or complicated. You keep shaping it — surfacing options, creating urgency where it's genuinely warranted, influencing the people who need influencing — right up until the finish line. Following up is a sprint. Following through is a marathon, and the bigger and more complex the deal, the more it demands marathon thinking.
None of this is about pushing harder. It's about being on the ball: prepared, responsive, reading your client's pace instead of your own, and staying in the deal instead of waiting for it to come back to you. That's the difference between an order-taker and a deal-maker, and it's usually the only difference between a deal that closes in weeks and one that quietly dies over months.
If your team's deals are stalling somewhere between “sent the information” and “waiting to hear back,” that gap is almost always fixable. Book a free discovery call here and let's look at where it's costing you.
