When I’m coaching sales training I talk a lot about the importance of follow up.

That’s because it makes a difference.

As a salesperson if you actually follow up with prospective clients, you’ll be well ahead of your competitors.

That’s because most salespeople either don’t follow up at all, or they only follow up half-heartedly.

But is it possible to follow up too much?

You can absolutely follow up too much. Follow-up is like closing, in that if you do it at the wrong time you’re not going to be successful. For example:

I get a lot of unsolicited product pitches in my work email.

Most of them are garbage: copycat offshore manufacturers offering knockoff products none of us are interested in.

Still, something interesting occasionally hits my inbox. For that reason, I do skim the product spam I get before deleting it.

This week, among the usual crop of garbage pitches was one email that presented a product that was indeed new and different.

I’m not saying that we’re necessarily interested in carrying it, but I did think it was interesting, so I forwarded it to our company directors and said as much, in case they thought so.

Not thirty seconds after I hit send on my forward, the person who emailed me the pitch hit my inbox with a second email:

Lee, could you please give me some feedback on my product?

Okay, that’s creepy.

I don’t know how he did it; how he was aware that I had forwarded his email. What sorcery is this?

Within about ten minutes, I had convinced myself that it was just a coincidence.

That’s when he sent me a request to connect on LinkedIn.

Woah, partner. That’s a little too much, too fast.

From my perspective as a prospect, as opposed to being the salesperson, this just annoys me.

If your follow up is so fast and furious that it makes prospects put you on Ignore, try being less quick on the trigger.