Improve My Business

My last blog post was about the importance of follow through in regards to our strategic plans, in this post I want to talk about another area of our business where follow through is incredibly important, or maybe I should say follow up. Follow up is just follow through for marketing. By now everyone has heard that it takes six touches to make and the value of constant contact, but for some of us we still don’t do as much as we could to stay in touch with our clients and potential clients. I am not going to go on and on about the importance of following up, we’ve all heard it before, instead I am going to focus on some tips for making it happen.

1. Make it a priority. This sounds simple enough but can go a long way to actually making us better about following up  with contacts. Too often we forget just how important following up with both clients and potential clients really is, it becomes         one of those things that we do when we have time or can get around to it, but by then it’s usually too late. The truth about        following up, is that timeliness is of the utmost importance, so if you want to be better about following up, you have to make it a priority.
2. Put it on your calendar. This goes hand in hand with making follow up a priority; scheduling time to follow up with specific     contacts on your calendar will make sure you remember to do it. Next time you go to a networking event, before you go add  some time into your calendar for the week after the event to follow up with the people you meet there. If someone tells you to contact them in a month, put that on your calendar, if someone says they will contact you in a month put that on your         calendar too, that way if they forget you can send them a friendly reminder. The more specific you can be in calendaring          your follow up the better it will be, I even go so far as to put individual follow up calls into my calendar.
3. View every follow up as an opportunity. I find myself from time to time dreading following up with someone for one                 reason or another, but the main thing we have to remember is that every follow up is an opportunity to further that person along the road to becoming a client. There are dangers in not having this attitude too. Have you ever just gone through the motions of following up without adding any personal touch to your message? You wind up coming across as a robot. If you view every follow up as an opportunity you will avoid robot syndrome because you will care about every person you are contacting. You will automatically include those personal touches that communicate to your potential clients that you remember them and care about their problems, which will go a long way towards building trust and converting people to clients.

I have found that for me at least adopting these strategies and mindsets, while they may seem simple, can really make a difference in whether or not I follow through on my follow ups. Give them a shot and let me know if they help you, or share the tips you use to make sure you follow up with all your contacts.

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