Just like Goldilocks and Papa Bear’s porridge, you’ve probably been burned a few times when your follow-up approach was too frequent or pushy – “don’t call me, I’ll call you” (or some more polite version of the same).

And just like Goldilocks and Mama Bear’s porridge, you’ve probably encountered a chill when your follow-up was too slow or soft – “we already made our purchase, we’ll keep you in mind for next time.”

So how can you avoid these two extremes?  How can you follow up in a way that is just right?

I gave a presentation to a group of business owners last week and the topic of proper follow-up extended from that seminar into a private meeting this week with one of the attendees.  So I thought I would share how our discussion went and the “rules” that emerged. 

See below – please share your thoughts too!

1)      Follow up starts during the current conversation.  I have coached several clients through this.  If in the current conversation you commit to delivering a proposal or other document that will require their review, establish a meeting to discuss it and answer their questions right then and there.  Sample script:

“Great Jim.  So I’ll be putting a proposal together.  You’ll have that in your inbox by Tuesday.  I’d like to give you a day or so to review it, but I also want to make sure that I address any questions you may have.  What’s your calendar like on Wednesday or Thursday?  Let’s go ahead and schedule that next meeting.”

2)      Follow up on the heels of offering value.  This is where your web and social media efforts weave together with your follow up practices.  Especially for each blog post, email piece, or article that your company produces, identify people who would find the information helpful and send them a copy with an individualized email.  Now you’ve set the stage for a follow up call:

“I hope you’re doing well… I wanted to make sure you noticed the article I sent you.  When I saw it I thought of you…”

This approach assumes that there is no active opportunity, but you have an interest in nurturing the relationship.  One of these kinds of personalized messages per quarter is a good starting point for frequency.  Check out this post for further ideas Sales Venture Capital Style. 

3)      Sometimes it’s o.k. to just “check in.”  If you are concerned about being a nuisance, don’t worry as much about the frequency as the content of your messages or conversations.  If you always have a self-serving agenda – like you want to meet or get names of others you should call or find out where they are in their budgeting process – then your prospects will find you annoying and avoid your calls.  Whenever you can, have something valuable to offer, as described in 2) above.  Whatever you do, don’t base your reason for calling on YOUR needs:

“If we get your order this week, we’ll make our quarterly goal” – I hate this tactic when I am in a buying position. 

If timing is an issue for THEM, you have something useful:

“I know you wanted to get this project launched by [X date], I want to support you in meeting that objective.  What steps are left before you would be ready to get started?”

Having “flawless follow-up” (the FF piece of the Profit Generating Machine) is critical to your business success.  There are 5 more critical pieces, so if you have not yet claimed your free copy of The Profit Generating Machine, request yours to the right.

Link to “Getting Things Done” by David Allen

If your job were to go around giving away money or simply assisting those in need, would it ever occur to you that your help may be unwanted? Sounds silly, right?  If you were clearly out to deliver a benefit, you wouldn’t stop to wonder if you were imposing.

As a business owner or sales person, we often do feel like we’re imposing when we follow up with a prospect.  Why?  Because we’re only thinking about our side of the equation – the benefit (profit) we receive on each sale to a customer.

But wait, what is the customer’s side of the equation? Think about it as a consumer. Do you ever buy something that is worth less than the money you spend on it?  Hmm.  Probably not.

I know it can be hard to “calculate” the benefit of a good meal, a new laptop, or a freshly steam-cleaned carpet, but wouldn’t you agree that we’re always comparing the price of something to the benefit we’d receive?  If the price seems too high, we hold onto our money.  If the price seems lower than the value of what we’ll get in return, we spend.

For a customer to buy, the benefit must be greater than the price. 

Value flows from the seller to the customer.

We, as sellers, deliver a benefit, just like the prize patrol.

There’s one more lesson to be learned from the prize patrol – Sally Smith doesn’t get Jim Johnson’s check.  Not everyone is a winner.  Not every prospect you meet is interested in, or capable of receiving, the value you provide.  Following up diligently with a process that allows both you and your prospect to determine if there is a fit is critical.

Not sure if you have a good follow up process in place?  Be sure to request your free copy of The Profit Generating Machine by simply providing your name and email address to the right.

If my stalled car analogy left you scratching your head, please call, e-mail or click on chat below. I sincerely want to help you understand the benefits of putting your energy behind one thing at a time – this lesson alone has the potential to transform your business.

I feel so strongly about this that I am devoting a second post to the same idea.  So (assuming that the whole stalled car idea made sense), let’s take a closer look at the downside of jumping from one project to another – The Calendar Effect.

Let’s say you have just 3 different projects (marketing strategies in our case) that you could work on, poke at, fiddle with, whatever your favorite term.  Your tasks may include things like:

• doing research to purchase a list or find alliance partners you could work with
• writing new copy to describe your product or service
• working with someone to help put together a flyer
• preparing a series of communications that will be used in e-mail or social media

And of course, you have to plan time to follow up with your initial leads from this new strategy, make adjustments to the marketing you put in place, measure results…  When you break down what it takes to launch and properly follow up on just one marketing campaign or new strategy, it takes real time and effort.

Moreover, we all know the world doesn’t stop while we put together our marketing. Often a series of tasks that in theory might take a few days of work can truly take weeks to complete.

For simple numbers, let’s say that each of our 3 marketing strategies would take 4 weeks of effort to research, implement, and properly evaluate. If we were to give into temptation and switch from idea to idea each week, rotating from one project to the next, this is what would happen:

We’d be working away for 10 weeks before even one of the strategies was producing good results! 

Have you picked up on the other flaw in this plan?  Think about my prior post (and the reason I say “in theory” on the table above).  Coming back to each project every 3^rd week means we’d be pushing on a stalled car every time – attempting to figure out where we left off, questioning decisions that seemed clear before, trying to coax others (vendors, friends, partners) who were previously helping us to move off of their project-of-the-moment to pay attention to our project-of-the-moment…ugh!

In the real world, the 3 “4-week” projects handled in this momentum-killing, juggler fashion, would take many more weeks to complete.

Now let’s look at how a focus on one project at a time would look on the calendar:

So would you prefer to have momentum work against you while business-getting strategies remained hidden from the light of day for weeks and weeks?  OR would you like to have momentum work for you, with business-getting strategies out in the world working on your behalf as soon as possible?

Perhaps we all experience this fear from time to time.  So what can we do about it?  It can be tempting to just get busy doing “more” by kicking off a completely new campaign or changing a bunch of existing programs – hoping to stumble across something that works.

While we should absolutely use multiple strategies to generate new leads, it is important to recognize that each one is not going to work the way we’d like right out of the gate (sorry to say).  We must be prepared to:

• take focused action to get it off the ground
• adjust our plans as we go
• ultimately automate, delegate or outsource it (so we get the benefit of the leads, without huge personal effort )

Recently I helped a new client uncover that he was not only experimenting with multiple strategies to get new customers, but he was pursuing multiple customer types with differing needs – spreading his efforts way too thin.  In order to explain the pitfalls of this I used an analogy that seemed to help – so I wanted to share it here.

Picture each method for generating leads as a car that is at a standstill.  Getting a car rolling takes a lot of effort in the beginning, right? 

Once you’ve got it moving along things get a little easier, but you can’t totally stop pushing. It requires continued effort to keep making forward progress.

Now imagine that instead of keeping that car rolling along, you leave it alone to go get another car moving.  You’ve got to expend an extra amount of effort once again, because the 2^nd car is at a dead stop.

When it is time to come back to that first car, what’s happened to it?  It’s come to a stop and you need to start all over – with your maximum effort required.  Try to get 4 or 5 cars moving together and you spend nearly all of your time pushing with your maximum effort, to make minimal forward progress.

How does this relate to marketing?  Again, each strategy for getting more business requires focused action to get off the ground, adjustment to produce positive results, and a process for automating, delegating, or outsourcing it once it’s working well.

How does this relate to marketing?  Again, each strategy for getting more business requires focused action to get off the ground, adjustment to produce positive results, and a process for automating, delegating, or outsourcing it once it’s working well.

Instead of frantically moving from strategy to strategy, with haphazard attempts to transform them into productive methods, it is best to:

• get your team focused on launching or improving just one strategy at a time
• stick with it – monitoring and adjusting – until it starts producing the results you want
• determine how you will measure its effectiveness
• automate what you can and make it someone’s responsibility to keep it going

Now it’s time to ask yourself – am I running around spending a lot of  energy giving insufficient shoves to each marketing strategy, or am I investing the time and attention necessary to create momentum?  Today is an opportunity to pick one and commit to doing what it takes for it to deliver great results.

There’s another nifty effect to focusing on one strategy at a time – a bonus benefit that may be just as valuable as the momentum effect.  I’ll cover that in the next post.

• Easy ways to add contacts like signup forms, upload, and just type them in
• Insight into who opens the emails and clicks on links (services do this differently and the data doesn’t always tell the whole story — but it’s useful nonetheless)
• HTML templates to help you create a polished email message

I have been using Constant Contact for a few years and it has worked quite well for me.  I have no real complaints, but recently I ran into a few limitations that sent me off to check out other options.  The short story (’cause I’d like to spare you the long story) is that I am now using MailChimp.  Here are a few of the reasons:

1)  Here’s a big one — it’s FREE for a list of up to 2,000 and a total of up to 12,000 emails per month

2)  I can create multiple auto-responder streams.  In Constant Contact, if I wanted a person who requested one of my ebooks to get a series of emails afterward, I could do that.  But what if a new subscriber didn’t want the ebook, or requested something different that I wanted to correspond with a different auto-responder series?  In Constant Contact, I was S.O.L.  In MailChimp I can set up distinct lists and create (or not create) distinct auto-responder messages for each list.

3)  It has powerful list-segmenting tools too.  Want to re-send an email to just those who failed to open your prior message?  Easy.  Want your next email to only go to subscribers who joined within the last 30 days?  Easy.  Constant Contact: if you offer that feature, it wasn’t easy to find.

4)  Integrations.  MailChimp is a more open platform that can connect with a list of other programs.  This worked out great for integration with my CRM system.

So there you have it!  You can check them out at www.mailchimp.com.  If you need help, just give me a call.

Cheers!

One of the exercises that I have found valuable in my work with clients, and for my own business, is to regularly step out of the day-to-day and:

• Take a close look at how I am actually spending my time and money (not just what my plan says I am doing
• Compare that to an ideal, cohesive, set of systems for marketing and selling
• Look at the gaps between the two

As simple as this sounds, it is something most of us do not do as often as we should.  I guarantee this exercise will inspire new ideas and energize you to find new clients to serve and uncover new methods of generating higher profits.

If you’re saying “This is a great idea, but when and how can I do this?” I’ve taken away those excuses.  I’m so passionate about the importance of this exercise that I’ve condensed it down into an online self-assessment that you can complete in 5 to 10 minutes. 

I’ve included specific recommendations at the end.  If you are wondering how you are going about marketing and selling, and would like your investments of time, energy, and money to be more productive, I encourage you to check it out.

I will likely do some more events in the new year, so stay tuned.  Per my previous post, I am always interested in hearing what business owners are struggling with the most.  Add a comment or drop me a note.  Perhaps I can tailor my next topic around your unique challenges.

So what is frustrating YOU?  I would love to hear what your biggest struggles are as you promote your business and attempt to obtain new clients.

Post comments below.  This will allow me to provide information and share strategies that will be more helpful to you.