You meet people at an event, you swap details. You get back to your office and the ‘busy’ work takes over. Most of us don’t have assistants to delegate work to and even if we do, our client work always comes first . But what about filling that marketing pipeline? Isn’t that just as important? Here are some questions that you need to consider:
- How you will capture prospects’ details?
- How soon you will follow up prospects?
- How you will go about following up?
- When to follow up a second time
- The point at which you will stop contacting a new prospect
- How you will put a reminder system in place so you don’t forget to follow up?
Pretend this prospect was one of ten that you followed up. You have found on average that one out of every ten new prospects becomes a client. Each client is worth on average $5,000 annually. That sounds like a nice sum that’s worth spending the time to follow up!
Put a system in place
How do you manage to continually follow up without getting distracted by the ‘busy’ work? You need a system in place for the entire process. Let’s see how this might look:
- Determine the sequence of events that occur to ensure follow up and who is responsible for each step (this occurs once).
- Upload business card to customer relationship management system (CRM). Preferably get your assistant to do this and/or use photo recognition software to scan cards in.
- Set reminder for follow up with contact.
- Actually follow up with client.
- Continue this process until desired outcome is achieved or contact is no longer considered a prospect.
You’re probably thinking that this all sounds very easy. However, I can tell you from experience that unless you believe that follow up is a core part of your business, you will never make the time to complete the process. You will forever procrastinate and tell yourself, ‘Oh, I’ll call them tomorrow’. But of course, tomorrow never comes.
Make follow up an integral part of your business
- Outsource the components that are getting in your way.
- Block out time each week to concentrate on follow ups.
- Most importantly pick a time of day that sits right with you to complete this, whether you’re a morning or afternoon person.
When will you next follow up?
