IT’S SIMPLE, BUT NOT ALWAYS EASY

Doing a good job at follow-up is a piece of cake. You just capture every prospect or potential referral partner you run across, then place a call, send the person something, or interact with the person online. If you don’t make a sale right away, you put the person on the calendar for the next follow-up and do the same thing again. Pretty straightforward, isn’t it? So why is follow-up such a problem? Here are the five most common reasons:

1. Prioritization. With an activity that you must initiate, it’s easy to let other tasks come first: responding to incoming calls and mail, getting the invoices out, keeping your technology updated, and, oh, yes, doing the client work you get paid for. If you don’t set aside reserved time for follow-up, it will never happen.

2. Disorganization. Business cards and scraps of paper lying on your desk, numbers in your cell phone, and rosters of social media contacts do not constitute a contact management system. Without accurate records of who you have been in contact with, when, and what your last exchange was about, effective follow-up is impossible.

3. Lack of Essential Tools. If you don’t know what to say when you call a prospect on the phone, you will probably avoid calling. When you haven’t yet created something to send your website visitors, you won’t have a reason to ask them to provide their e-mail address. Simple follow-up tactics become impossible to implement when you are missing basic components.

4. Resistance. Do you find yourself saying, “Why do I have to do this? I’m good at what I do. Why aren’t the clients coming to me?” You are sabotaging yourself with this line of thinking. Business owners much more established than you are do follow-up every day. It’s one of the ways they got established. Regular follow-up does not make people think you don’t have enough business; it makes them see you as a professional.

5. Fear. “If I follow up that lead, I might be rejected,” reasons the voice in your head. “So I’ll avoid the pain by not making the call in the first place.” Or conversely, you may be thinking, “If I place the call, I might get the business, and then I’ll have to do the work, and people will have all these expectations of me.” But the reality is that if you don’t follow up, you’re going to fail even more dramatically than in these two imaginary scenarios.

By working with the Get Clients Now! system to begin with, you are already addressing two of these issues. Using the 28-day program consistently will help you to set better priorities and overcome resistance. Later in this chapter you’ll learn more about breaking through fear. So let’s tackle disorganization and some essential follow-up tools next.