Following up and the rule of 3

The art of following up. Why it’s critical to follow up, why you don’t follow up and how you can follow up simply and easily without an overcomplicated online funnel that drives you nuts in trying to set the whole thing up.

Following up leads and prospects is critical to the success of your business. If you’re going to go to the effort of building a list of subscribers to try and find new clients, then following up on anyone who shows an interest in what it is you offer should be part of your weekly – if not daily – marketing activity.

And yet, why don’t you follow up?

There are 3 main reasons why business owners don’t follow up.

1) You let the process become too emotional – there can be a lot of fear attached to following up – fear of being rejected – fear of being humiliated – so if you let yourself listen to these fears too much, you make up stories why you shouldn’t follow up. “I don’t want to pester them – they know where I am if they need me” … which actually makes no sense because you have no idea whether they are too busy for you and you certainly can’t be assuming that they know where you are if they do need you.

2) You don’t have a system to follow so when you get busy, you forget. If you keep the names of people of you’ve spoken to or emailed in your head or on a to-do list somewhere, it’s no surprise that you find yourself two months later after an initial phone call, and you never scheduled in a follow up in your diary.

3) You over-complicate the process by trying to build online funnels with upsells, down sells, double opt-ins and autoresponder sequences. I see this one a lot because the creative brain of an entrepreneur is attracted to shiny shiny and it’s also far easier to distract yourself with creating landing pages and writing emails than it is to pick up the phone.

So can you see how you can distract yourself from the actual process of following up?

To make sure your follow-ups happen you need to create a repeatable, simple process.

And if you can delegate this process, then even better.

With all follow-up processes, I teach the power of 3.

3 emails, 3 letters, 3 phone calls, 3 messages.

3 is enough to send out over a two week period without being a pest. And 3 is enough for you to create, write and execute without it becoming a huge project.

Often I have people ask me about autoresponders with 10 or emails in them. Or they want to create a 6 month follow up.

But make this too big, and you’ll never find the time to complete it.

So start with 3 emails,3 letters or 3 messages over a two week period to begin with. You decide which form of communication is going to be best of your prospect.

If they don’t respond to any of the 3 within that time period, then put them back into the prospect pot and try a different approach next month.

So if you’ve sent them 3 letters, then the next month try 3 phone calls. If you’ve tried phone calls, try 3 special delivery parcels next month.

The important thing in following up is that you keep following up, even when you get a no.

Because a no is often where the conversation starts and a no now, may mean a yes in a few months time.

Finally, I want to make sure you keep track of your prospects that you’re following up. As I’ve mentioned already, keep these in your head or rely on your inbox to keep track of them and you will forget.

There are a tonne of online CRM systems so if you want to subscribe to one of these – do it. But before you distract yourself with a new tool, often the best place, to begin with, is a spreadsheet.

Name, contact details, date of initial contact and date of next follow up – keep it simple and you’ve got a place to go to at the start of each new week so you know who needs what from you.

Thank you for reading. Until next time, do less, be more, play bigger.