Do you have a follow up system in place? How many opportunities are you missing if you don't?
If you're like most professionals, you meet new people on a weekly basis. Some of those new connections are potential clients, future referral sources or possible strategic partners. When you meet them, you probably have good intentions about following up with them, checking out their websites, sending them additional information, contacting them to continue your discussion, or getting together to talk about how you might help. But how often does life - or work - get in the way? Do you know, before you even go to the event, what you'll be doing with the business cards and contact information you receive?
No matter how good you are at networking, without the follow up, your efforts are going to have limited results. Statistics show that it takes anywhere between 7-9 'touches' or contacts with someone new before they'll do business with you. That means that even if you do manage to follow up once after an initial meeting, it may not lead to anything unless you can continue to develop the relationship.
Make it easy on yourself - create a system to automate your follow up efforts. Then just add your new contacts to the system and you're good to go.
If you prepare you progression of follow-ups in advance, you'll be way ahead of the game. Decide in advance what additional materials you'd like to give prospects after you meet them for the first time. This could be almost anything: an article, case study, checklist, audio, etc. related to your practice area. Be sure that the information is relevant and provides value to your prospect and include information about your firm and how you help your clients.
Next, create a series of additional follow ups which will be scheduled at regular intervals after meeting a prospect. These follow ups can be done in a variety of different ways - by email, over the telephone, by regular mail, etc. And if you use an autoresponder system or send out a regular newsletter (whether by email or regular mail), this will be even easier.
When you return from meeting a new prospect, add their contact information to your database immediately and get that prospect into your pipeline. Then let your follow up system take over.
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