How to Radically Transform Your Follow-Up: It’s Not Business. It’s Personal.

We’ve all been told (and retold, and scolded, and hounded) of the pressing need to follow-up promptly and persistently with our prospects.

Deep down we know that the admonishment is accurate and beneficial. We can see the evidences of proper follow-up leading to sales success in our own track record.

So why is follow-up so dang hard?!

I would contend that many salespeople struggle with follow-up for one simple reason: follow-up is something that they DO, but it is not something that they ARE.

Consider the critically important sales skill that we call “relationship building”. Show me a salesperson who does not know how to build a relationship and I’ll show you a soon-to-be former salesperson.

It is a skill set that is fundamental to the job and, in fact, one of the primary reasons that a sales representative is hired in the first place. So we can rightly say that relationship building is not something that a salesperson DOES; it is something that a salesperson IS.

Not so with follow-up skills.

We struggle in following up with customers because we struggle with follow-up in our daily lives.

I find follow-up to be a chore in my own day-to-day biddings; a discipline to be endured rather than a joy to be anticipated. I struggle with follow-up at work because I struggle with follow-up at life.

What if we changed that? What if we approached our follow-up efforts from a personal perspective rather than as a business task?

What if we were to address the issue by building follow-up habits in our daily lives that could be easily adopted in our sales presentation?

Here are three techniques to get you start building follow up into your lifestyle:

1) Fall in Love with the Phone Again

I used to tell people that if they really wanted to reach me, send me an e-mail.

When I kicked over 100 e-mails in my in-box a day I changed my tune. “If you really want to reach me, shoot me a text.” Not anymore. Now I’m back to where I started: “If you need me, call me.”

The irony is that the phone call is once again the easiest and most effective way to reach someone. Alas, the skillset of making a simple phone call is fading by the day, rusty from under-utilization.

Get back into practice. Today. Now. Call your kid, or your mom, or a high school friend. Call for a specific reason, or for no reason at all. Just get back into the habit of picking up the phone and making a call. See what happens.

You’ll thank me – take my word for it.

2) Get Good at Brief Impact

That is not to say one cannot utilize e-mail, but for all that is holy please be brief! Great follow-up is about impact, not word count.

Start in your personal life.

Shoot a quick e-mail to someone – anyone – and keep it to one sentence (two at the most).

Practice brevity.

Your recipient will thank you.

3) Go Old School – Write a Note

When was the last time you received a hand-written note in the mail? And when you received it did you open it first, before all the bills that arrived that day?

Such is the power of the hand-written note. It is truly one of the most impactful methods of making an impression, and it is vastly underutilized.

Send one today – you’ll see.

It’s time to stop thinking of follow-up as a task and start thinking of it as a normal part of our daily routine.

When follow-up becomes something you are comfortable with in every corner of your life, you’ll be downright excited to get back in touch with that prospect!

And that’s when you get the chance to change someone’s world…