You’ll Get More Clients by Following Up

It never ceases to amaze me how often business owners fail to make time to follow up after making initial contact with a prospective client. In my experience, there have been countless times I’ve met people at events and they have failed to follow up on promises and commitments. That adds up to a load of missed opportunities and wasted time.

Think about it this way. When clients are looking to invest in your services it’s unlikely that they will make a snap decision to hire you on the spot. Often, they will have questions, uncertainties and doubts about making the decision to hire you.

That’s why follow up is critically important in winning new clients. You can deepen relationships, ease prospects’ worries, and answer questions that helps your prospect to say yes.

So why do people fail to follow up? Here are a few reasons:

• People don’t want to be too pushy or ‘salesy’. There is a fine line between an interested person and being irritating. Depending on your business, a regular ‘checking in’ call or an email with a relevant piece of information or helpful article will be seen as valuable and welcomed. It will help keep you visible and in the forefront of your prospects’ minds

• Follow up calls often get forgotten. We all live in a busy world where we start with good intentions, but as there is no systematic way to ensure that a follow up gets done, it tends to gets lost in the day to day of running your business and soon becomes a distant memory

• We can be afraid of rejection. When a prospect does not immediately respond or return our call we think that they are not interested. That’s often not the case. They are busy people too, and you need to be persistent in making sure that you get to speak to them and answer their questions

The real solution for effective follow up is to create a system that prevents any of the above from happening. Here’s a couple of ideas that you can consider:

• Use an email auto responder system – send a series of keep in touch emails automatically

• Invest in a simple contact system so you can schedule calls and set up prompts to follow up on a specific date

• Connect with prospects and clients on social media platforms

Footnote – around 80% of my clients come from my follow up systems. Do you think you would convert more prospects if you followed up more consistently?