Follow Through – Good For More Than Golf

Many of the posts here shed some light on how to use our Leads Manager to increase business. It’s a great tool for making contact with potential customers and keeping track of contacts made or needing follow up.

In this post I’d like to share the secret of how to NOT need our product.

Simply increase your referrals instead of making cold calls to increase business. No-brainer right? But it’s not the secret.

Let’s start with some golf terms, since one starts to think about golf around this time of year. Just how is your game? Is your business focused only on the short game? Once you make contact with your target, do you follow through? Do you practice your game with good form?

Argh, enough of that. I’m sure you get the point of where this is headed in that paragraph alone. Too many small businesses have no follow through and consequently lose the same customers that came looking for better than they got from the last place that had their business.

And losing customers means losing referrals from those customers.

Follow through. That’s the secret. Just like golf.

Now we know that life is hectic and the best intentions get pushed aside with the concerns of the day. Yet, with plenty of reminder solutions on the market, from simple calendars to complex customer relationship management tools, keeping track of your customers for eventual follow up should be simple.

The trick is to just pick one. And follow through.

Referrals don’t come easy. Most people associate them with being the result of great service. While mostly true, the other secret is that great service is just showing that you care. That means during and after the deal. Yet, after the deal is where many small businesses miss the ball.

So do you have game? You’ve provided stellar service to your client, but the onus is still on you to help them remember. And provide that referral.

Sure you still have to make calls, but at least they’re not cold calls. Unless you like that sort of thing.

Yes the Leads Manager provides a way to track follow through while you’re trying to win business. But that’s just the start.

You need to continue after the deal has closed. Or as we like to say, to follow through.