Top 10 Business Mistakes Series - The Fortune Is In The Follow Up

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Speaker C: to Work from youm Happy Place, the podcast that equips you with the knowledge and inspiration to live your dreams and find your own happy place. You will be encouraged by and learn from entrepreneurs and artists who are already working from their happy place, all while pursuing their passion with a purpose. Be sure to sign up for our free weekly newsletter for a recap of the week's guests and a preview of what's in store. We also have two special gifts for you, a video, the five Core principles to Living a Happier life and a printable Download titled Top 10 Sales Strategies, go to workforyourhappyplace.com free. Fill out the attached form to receive your gifts and be added to our newsletter. And now, here's your host, Belinda Ellsworth.

Speaker D: Hello everyone and welcome to Tuesday Tip. I'm Belinda Ellsworth and we are completing a series of the top 10 mistakes to avoid in Business. Now. This has been a really fun series. If you have not gotten a chance to listen to the other nine tips, I would highly encourage you to go back over the last nine Tuesdays, check them out and listen to them. It really does flow in a nice series and I really highly recommend that you check those out. Now I did save this one for last because you've heard that saying save the best for last. It is not because it is the least important. I actually do believe that this is one of the most important things that you can do in having a successful business and it is one of the biggest mistakes that people make. They get busy, they think it's not important. And so what is number 10 mistakes to avoid? And that is the lack of follow up. You definitely want to do follow up with new customers, your current customers, and any future leads that you may have, connections that you make, networking that you have with other vendors, with other businesses, with new contacts. All of those things happen on a daily basis. If you're putting the time in to make that happen. If you get a referral from someone, you want to make sure that you have allocated time in your schedule for follow up. You want to make sure that you have a system in place to do proper follow up so that things don't fall through the cracks. Oftentimes, and I know this happens to me, you get inundated with emails. I get about on average 150 to 200 emails a day. Some of them are super important and it's the way that they're flagged. It's my assistant and how she's saying, did you follow up with that? And sometimes you're overwhelmed and it just falls through the cracks. You need a very specific system in place that you can tag things as urgent, you can tag things to come back to. You need someone that is going to assist you with, with that follow up. That's the first thing. The second thing is that you need to make sure that you allocate time in your schedule in order to do proper follow up. Now what kinds of follow up is there? Well, there's basic referrals and networking is one type of follow up. That means one person introduces you to another person. Let me do an introduction. I think the two of you have some mutual things in common or could be beneficial to one another. A referral from someone and an introduction like that is so amazing and you want to at least respond now. I try to respond right away because if I let my day get away from me, then I sometimes might not respond at all. It gets lost in the shovel of life and a business. So I try to respond right away saying thank you so much for this so that it acknowledges the person who sent it. So that is first and foremost, thank you so much for this introduction. That's very kind of you. I'm so happy to meet you. To the individual, I am sure that we have some things that we can share and have in mutual interest. I'd love to set up a time, possibly chat about it when it's convenient for both of us. When I do that straight out of the gate, what's really awesome is now I have acknowledged the person that did it and I've acknowledged the person that they're sending me. That follow up is so important. Sometimes those leads go somewhere and sometimes those leads Go nowhere. But the point of it is, is two things. You may not know where it may lead you. It may be the person. I've had this happen so many times that I talk with that person and they're like, yeah, I really don't think that there's anything I can do to help you out. But you know what, I have a friend and I have been then directed to that friend. Now this is a referral from a referral of, uh, someone that I really don't even know that well. And I probably would never have met a of lot otherwise. And so they are now saying here, I think this person might be of interest. You guys might be able to help one another. So then they do an introduction. And I've had that completely take off in a whole new direction that I wasn't expecting at all. It's through those connections that we can really sometimes move our, um, business forward in a way that we weren't expecting. So first and foremost, acknowledge all referrals of introductions that you may get. That's one type of follow up. Another type of follow up is with your customers. Your customers are one of your greatest assets. And yet so often we don't do any type of customer follow up. I'm kind of blown away on a regular basis when I ask people about this and they're like, well, you know, if they want something else, they'll come to us. Or, you know, I don't really know what our people really want, but hey, let's come out with this new product without having any ideas at all about what their customer base really wants. Now I have a firm belief in if you've got a customer, acknowledge them, thank them. It doesn't hurt to do random customer follow up to say, how are you enjoying your product? I just wanted to say give you a personal thank you. And if there's anything that we can do. You know what? I would like to do a poll with our top buying customers. So sometimes I will do this. I will take people that have spent over a certain threshold of money and I will say, I would like to do a poll with our most important valued customers. If we were to come out with a new product, what is something that you'd be more interested in? This or that or I would say, of all of the different things we have, what is one thing you would like to see us come out with as a company? And so people will give their wish lists or they'll say, oh my gosh, thank you so much. They feel honored that you are asking them their opinion. So anytime before you launch a new course or a new product, reach in and ask your customers what's important to them. The more you have that answer, you can avoid going to market with a product that nobody wants to buy or that no one needs. You can actually identify through these types of focus groups what may be the product that people really want. You might change what your thoughts were originally and then come out with something different. So there's customer follow up, there's referral follow ups, there's. And then of course there are connections and that's when either people reach out to you randomly. Now sometimes I get a lot of these and you at least want to respond. You can't set up 15 minutes or 30 minutes. I always think it's kind of funny when people want to always set up 30 minute conversations with me. And that could be most of your day if you did this all day long. So find a mutual common ground or find something of interest that maybe you could chat about. I like to do it through messaging first and then if I see that it warrants a connection or it warrants a, uh, meeting. But I try to say 15 minutes. I can give you 15 minutes because. And if it's going well, then it's usually they set at 30 on um, a calendar link. But if you do 15 minutes and then that's all that there is and you don't see that that's really going anywhere, then you've got 15 minutes in. If it's going really well, then oftentimes I will take the entire 30 minutes and we find that we do have common ground or there is a mutual benefit to one another. So there is referrals from people that you know in introductions there is your customer follow up and then there is call it cold call following up. Like if people do reach out to you. Now this is, I obviously covered this last but, uh, new connections. So I have set that I want to try to make three connections in a day. So that means I'm reaching out to people or I'm setting it on my calendar. It doesn't necessarily always mean that I'll have have three in a day, but I certainly don't ever want to have more than three in a day because you don't want to waste a lot of your time on things that may not go anywhere. And yet you want to allocate some time for discovery and curiosity because you never know when one of those things is going to turn out pretty spectacular. So be smart in this, but make sure that you have some type of system in place so that you can do good in adequate follow up with your customers referrals and connections because this is going to advance your business further and quicker than you could possibly imagine. So this does conclude our top 10 mistakes to avoid in Business. I hope you've enjoyed this series. Thank you so much for tuning into this series. Thank you for being part of Work from youm Happy Place. Make sure that you follow or subscribe so you don't miss a single great episode. So thank you everyone and we will see you next time on um, Work from youm Happy Place.

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