Follow Up TODAY

In a survey of 2,000 businesspeople, “follows up on referrals” was ranked as the single most important trait of a master networker.

People who don’t know you will judge you harshly if you don’t deliver on what’s expected of you. Your number-one objective is to cultivate strong relationships with other business professionals and build social capital, so you need to start off right. Demonstrate commitment to follow up on every promise, every contact and every opportunity to help your networking partner.

Think about how you form judgments about other people. If you have had a problem with your central heating, and you’ve left messages with several plumbers, you are likely to be most impressed by the one who gets back to you first with a promise to have an engineer visit the same day. You certainly won’t do business with those who never respond at all.

Your ability to follow up on what you say you will do, when you say you will do it, is crucial to building credibility within your network. Do you do business with people who don’t deliver? Certainly not twice! Likewise, you won’t get a second referral if you do not deliver on the first.

Good follow-up is not just doing what is necessary or what you’ve promised. It also involves going beyond what is expected. What can you do to delight the client? Let’s say you are working with a client and there’s a technical glitch on her computer. Solve her problem by referring her to your favourite computer troubleshooter. Then, if you get news of an event that might help her professionally, send her an e-mail with a web link. You’ve followed up on a conversation with an action she did not expect of you. Going the extra mile helps her and establishes you as the “go-to guy”.

The key to good follow-up is a system for keeping track of referrals, your interactions with them and what you know about them. With this information readily to hand and written into your diary, you can be sure to follow up in a timely manner and complete the steps required to see it to a conclusion. Make sure you add additional follow-up steps to check in again with the contact, say, every three months for the next year. Use these regular calls to cement the relationship.

Action this week! The only useful system for following up and staying in touch with your contacts is one you actually use. If you don’t use it, the system is worthless. So set up a system, but keep it simple. Perhaps just a table drawn on a piece of paper—create a blank template in a word processor or PowerPoint—listing contact names with columns to note follow-up actions and dates. You may be inspired to implement this as a simple spreadsheet. Or you could take advantage of the advanced features of Microsoft Outlook, or some other customer relationship management (CRM) software. It does not matter, as long as you set up a system and begin using it this week.

This article is similar to an educational talk I gave at a BNI Premier networking breakfast. It is based on material in The 29% Solution by Ivan Misner.