How You Create the Need to Follow Up

The need to follow up is driven by the failure to gain the commitment to take next steps with your prospective client.

Leaving a client interaction or sales call without asking for the commitment to do whatever needs to be done next all but ensures that you are going to have to reengage around that same commitment later. You are also going to weeks or months to the process of helping them produce the better results they need. But worst of all is the challenge you are going to have gaining the commitments.

You will have to call your prospective client to ask them for the commitment that would have been more easily acquired when you were with them. Many of those calls are going to go to voice mail. You might get a callback, but it isn’t going to be as soon as you’d like. You might also send emails to try to gain the commitment you need to move forward. Those emails will mostly go unanswered.

Your prospect is busy, and they have competing priorities. They have work to do outside of working on the opportunity you are pursuing together. If you don’t like having to chase down your dream client, then you have to ask for the commitment to take the next step at the conclusion of every interaction. Leaving a meeting without having another meeting scheduled is how you create the need to follow up. Not getting something on the calendar while you are together is how you create the need to follow up.

Selling is a series of conversations about change. During those conversations, you work to create a preference for you, your company, and your solution. It is also a series of commitments, a series of agreements to do certain things together as part of a process of exploring and making change. You make this process more difficult when you don’t gain those commitments.

By failing to get the commitments you need, you create the need to follow up.