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Many of us know that we should always be following-up, but for some reason this highly important activity is often neglected. Yet it is one of the most powerful tools in our marketing arsenal.

What is a follow-up? It is simply a phone call, a letter, an email or fax, a meeting after an event or transaction.

Who should we follow-up on?

If you want to have a profound effect on the growth of your business, make it a clockwork process to always follow-up on:

1. Prospects
2. First Time Customers
3. Existing Customers

As following-up on ‘existing customers’ is a whole different kettle of fish, I will focus on the importance of following-up on your Prospects and First Time Customers.

Why should we follow-up?

Prospects

It is essential to follow-up on your prospects for the following reasons:

• We all like to feel special and appreciated. When you follow up on someone, and if you are sincere in your follow up, you will reassure the prospect that you are actually interested in them becoming a customer. They will feel appreciated. When it comes to converting more prospects, it comes down to one company doing one small thing extra. If you are the company that has someone feel appreciated, that can make all the difference, and thus have them buy from YOU.
• Staying Top of Mind. A prospect can only buy from you if they remember who you are. Often prospects shop around, and can easily forget all the suppliers they contacted. Combine this with our naturally busy lives and unless you remind the prospect you exist, you don’t stand much of a chance. Remind them that you are here to support them.
• Opportunity for further selling. If someone is still a prospect, it means they have not been completely sold on your offering. By following-up, you create for yourself another opportunity to continue the sales process. Here you can further educate your prospects on all the benefits and advantages of going with you. The follow-up becomes an opening for rapport building, for removing concerns, risks and objections, and for being flexible and adapting to your customers’ needs. Give yourself a second chance!
• Market Research. Even though you follow-up, you still may have lost the prospect. However, by following up you create an opportunity to learn about ‘Why’ you may have lost this prospect to another supplier. This information is obviously critical and can allow you to avoid losing prospects in the future. It is important to ask your lost prospect to be honest with you, and let you know why they chose not to go with you. This information is invaluable to you and will help you grow your business!

First Time Customers

It is essential to follow-up on your First Time Customers because:

• Again, we all like to feel special, and appreciated. If you follow-up on your fist time customers, you will have them feel cared for, appreciated, and an important part of your business. If you were in a relationship where a friend or partner was indifferent to spending time with you, and you then met someone who really enjoyed your company and appreciated spending time with you, who would you gravitate towards? The same applies to your customers. They want to feel special too! And when they do, you have just given them a reason to come back to you again and again! Repeat purchases = the great revenue multiplier!
• Stopping Negative Word-of-mouth. Researchers tell us that if a customer is happy with your offering they will tell four people. If they are unhappy they will tell 13 people. It’s human nature to want to release negativity and get it off our chest. But, can you afford for all your dissatisfied customers to be reverse marketing for you? When you follow-up on a dissatisfied first-time customer you become the outlet for them to dump and complain. Either they complain to you, or to everyone else they know. Don’t allow the negative word-of-mouth to leak out past you!  Ensure your customers feel heard!
• Turning them back. By following-up you are creating an opportunity to convince this customer to return to your business. Had you not followed up, you would never have heard from them again. Even if they are dissatisfied, give them an offer they can’t refuse and invite them to give you another opportunity to Wow them. Remember that a major way to achieve growth in your business is to stop or reduce customer losses (customer attrition). If you are increasing customer attraction at 15% per year but are losing 10% per year, you are only growing your customer base by 5%.  Plug up the losses! Tackle growth at both ends: gain new customers and reduce losses.
• Market Research. This is a perfect time to learn how well you are actually meeting customer needs. Customer satisfaction is the result of you meeting an expectation. However, we are not always aware of what the expectation is, whether we have set it or not. Use this opportunity to see how well you are aligned to your customers’ needs. This is invaluable data that can help you convert more prospects, retain more customers and plug up customer attrition.

There are actually very few companies who follow-up, so by you following-up there is a high chance your customer or prospect will be very impressed by you. This can generate some serious buzz marketing about your business (positive word-of-mouth).

Can you think of your own experiences where if a supplier had followed-up on you they would have actually won your business? Can you think of experiences you have had where you were put off returning to a supplier because you felt they were indifferent to you? I’m sure you can think of plenty!

So, remember to make it standard practice to follow up on your prospects and first time customers.

Author Bio: Daniel Rechnitzer is the founder founder of Ui Group – the Brain Upgrade and inventor of the ChildsPlay Marketing Cards.
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If there’s one advantage we small business owners have over the big end of town, it’s the capacity to build quality relationships with our customers. We often do this by interacting with our customers on an authentic and personal level, taking the time to know their name, personal preferences and any issues they may need resolved. Most people respond well to this – it makes them feel connected.

Of course, the connected customer is more likely to be converted into a customer for life.

So, what’s the best way to build quality relationships, establish that strong connection and provide a great customer experience? Why not try these 7 steps:

1) Know thy customer

You must know who you’re marketing to. Precisely who is your target market or ideal customer? What do they want from you? Once you’ve identified this, tell them how you’re going to solve their problem. Tell them stories – give them something they can relate to (and something to pass on!). This also helps to build your brand.

2) Put your personality into your marketing

Express yourself in your marketing. People want to relate to other human beings, not an organisation or a product, so be yourself.

3) Be honest and authentic

There’s no point in bending the truth or lying to your customers – ‘cause they’re gonna find out eventually. If you make a mistake, admit it, apologise and move on. After all, we’re all human, aren’t we? Being honest is much more likely to endear you to customers than attempting to cover it up – and being found out.

4) How’s your customer service?

What kind of customer experience are they receiving? Is it world-class? Are you delivering quality service at every point of contact? If you’re failing to deliver in one particular area, it will affect the customer’s experience and may diminish your chances of retaining that customer for life.

5) What do they think?

Have you ASKED your customers for their valuable feedback? Don’t assume you know what they want or what they’re experiencing – ask them… then LISTEN and learn!

6) Fix it, upgrade it, improve it

Listen to the feedback your customers provide. If improvements can be made, put the suggestions into place as soon as possible.

7) Keep them informed

Being innovate is all the more effective if you let it be known that you’re acting on your customer’s request, recommendation or feedback. After you’ve fixed a problem or made an improvement, tell the customer who made the suggestion, as well as all your other customers about how you’re responding to customer feedback – and then ask for more. Your customers will love being involved and ‘listened to’.

Taking the above steps will set you on the road to establishing strong connections with your customers and the reward will be customers for life.

Author Bio: Lyndall Guinery-Smith is passionate about empowering you to grow your small business owners and become the envy of your competitors. Visit her blog, Kiss Your Competition Goodbye, to learn how to stand out, grow, prosper and succeed.
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Emotional intelligence (EI), often measured as an Emotional Intelligence Quotient (EQ), is one of the most important ideas to hit the business world in recent years. It is based on the notion of the ability, capacity, skill or a self-perceived ability, to identify, assess and manage the emotions of one’s self, of others, and of groups.

The most effective leaders are alike in one crucial way: they all have a high degree of what has come to be known as emotional intelligence (EI).

For managers and leaders this means understanding their own emotions, and those of the people they work with.

Many believe it is the key to better business performance.

It is not that IQ and technical skills are irrelevant.  They do matter but mainly as entry level requirements for executive positions.

Intellect is, of course, a driver of outstanding performance: cognitive skills such as big picture thinking and long-term vision are very important.  However, when the ratio between technical skills, IQ and EI, as components of outstanding performance, was calculated by in a recent study by Daniel Goleman (author of emotional intelligence (Bantam 1995) EI proved to be twice as important as the others.

So which elements of EI drive outstanding performance? What are the top 5? Do you have them and if not can you learn them?

1) Self Awareness

Self awareness means having a deep understanding of your emotions, strengths, weaknesses, needs and drives.  If you have strong self awareness you are neither overly critical nor unrealistically hopeful, you are honest with yourself and with others.

A self aware person would know that tight deadlines bring out the worst in them and would therefore plan their time carefully to get the work done in advance.

The other aspect of a self-aware person is that they understand their values.

If you haven’t already spent time examining your own values can I suggest that now is a good time.

How can you recognise self awareness in yourself? It shows itself as candour and an ability to assess yourself realistically.  One of the hallmarks is a self deprecating sense of humour.

2) Self –Regulation

Biological impulses drive our emotions.  We cannot do away with them but we can manage them.  Think of self regulation as your inner voice, that ‘mini me’ inside you.  It is that component of EI that frees us from being prisoners of our own feelings.  If you have self-regulation you feel the moods and emotional impulses just the same as everyone else but you find ways to control them and even channel them more usefully.  You manage your ‘state’ effectively.

Why does self-regulation matter for leaders? Well, if you are able to control your feelings and impulses you are able to create an environment of trust and fairness.  Politics and infighting will be reduced and productivity will go up.  Who wouldn’t want to work for this kind of organisation?

3) Motivation

This is one trait that virtually all leaders have.  Are you driven to achieve beyond expectations?  The key word here is achieve.  Plenty of people are motivated by external factors such a money or status but by contrast those with real leadership potential are motivated by a deeply embedded desire to achieve for the sake of achievement.

Do you love to learn and take pride in a job well done? Do you constantly raise the performance bar? If the answers are yes then you have what it takes.

4) Empathy

Of all the dimensions of EI empathy is the most easily recognised.

Empathy means thoughtfully considering others feelings – along with other factors – in the process of making smart leadership decisions.

Unfortunately, we rarely hear people praised for empathy in business.  In my opinion, it should be.  It is particularly important today as a component of leadership for three reasons:

• Team Building
  As a leader of a team you must be able to sense and understand the viewpoint of everyone so you can manage them effectively. The role of a leader is to get work done through others.  This is almost impossible if you don’t understand what is important and of value to them.

• Globalisation
  Cross cultural dialogue can easily lead to miscues and misunderstandings.  Empathy is an antidote.  People who have it are attuned to subtleties in body language; they can hear the message beneath the words being spoken.  Beyond that they have an understanding of the existence and importance of cultural and ethical differences.

• Talent retention
  Empathy plays a key role in talent retention.  Leaders have always needed empathy to develop and keep good people but today the stakes are higher.  When good people leave they take the companies knowledge with them.

5) Social Skills

The first three components of EI are self-management skills.  The last two, empathy and social skills are about your ability to manage relationships with others.  As a component of EI social skills are not as simple as they sound.  It is not just a matter of friendliness.  If you have highly developed social skills you will tend to have a wide circle of acquaintances and a knack for finding common ground with people of all kinds and an ability to build rapport.

People with social skills build bonds widely because they know that success is built on the quality of the relationships they have.

Are social skills considered a key leadership capability in most organisations? YES, especially when compared to other EI components

In Summary

It would be foolish to assert that good old fashioned IQ and technical ability are not important ingredients in strong leadership.  However the recipe would not be complete without EI.  It was once thought that the components of EI were ‘nice to have’ in business leaders.  Now we know that for top performance they are ingredients that leaders ‘need to have’.

It is fortunate then that EI can be learned.  The process is not easy and it takes time and commitment. However, the benefits that come from having a well developed EI make it worth the effort.

Are you able to self analyse yourself, or motivate those around you? Share your experiences in the comments below.

Author Bio:Louise Carter – Specialises in career and professional development and is particularly passionate about the advancement of women in the corporate world.
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