To Follow Through or Not to Follow Through?

To follow through or to not follow through — that is NOT the question! The question, what does it look like in your world to be a master of the skills of Follow-Up and Follow-Through? (See previous blog entries for the Why and the How!)

You are a master of Follow-Up and Follow-Through when you:

• Have a vision for your commitments. Use visual reminders in your work area to boost your motivation.
• Provide encouragement and motivation to others. You’ll uplift yourself in the process.
• Follow prevailing standard operating procedures (if established) until you can improve on them. Model your actions on someone successful.
• Plan your processes ahead of time. Create checklists so you don’t have to rely on memory to ensure each step is completed.
• Schedule next steps using specific dates and times. Use business tools such as mobile devices or computer calendars to set automatic reminders at the time you schedule.
• Respect other people’s time and wishes by asking what works for them and being on time.
• Plan to take actions every day that can move you toward your commitments.
• Schedule periodic evaluations of your effectiveness. Identify what actions were missing that could have improved outcomes and add them to your checklists.
• Offer resources of value to others based on their needs, working towards a win-win situation.

When it comes to sales or new business development, you as a master of Follow-Up and Follow-Through:

• Embed your campaign with value. This is helpful for building new relationships, maintaining current ones and expanding current engagements into larger accounts.
• Build a favorable “personal brand recognition” with your customers by using frequent, brief emails, tweets or phone calls to provide communications the customer is genuinely interested in.
• Educate people to aid their decision-making process and motivate them to action. Help prospects move towards making a decision without pressure or hype.
• Personalize your efforts. Plan ahead to provide something of value from the other person’s point of view.
• Be persistent, but don’t continually pester people who have told you no. Have a valid business reason (such as new information) for asking them to reconsider.
• Ask permission to follow up with them at a later date when they may have further needs. Set a reminder to do so.

These are just the beginning of applying Follow-Up and Follow-Through in your working world. Of course you can (and need to!) apply Follow-Up and Follow-Through in your personal life as well.

If you could use a little assistance in strengthening these skills, let us know. We’ll follow up with ya!

Your Coach,

Shandel