Lead Zeppelin

From the excellent Win Without Pitching blog, Blair Enns lays out a 4-touch follow-up plan for prospects:

1. 1st touch – Voicemail
2. 2nd touch – email; within 48 hours of 1st touch
3. 3rd touch – Voicemail (1-3 days later)
4. 4th touch – email (1-2 days later)

We use a similar system with our own Lead Zeppelin account. And, rather than pre-load all the tasks, we just add them after noting each follow up, since the duration may vary and we might move the prospect to the next phase earlier than expected.

What’s your follow up routine?

It’s getting less expensive to communicate to your customers and contacts on a regular basis, especially with MailChimp’s new plan that lets you have 500 contacts for FREE and send out 3,000 emails a month.

Now you can send a simple email to your best customers and contacts at least once a month, letting them know what’s new with your company (comon’ there has to be at least ONE newsworthy thing?), while staying in touch and top of mind.

If you’re not doing any blogging, twittering or email marketing now for your company, I suggest you start with a simple blog and or a monthly email. Twittering is great too, especially for folks who can’t seem to churn out a longer blog post, but it takes a certain personality and strategy to make it worthwhile, let alone finding the time for yet another social media time sink.

If you’re in the services business, like our company cre8 is, we always have a project or two getting completed each month we can talk about and share some best practices derived from it. We can also talk about new technologies that may be relevant to decision-makers at small to medium-sized businesses.

The same on the product-side, like we have with Lead Zeppelin. Digital products, much like physical products, are always being updated, upgraded and improved. If it’s a slow month, product development-wise, you can always highlight how a customer is (successfully) using your product.