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The Follow-Up: Dos and Don’ts

 

You worked hard to win the sale. And you want to serve your customer again in the future and have them refer you to their contacts.

The secret? Following up.

Diligent follow-ups before, during and after the sales transaction helps position your business as a resource—not just another company trying to sell things. Strategically timed phone calls, emails and presentations help build goodwill with your customers and vastly improve your odds of future sales.
 

Here are a few things to keep in mind when you’re following up.


DO
• Learn as much as you can about your clients so you can tailor your follow-ups to their preferences. If they contacted you over the phone, call them back. If they sent you an email, respond by email.

• Follow up in a timely manner. Interest wanes if you wait too long.

• Implement a system to manage follow-ups. There are database and contact management programs to make this easier on you.

• Use different types of follow-ups: personal phone calls, emails, presentations, etc. Recognize birthdays and anniversaries. Send congratulations or sympathy. Of course, follow up with sales and offers that fit their needs.

• Use the Survey/Referral marketing tool to gather important follow-up information. This free resource helps answer the questions: “How’d I do?”, “What can I help you with next?” and “Can you provide referrals?”.

• Know when to stop following up. If you’re being ignored, send one last email or make one last phone call. Let the client know you won’t be contacting them again. But leave it open by stating your contact information and saying that you’ll always be available should they need you in the future. Then move on.


DON’T
• Fear the follow-up. It’s generally easier to nurture and maintain an existing customer than it is to prospect.

• Take no personally. Rethink negative responses by realizing that your products or services just didn’t fit their needs at this moment. Things change. Follow up occasionally to see if needs have changed.

• Put it off. Do what you say you’re going to do when you say you’re going to do it.

• Disappear if a customer doesn’t work out. Introduce them to someone else in your company (or suggest a competitor) to help them out. This will reflect positively on you.


Following up is a cycle of being persistent, but not pushy. Done correctly, effective follow-ups will elevate your professionalism, reflect the quality of your products and ultimately, generate more sales.


 

THE OPTIMISM REVOLUTION.

Psychology Today, May 2007 by Jill Neimark

OPTIMISM AS YOU KNOW IT ISN'T ALWAYS THE BEST MEDICINE. IN THE NEW VIEW, BEHAVIOR TRUMPS POSITIVE OUTLOOK, WHY A HEALTHY MENTALITY PAINTS THE WORLD IN LIGHT AND SHADOW.

THE PAIN WAS BLINDING," RECALLS Larry Dossey of the afternoon last August when he was thrown by two different horses--within a mere two hours. Dossey, his wife, and another married couple had just spent two weeks camping and fly-fishing in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming--a place so beautiful, he says, that it makes him feel like he's "in touch with the gods"

Dossey, a doctor as well as an early champion of mind-body medicine, cracked his ribs when the first horse spooked; but he allowed the wranglers to mount him on a second horse--their most experienced one--with the hopes of reaching civilization soon. The second horse bolted up the mountain, lunged over an embankment, and sent Dossey flying. He fractured his spine, though he didn't know that at the time.

After testing his ability to wiggle his toes and turn his head, Dossey concluded his best chance for survival was to walk out of the wilderness. "I realized that this was an extraordinarily serious situation with no good solution that I nonetheless had to overcome," he recalls. "And somehow I knew I could overcome it with sufficient courage and resolve." So he suggested that the women, wranglers, and pack horses ride ahead, and that his friend accompany him by foot. Night fell. For 10 hours he walked, in pain "with every step, one flashlight between us, across some of the most rugged territory I've ever seen," says Dossey. "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. I focused on the act of putting one foot in front of the other. I put my consciousness down in my feet. I stopped every 15 minutes to get on top of the pain."

At about 4 in the morning, they reached the wranglers' base camp, and from there his wife drove him to the small town of Lander, Wyoming, an hour away. But his back pain only worsened, so that he could hardly stand. Two days later they located a spinal specialist in Bozeman, Montana, who diagnosed the fractured vertebra and hospitalized Dossey, putting him on intravenous morphine. For months he wore a body brace, encased in plastic from chin to hips. He now wears a lighter brace and suffers from daily back pain. His conclusion: "I'm absolutely grateful I didn't land on my head or neck. I came within just a whisper of being a quadriplegic. I reflect on this every day."

 

 


Optimism is "an inclination to put the most favorable construction upon actions and events or to anticipate the best possible outcome".[1] It is the philosophical opposite of pessimism. Optimists generally believe that people and events are inherently good, so that most situations work out in the end for the best.

Alternatively, some optimists believe that regardless of the external world or situation, one should choose to feel good about it and make the most of it. This kind of optimism doesn't say anything about the quality of the external world; it's an internal optimism about one's own feelings.

A common conundrum illustrates optimism-versus-pessimism with the question, does one regard a given glass of water, filled to half its capacity, as half full or as half empty? Conventional wisdom expects optimists to reply, "Half full," and pessimists to respond, "Half empty" (assuming that "full" is considered good, and "empty", bad).

Another paradox sometimes associated with optimism is that the only thing an optimist cannot view as positive is a pessimist. Pessimism, however, as it acts as a check to recklessness, may even then be viewed in a positive light.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_psychology

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/optimism.html

http://www.newsweek.com/id/61572      This is your brain on optimism

 

 


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