Follow Up Isn’t Chasing

She said, “I’m not chasing people for business.”

Translate that into, “I’m not prepared to follow up and take an active interest in the people who are potentially interested in working with me. My ego is so big that I expect customers will rain from the sky and I’ll never have to put any effort into selling and my life will be perfect.”

I hate to be the one to tell you, but this is not how you build a business.

Let me explain what a sales process looks like in a super simple way:

1. You create content and do all kinds of things to establish visibility and credibility so people are interested in doing business with you.

2. The interested person shows up. This can be someone who visits your website, sends you an email or calls you.

3. The interested person demonstrates a desire to buy. This might be an abandoned shopping cart if you’re selling retail products or the request for more information or a proposal for a service offering.

4. The interested person doesn’t follow through. Something happened that distracted them because your sale was not their top priority.

5. Decision time for you. You can follow up (they say the fortune is in the follow up for a reason), or you can adopt the attitude of “not chasing people for business.”

6a. You follow up, sometimes multiple times, and eventually, the interested person makes a purchase and goes from being interested to being a customer.

6b. You don’t “chase” the interested person. Rather, they see another business that does what you do, they wonder why you never followed up with them, and instead, they buy from them.

Why on earth would you spend so much time on marketing to attract people to your business and then let your ego, fear, or attitude get in the way of following up? If you are not following up with people, you are leaving tons of warm opportunities on the table to fizzle out, and you’re spending way too much time, money and energy on marketing. If you simply followed up, you’d get the sale, the customer, possibly the long-term value of the customer, and referrals to their network of friends.

Stop taking delays in the sales process so personally and start doing the basics of following up and getting back to the people you’re marketing to. This isn’t even hardcore selling, my friend; this is common sense and good customer service. I appreciate it when people follow up with me, and I am super impressed when I’ve abandoned a cart online and they email me to complete the transaction.

Those are the businesses that are thriving.