Follow-up strategy

1. Yes or No, but Not Maybe

 

I really don’t care what I get. If somebody tells me no, I’ll stop following up with them. But until they do, I will never ever stop following up.

 

If you just follow this simple rule, I guarantee you, I’ll bet you any amount of money you want if you just follow this simple rule, it’s not rocket science, if you just start following up with people indefinitely until you get a response, you will generate results in your life and in your business that you only dreamed of yesterday. It’s as simple as that.

 

2. How frequently should you follow up?

 

In general, the frequency that you want to have with this stuff is that you want to follow up very frequently at the beginning and then you want to broaden up the frequency over time. So as an example, if we just had a good meeting and a good conversation, my next follow up could be today and then my next follow up could be a day or two later.

 

And then the next follow up is like two or three days later and then a week later and then two weeks later and then a month later. And then after that, maybe every month, maybe every two months, and eventually, if could be every quarter. So what you do is you do a high frequency and density at the beginning of the relationship and then you’re broadening and spacing it out over time.

 

3. Which channels should you use to follow up?

 

Email allows you to do the highest level of frequency over the longest period of time but it’s the least urgent channel. if you don’t have urgency, if you don’t need somebody to respond immediately to what you’re doing and there’s not a deadline, email is probably the right channel. So more urgent than an email could be, a letter, an SMS, or a fax, it could be some social media. But even more importantly, let’s go from an email to an actual phone call.

 

what you want to do is if you don’t have urgency, you just use email. If it’s more urgent, you might want to go one level above and pick up the phone and call somebody. And even one level above that urgency is to actually show up in person. You would not believe how many multimillion dollar deals have been saved by people showing up in somebody’s office.

 

4. The dos and don’ts of following up

 

Number one thing is you need to be friendly and you need to keep it short. So my follow up emails honestly, lack any and every piece of creativity. All my emails sounded something like this, “Hey, another beautiful day in paradise. Here’s a new press article about our company. Can we meet this Tuesday or Thursday?”

 

The next email would be, “Hey, another beautiful day in paradise. We just hired this amazing person. Can we meet today at this time?” The next email would say, “Hey, another beautiful day in paradise. See, we just crossed this big milestone. I want to tell you about it. I’m so excited about meeting. When can you meet in the next 48 hours?”

 

All my emails were just that, just one sentence saying something nice about our company, a bit of news, and then proposing a time to meet. That’s it. You never want to apologize for emailing them.

 

5. Should you follow up even after hearing no?

 

It depends how big and how valuable the conversation relationship could be for you and them and for your business in the long term. 

 

 

6. Reaching out and following up with cold contacts

 

There are some studies that say that when you do a cold outreach, you want to follow up between 4 to 8 times. Four to eight times is probably the right frequency of following to a cold outreach. 

 

7. The break up email, or how to become a priority if someone has ignored you

 

Here is the simple format. You write a subject line that says something like, “Goodbye from Trunk Club” or goodbye from – this is an email I got from Trunk Club. It’s a B2C company. I got the exact same email from HubSpot which is a B2B company. And there’s a bunch of other companies that do this.

 

And then in the email basically what you say is you say, “Hey dude, I’ve been trying to reach you multiple times over this period of time. I never heard back from you. So what I need to do right now is I’m going to assume that you don’t care about this anymore. I’m going to take you off my list. You will never ever hear from me again. Whenever you’re ready to talk, here’s all my contact information. I’ll be excited to chat with you but you will not hear from me again. Goodbye.”

 

8. Put some funny in your follow-up

 

9. Optimize for being valuable over being liked

 

Business is not about being liked. Business is not about being loved. Business and life in my opinion is about creating value, making things happen. So I’m not optimizing for being liked. I’m not optimizing for not being convenient to other people. I’m optimizing for creating value.

 

10. Hiring the right type of salesperson

 

Just reject everyone and the people that keep persisting might be the right people to join your team. That’s not a bad piece of advice.