Learn how you can change your life for the better through following up
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, where my goal is to give you 10-minute lessons on how to grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually so you can have better careers, better relationships, and better personal finances.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones.
In today’s episode we’re going to talk about the importance of following-up. You got to remember this, the fortune is in the follow-up. There is a stat out there by the National Sales Executive Association where:
- -48% of salespeople never follow up with a prospect
- -25% of salespeople make a second contact and stop
- -12% of salespeople only make three contacts and stop
- -Only 10% of salespeople make more than three contacts
- -2% of sales are made on the first contact
- -3% of sales are made on the second contact
- -5% of sales are made on the third contact
- -10% of sales are made on the fourth contact
- -80% of sales are made on the fifth to twelfth contact
So if you want something out of life, you have to follow-up. When it comes to getting people to come to an event, you have to follow up with them to make sure they didn’t get distracted and now are doing something else. People get between 4000-5000 distractions a day and can just be busy sometimes when you follow-up, so you have to do it again. In your career, it’s important to follow-up if you’re not in a sales job or are your own business owner. If you want a promotion at work, it’s important to ask your boss what is it going to take for you to get that promotion. Then make sure you follow-up with them periodically to make sure everything is going in the right direction. It’s not wise to get what is needed for a promotion and one year later find out you were doing the right things necessary. I would say every 2-3 weeks should be fine for a quick check-in to tell your superiors what is going on. If you don’t say anything, then things can be lost and you wasted time.
The same thing can with your goals. When it comes to working out, you just have to follow-up with yourself the next day and work out again and eat right. You have to constantly follow-up with yourself to make sure you’re doing the right things. We can easily get caught up in life and get distracted. One day you don’t go to the gym and then the next day, and then comes a point where you stopped working out for a month or two and you can’t remember why you stopped working out. You have to follow-up with your goals to make sure you’re on track.
If you haven’t done this yet, I but I was thinking a virtual assistant would be helpful in keeping up with your goals. Pay them $10 dollars a week to call you every day or e-mail you to make sure you’re on track for your goals. They would ask you at 5 pm if you did the thing you were supposed to do and hopefully you say yes. Follow-up is key.
One of the best ways to follow-up is using the Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow method. This only takes about 5 minutes to do but can prevent a lot of things from falling through the cracks that you do at the end of your workday. You can use a piece of paper, a journal, or my personal favorite, Evernote to keep track of your YTT report. So this is how it works. You put to YTT on the top with the date. Then you create three different lines, with Y T & T. So when it comes to the Y you put everything you did yesterday that needs some type of follow-up. If you have a client appointment yesterday, did you finish your tasks from that meeting and delegating them to the right channels? This will prevent you from having that moment where a week goes by and it’s time to have that second meeting and ensure everything was completed. For the first t, it stands for today. What are the things you did today that need follow-up and did you do them? When I got leads from marketing events, did I put them into my CRM so I can give them a call that day or tomorrow? Did something break and now it has to be fixed? Just another filter to make sure nothing slipped through the cracks. The final T is for tomorrow. This ensures that you don’t walk into work the next day with a surprise waiting for you because you forgot to do something. This gives you some time to plan out the next day and be successful with it because you planned it out. One minute of planning saves you 10 minutes in execution time. So by spending two minutes thinking about tomorrow can save you 20 minutes. What a great return on your investment. When I had an assistant at my last firm nothing made me feel bad than asking her to do something at the last minute because didn’t properly delegate and follow-up. It was my fault and I tried my best not have that situation again.
Another thing is to follow-up with those people around to see how everything is going. I’m in a relationship business and at the end of my meetings, I ask them is there anything I can improve on for them. Most of the time, I get that everything is going well but then I do get some feedback to make my meetings even better. I feel like asking feedback on a relationship can save a lot of them because if you don’t follow-up people just tend to grow apart. So it’s best to ask periodically like every month to see how things are going. The fortune is truly in the follow-up.
To summarize today’s episode, you’re probably going to have to follow-up many times to make sure things are done. Just have a system to ensure you like the YTT and having a to-do list. And realize that if you don’t follow-up that’s when things start to fall apart like a career, an organization, or a relationship. If you want the good life, then following-up on things is going to be crucial.
Thanks for listening to today’s episode.
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