The #1 Way to Take Control of Your Follow-Up

Welcome back to this week's episode. Thanks for tuning in. And as always, I appreciate you. Does this sound familiar? The call went great, like really great.

They said, this sounds amazing. Can you send me more information and follow up? You said, absolutely. That was three weeks ago. And that follow-up email, it's being ignored, and you have a few more sitting in your drafts.

If you're nodding right now, you're not alone. For so many people that I work with, the follow-up list just keeps on growing. It gets longer, it gets deeper, and somehow there's something always more important to do than follow-up. Today, we're going to talk about the number one way to improve your follow-up. And it's probably not what you think.

It doesn't start with a better email. It actually starts long before that person ever gets onto your follow-up list. Now, before we get into how to improve your follow-up, it's important to figure out why we avoid follow-up. And there's three real reasons that I see for people avoiding follow-up. The first one is we invest a lot of time into that call.

Sometimes we get off the call and we agree to a follow-up, and deep down we know that we didn't get to the heart of what was going on. Yet we're kind of banking on that deal to happen during our follow-up. But it's an unknown because we left things, some things unanswered, right? In the background of that call, we knew there was something there, but we didn't ask the question to uncover it. Instead, we moved on with the yeah, I'll send over the information and follow up.

And part of us is worried that when we do follow up, we're gonna hear we went in a different direction or we went with someone else. And this right here ties directly into the number two reason why we avoid follow-up. It's the fear of rejection, especially when the call went well, at least on the surface. They asked us to send something over, they asked us to follow up at a certain time, or maybe just follow up in a week. And now, when we follow up, if they don't respond, or they respond and tell us they've gone in a different direction or they're no longer interested, does that mean we did something wrong?

Or even worse, what if they ignore us? So oftentimes we send the one follow-up and then we don't send any more because we don't want to, you know, be pushy, but we're also scared that if we send too many emails, we're gonna get that rejection. And sometimes that's hard to process when you're in sales and it feels like the weight of the world is on you. The third reason it's all connected together is that sometimes we just don't know what to say. We agree to a follow-up without having a clear understanding of what the follow-up is intended to do.

So we'll send an email or we'll leave a voice message saying, hey, just checking in, just circling back, just following up. That's okay for the first time, but how many times can you send the follow-up for the follow-up and just following up and just checking in and just circling back before you start to feel like you're pestering somebody? And I think that's why follow-up begins to feel heavy and overwhelming, is because we don't know specifically what we're following up on and how it's moving a deal forward. This all stems from a core problem. I've noticed that most people are way too quick to say yes.

Yes to the follow-up, yes to sending more information. And when we jump to yes, all of a sudden we own the follow-up 100%. There's no shared responsibility. You, as the entrepreneur or the salesperson, you now own the follow-up, and that becomes really heavy. When they say send me more information, you say yes, right on it.

They say follow up next week, no problem. They say call me back another time, you got it. We don't slow down. We sometimes out of nervousness or just a reaction, we go right to yes. Someone once described this really well to me.

They said salespeople and new entrepreneurs are like golden retrievers. The prospect throws them tennis balls and we just keep on chasing them. The tennis balls are the send me more information, follow up next week, call me back another time, and we just say yes, and we go happily waggling down the core, down the lawn, we grab the ball and we bring it back and we say, I just sent you the information. Now what? And they throw you another tennis ball.

And this can happen over and over. Sometimes it's just an easy way to get rid of you for a bit and for you to return the information, and we do it without ever asking any further questions. But chasing the balls is going to burn you out. The whole responsibility of follow-up resting on your shoulders is heavy. And today we're going to change that.

Remember that a sales conversation, especially a consultative one like you are doing,

is two-sided. You're guiding somebody through a decision-making process. There's, if there's a disconnect at any point in time, you start to carry more weight. And that's when follow-up gets weird and awkward, and you know, we start overinflating our pipelines. It leads to us feel like we're nagging because you don't actually know what the other person is expecting or what the clear next step is.

And that next step is so key to the number one way of improving your follow-up. You see, we typically have a whole list of follow-ups with no clear next step. We don't know what the outcome of that follow-up is going to be, and it's never been clearly stated nor agreed upon by yourself and the person that you're talking to. So instead of jumping in with a yes, I want you to start following up with something different. And it's gonna change your world.

I want you to slow down and ask a couple of more questions and define the next steps together. So instead of the person saying, Hey, can you send over the proposal and follow up with me next week? You're going to slow it down and not just jump to the default yes. You might say something like, Yes, I can do that. However, can we get some time on the calendar next week?

Because if it's not on my calendar, I'll totally forget about this. Does morning or afternoon work best for you? Immediately, that person is going to notice that you're doing something different. They will see that, oh, this person really has a process. They really understand what's going on.

I feel like they are helping guide me toward a decision. And for a person who's truly interested, they will typically get something in the calendar with you. You know what? Let's do Tuesday at 10 a.m. Perfect.

And the purpose of this call, from my standpoint, is to make sure that you have the clear next steps so that we can start working together. What is your goal of this call? You're establishing that mutual agreement. So your goal as the business owner is to have a clear next step so that you can start working together. You want to know if that other person's expectation is the same, so that when you do the follow-up call, you're both coming into that call with the same expectation.

Sometimes you will get a misalignment here. Somebody will push back and say, you know what, just follow up sometime next week. Wednesday morning should work fine. When that happens, I don't cave. I will typically say something like, I get the sense that there might be something more going on here.

Is there something that's unanswered for you? And that can feel like a really brave thing to ask, but it is a differentiator because sometimes people just don't know how to tell you that there's another concern lurking in the background, whether it be related to price, the solution, maybe there's another decision maker or timing. Maybe it's a priority thing. This slowing down, asking a couple of questions, and getting to a mutually agreed upon next step is going to change that follow-up list because every person that you're talking to will have a clear next step, who owns the next step, and the outcome of the next step. That is when your follow-up game completely flips on its head.

And sometimes you won't get a person in the calendar. The reality is sometimes people will say, I'll get back to you next week. When that happens, I don't just say, that's great, get back to me next week. I want to know when. When are you going to get back to me next week?

Okay, you're going to get back to me on Tuesday of next week. Perfect. If I don't hear from you by four o'clock on Tuesday, is it okay if I connect with you? Yes. And you can just say, hey, look, I don't want to be that person that's filling up your inbox.

So what can I expect from you when you follow up with me next week? Having that clarity saves everybody a whole bunch of time. It lets the person that you're speaking to know that you're organized and you have a system and you work the system. And it also lets you know if the person on the other side might just be dragging you along. Or maybe there's just unanswered questions that they're not coming out and telling you up front.

When you have the mutually agreed upon next step, it takes the pressure off you. It's a shared responsibility, and it's really how I love to work. I didn't always do this, but now having that agreed upon next step and preferably in the calendar changes how I operate as a business owner. Now, sometimes that person is going to ask for the follow-up. They're going to commit to a time in the calendar.

You're going to reach out to them, and there's going to be radio silence. And they're going to ignore you, even though the time was on the calendar. One way that I do, one way that I work to avoid this is I will typically send somebody a reminder, you know, a day before the meeting, saying, Hey, we have our meeting coming up tomorrow at X time. Just wanted to make sure that we're still good to go. And if you have any questions prior to the meeting, if they respond back and say, hey, you know, we have to move the time, that immediately starts putting a little bit of a flag into my head of, hey, there's something going on here I have to be aware of.

And it could be that they weren't well qualified or something was missed or there's something hidden there that we haven't asked. The follow-up list will shrink when you start having mutually agreed upon next steps because all of a sudden, it's not just a list that you're carrying, it's a mutually shared responsibility between you and the person that you're speaking with. Now, I want you to think about people that you have sitting on your follow-up list right now who haven't responded. It's important that you're not just following up for the sake of following up, like I mentioned. You're not just following up to follow up to follow up to circle back to follow up.

Maybe you have some of these people who've been sitting in your pipeline or in your opportunity list for some time and they haven't moved. If you followed up and followed up and circle back and followed up, and there's been no movement, I really like the approach of a breakup email or a closing your file email. And it will typically go something like this Hey, customer, it was great speaking to you. We missed our last follow-up call. I have sent you several emails and haven't heard back.

It leads me to believe that now is not the right time. I'm gonna go ahead and close your file. If anything changes, I'm here. That is the breakup. You would be surprised how many times people will respond back and say, Oh my goodness, I totally like just got sidetracked and forgot about you.

Let's have another call next week. And then if they ignore you next week, I would just flat out close the file because I don't waste time on people who waste my time. Hopefully, what I've talked about today hits home, right? The fear of rejection is real. Sometimes we know in our gut that the call didn't go well, but we do the follow-up anyway because you know what?

Maybe there's still a chance that it's gonna work. And then sometimes we just don't know what to say. But when you have that mutually agreed upon next step, you have the next step, it's in the calendar, you know what the outcome of that next step is gonna be. All of a sudden, your reason for following up becomes a whole lot more clear because you know what the successful outcome is going to be. So here's what I want you to take away as we wrap up.

The one way to improve your follow-up isn't a better email. It's getting a mutually agreed upon next step before the call ends. And to do this, you're gonna slow down, ask an extra question or two, get it in the calendar, and if you can't, be honest about it and find out what is really holding things up. Your follow-up list will get shorter, your sales cycles will speed up, and you'll stop chasing tennis balls because you are better than that. Until next week, my friend, get out there, continue to grow your business, and don't be scared to shorten your follow up list and ask for the mutually agreed upon next step.