One of the keys to maintaining and growing a business is a follow-up routine.
Staying in touch with potential customers, past customers, and referral partners is key. There are many methods to do this, including social media and email marketing. Often, though, a business needs to make that personal contact.
It’s important to follow-up on a regular basis before you fall off of someone’s radar.
This means maintaining a follow-up list and a follow-up schedule. A good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool can help you to do this. You can read my blog post here about CRM systems: 3 Tools to Easily Follow Up.
In a typical daily routine, you will start your day by checking your calendar, perhaps scanning your email, and checking your to-do list.
The most efficient way to have a follow-up routine is to integrate with your regular tasks.
Here are some ideas of how to do so:
Integrate with your calendar
Many CRM systems will integrate follow-up tasks with your Google or iCloud Calendar. Some will also integrate with an Exchange calendar.
If you’re using Evernote as your CRM, as I write about here: 7 Steps to Manage Client Info, you can use a service called Cronofy to integrate Evernote reminders with your Google, Exchange, or iCloud calendar. The Cronofy service will create a calendar event on the date of the reminder using the title of the note.
Move your emailed task reminders to a task list.
I write about that here: How to Integrate Email with Task Management.
Check your follow-ups tasks before you check your to-do list.
This usually means logging into your CRM system and checking your dashboard or your reminders if you’re using Evernote. Having the CRM mobile apps installed makes this easy – just open the app and check your tasks/reminders for the day.
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