Be proactive and contact them

The Power of Follow Up

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Say what you're going to do and then do it

It never ceases to amaze me how few business people make the time to follow-up after they have made initial contact with a prospect or customer. In the last few months, I can think of at least eight different situations in my own life (business & personal) when someone did not bother taking this initiative. These included a landscaper who designed plans for our property, two different people who spoke to me about creating a promotional piece of literature for my business, a sales rep for a pool company, and a men’s fashion salesman who was asked to send information. In each of these situations I was very interested in the product or service offered by the vendor.

This got me wondering…why don’t people follow-up? I think there are several reasons.

They don’t want to appear pushy. It may be true that following up too frequently will come across as being pushy. However, very few people ever come close to crossing this line. In fact, one the few times, a salesperson was pushy was more because of his tone, rather than fact he actually followed up. As a business owner, I believe it is our responsibility to keep following up with our prospects until we know for certain if they want to do business with us. However, I also strongly believe that we can cross that line by making too many calls in a short period of time. So where’s the happen balance? It depends on your business. A weekly call is more than enough to keep in touch providing you make sure your call is short and to the point. Don’t waste your prospect’s time by droning on and on. Also, if possible, provide some additional value during your follow-up call. This may give your prospect a reason to choose you instead of a competitor.

They forget. It’s easy to forget considering how busy we are. We may have every intention of calling our prospect but we get caught up in our business. Unexpected problems crop up, we find ourselves spending more time in meetings ad stuck in traffic, and because we didn’t schedule the follow-up, it doesn’t get done. This is a common dilemma but one that can be avoided by considering the follow-up like a scheduled appointment.

They make false assumptions. I once submitted a proposal to a company and told them I would follow-up on a certain day and time. Unfortunately, I was extremely sick that particular day and it was several days before I recuperated. I then wrestled with whether or not I should call him. I was concerned he would question why I didn’t call as scheduled. In the end, a simple apology was enough to rectify the situation and move the sales process forward.

When someone doesn’t immediately return our phone call or email message, we usually assume the worst – even if this assumption is not verified. I have learned from experience that a lack of response can often be attributed to the fact that the other person is just too busy to respond or does not have an answer for you. They think that the customer or prospect will contact them. I think this is one of the most common myths entrepreneurs fall prey to. They think that if they do a good job the customer will automatically call us back – we don’t need to follow-up. Unfortunately, we cannot rely on this if we want to achieve our sales goals. I remember talking to a couple of independent business owners at a networking function. Both lamented the fact that companies did not return their calls. I pointed out that the average executive receives dozens of phone calls everyday and often hundreds of emails. They are extremely busy which means they forget and the more time that slips by, the less important your product or service may be to them.

They have never been taught. Many people have never received formal sales training and have not learned why they should follow-up and how to make this happen. This is relatively easy to remedy. Start by asking or telling your prospect that you will follow-up on a specific day or time. Tell them how you will follow-up (telephone, email, face-to-face) and record this in your day planner or time management system. I use Outlook and now include a reminder so I don’t forget to follow-up.

Follow-up should also be completed after the sale is completed. A quick telephone call after your product or service has been delivered confirms their decision to buy from you. I make an effort to send every client a handwritten thank-you card once the sale has been confirmed and again when the services they requested have been delivered.

Here’s the bottom line. You can easily differentiate yourself from your competition by making the effort to follow-up with your prospects and customers. Don’t take it for granted that they will call you. Be proactive and contact them.

See what KBC2 is doing ... sab ko bakara bana raha hai!!!

See what KBC2 is doing ... sab ko bakara bana raha hai!!!

6 x 100 x 10 x 20 x 20 = 2400000

24 lakhs in 20 minutes..

cue is KBC 2!

Any guesses ??

6(Rs/SMS)  x 100(entries)  x 10( cities ) x 20
(districts ) x 20(states) = 6 x 400000(people trying
for the 2 lakhs cash price )

Imagine what if 1000 entries try out from 100 cities
??

The figure simply grows by 2 more zeores and yields a
whooping 24 Crores!!

And it does not stops there... 1000 entries from 100
towns is a very small number .. in practice it could
be another multiple of 100 or worst case a multiple of
1000 on an average..

In that case it is 24 x 100 crores earnings in just 20
minutes on every episode!

And the price money :-))  mere 2 CRORE ( and from
whose pocket ;-) )

Smart Buisness by Sidharth Basu!

And the best part of  this calculation is just the SMS
earning!

What about the Ad money ??

A rough annual profit calculation goes like this..

2400 x (5 x 4)(episodes/month) x 12  = 576000 crores

Let even 50% get dissolved in taxes and other
payments, still you will be left with  ( which
includes even the meagre 480 crores of price
money..i.e., if every episode bags 2 crore prize!! )

2,88,000 Crores profit ( only from SMS !!!! ) of
Indian Industry.

connecting the dots

 

----- Original Message -----

From: JEBEEN@aol.com

To: JEBEEN@aol.com

Sent: Sunday, October 16, 2005 8:02 PM

Subject: 10/16/05

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.