Recently my parents decided to move across country to my city. To aid this process my dad’s newest hobby is checking out local real estate listings online then calling the real estate agents involved. Anything that looks promising, he has me go look at, armed with my digital camera.
What surprised me was how many agents don’t follow up. One agent had actually booked a showing with me and had to cancel at the last minute. She said she’d call to reschedule. That was six weeks ago and I’m still waiting. Eventually I looked at the property with another agent. Even worse, the property listed by the first agent recently lowered the price. All without a call to me or my father.
A couple of others are agents I know personally. They are not part time hobbyists selling real estate to fund foreign travel but full timers who market and promote themselves aggressively. And yet they didn’t follow up or return phone calls.
What gives?
As I started thinking about this I quickly realized that real estate agents are not the only industry afflicted with this problem. Lots of other small businesses suffer from no-follow-up-itis.
I think there’s a number of reasons why.
Too much to do, too little time.
First, many small business owners are doing it all themselves. They don’t have assistants to help
them with bookkeeping, phone calls, marketing, customer service or any of the daily activities of their business. They wear all the hats.
Whether it’s because their income is too low (or they think it is) to hire someone, or they’re afraid of giving up control, by not getting help, they have too much to do. With too much to do, some things fall through the cracks. And often those things are following up.
Following up ain’t sexy
Second, marketing is sexy. Following up is not. It can be exciting to design a new marketing campaign or send out a batch of press releases. It sounds impressive to say you were interviewed on a radio show. There’s a real wow factor to posting a video to your website.
Returning phone calls and emails is not sexy, exciting nor impressive to others. However, having someone to follow up with is the entire purpose of doing all these marketing activities. I suspect people who don’t follow up have mixed up their priorities a little bit. They’ve forgotten why they are marketing in the first place.
Don’t forget the systems
Third, people who don’t follow up probably don’t have any systems in place. Think about your calendar, planner, daytimer or whatever you use. You probably schedule in appointments, deadlines and even larger tasks. But do you actually write down specific times for returning emails, making phone calls or using social media?
If you’re like many people, you probably don’t. And yet all of these activities combined might take an hour or more a day. No wonder these tasks sometimes fall through the cracks. But if you actually put them into your calendar each day, they wouldn’t get forgotten. And for days where there are no follow ups required? Wahoo! That’s free time for getting a jump start on other tasks.
And if you don’t have anywhere to record phone numbers or names of people you want to follow up, odds are you won’t remember. I know if it isn’t written down, it doesn’t exist for me.
What does this all mean?
I recently read that the real key to success is following up. After some consideration, I think this is absolutely true. Think of how many really successful people you know. Often their products or services aren’t that much better (if at all) than their competitors. They’re not always smarter. But they consistently and habitually follow up with their leads.
Now I must confess, I have sometimes been guilty of this lack of follow through myself. In fact, before I sat down to write this post I quickly returned some emails I’ve neglected. Two quick emails resulted in almost $500 worth of revenue.
If you know (or suspect) that you’ve been letting some opportunities slip through your fingers, make the change today. Set up some systems, schedule regular times for following up, get some help or change your mindset.
An extra $500 won’t make me rich, but it will pay my mortgage.
So what if you could get an extra $500 every week? That would be amazing. And if you could get an extra $500 every day? Now wouldn’t that be worth taking the time to follow up?
Andrea J. Stenberg
What do you think? Have you been on the receiving end of a lack of follow through? And what do you do to ensure you don’t miss out on any opportunities? Please leave a comment and share your stories.
