Book Yourself Solid, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER 7The Book Yourself Solid Keep-in-Touch Strategy

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

—Garrison Keillor

You already know that, generally, you need to connect with potential clients many times before they feel comfortable hiring you or purchasing your products. If you don't have a systematized and sometimes automated keep-in-touch strategy in place to support your Sales Cycle Process, you may, as the saying goes, leave a lot of business on the table.

Many businesses fail for lack of a solid keep-in-touch marketing strategy. Either they bombard you with too much information and too many offers that turn you off, or you never hear from them at all, which leaves you feeling unimportant and irrelevant.

Consider the experience of one of our clients, Barbara. Within a few short years she had compiled more than 5,000 subscribers.

The names were captured, but Barbara never really followed up with any of them until one day when she created a promotional offer to send to her list, and she eagerly clicked Send. What came back were mostly emails from recipients inquiring as to who she was and how she got their email address. Barbara learned a valuable lesson that day: Determine the best approach for using this strategy and build it into your keep-in-touch plans.

There is an important distinction to be made between following up with potential clients, colleagues, and others on a personal (one-to-one) level, and developing an automated keep-in-touch strategy through which you ...