The final building block in our marketing tactic model is the Follow Up block. As accountants, lawyers, and other service professionals, we tend to, as my fellow Duct Tape Marketing coach Bill Doerr is fond of saying “meet people by introduction rather than by crisis”.
In other words, for most professionals, we don’t meet people at the specific time that they have a need for our services. However, chances are they will need our services in the future. Hopefully, they will have a need for our services several times over the course of our relationship. Chances are, they will also have friends and acquaintances who will periodically have a need to know about us and what we do. We spend a lot of marketing effort to help us achieve “Top of Mind” status. It is of paramount importance that we have a follow up system in place so that once we achieve Top-of-Mind we are able to stay Top-of-Mind, so when a need to know about what we do does arise, they will contact us or refer us to those with the need.
Of course, we also need to have follow up systems in place so that when someone responds to one of our Calls to Action, that we respond appropriately, whether that mean starting a sales conversation or continuing to educate via our marketing materials.
In the building block diagram, there is a dotted line (you may click on the image to see the larger version) right below the Follow Up block. This signifies that, while every tactic needs to be attached to a follow up system, you certainly don’t need to have a separate follow up system for each tactic. As a practical matter, the fewer systems that you have, the more likely your are to use them consistently and effectively. As I mentioned in the Tools block, these systems should only be as sophisticated as needed to get the job done. For some firms, ACT! may do the job. Others may use something like Salesforce.com. For others, a simple index card based tickler system may do the trick. The “best” system isn’t the one that has the most bells and whistles, it’s the one that produces results.
That’s the end of this series of blog posts. Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback, both here and in person. I’d love to hear your opinions about this model – did you find it helpful, what do you think is missing, etc. Leave me a comment and let me know what you think.
