Video Transcript:

Ken Cook
That is perhaps the biggest game changer for the small business, is to have something that works when you’re not. Have something that’s selling, that’s marketing, that’s engaging while you’re sleeping.

So if you look at that piece of automation, what is it that is so critical there, and why is that such a game changer?

Clate Mask
In order to understand this, we have to recognize what happens in most small businesses when it comes to follow up. The reality is and you start to touch on it. If you have ten leads, there’s probably one of those that’s hot.

And three of those that are lukewarm and two or three that are maybe someday– and a couple, they’re like, how do they even become a lead? Right? That crap. They’re never going to turn into anything. But the problem is in business, especially as entrepreneurs, when we’ve got we’re wearing so many different hats, we really only have the mental capacity to focus on that one lead because there’s too many other things going on. And I have Ken, I have spoken to audiences all over the world. I’ve asked this question of entrepreneurs over and over and over.

I asked them two questions. First, how are you following up? And usually I get kind of the pained groans like, you know, not doing that so well, it’s it’s almost universal that I get a response like that.

Sometimes they’ll say, Yeah, you know, I do this and you press on them and they’re following up, they’re doing a little bit of follow up. We have to realize that people buy on average the seventh time they’ve seen the opportunity.

So if we’re not following up consistently and if we’re not following up with those that aren’t hot right now, we’re losing a ton of opportunity on the table. Most people follow up once or twice, but literally our math has shown over the years that when you follow up properly, your sales roughly triple.

And it’s because of this. If you have ten leads, you talk to the one that is hot. And by the way, if you have sales reps, they’re doing the same thing and then you’ve got these, this other group that’s warm.

The time is not right for them, but they’re probably going to buy us some point. And then you’ve got another group that maybe with the right offer the right situation over time, they might buy. And then you’ve got a group that’s cold, they’re never going to buy.

So why don’t we follow up? And I’ve talked to people over and over, look, you just went to this event, you got a whole bunch of contacts, a whole bunch of leads that you could talk with.

Why don’t you follow up with them? So these are two questions I ask, how are you doing following up? And then why don’t you follow up? And I’ll just have the audience tell me, and this is what I hear over and over and over.

00:24:58:23 – 00:25:14:07
Clate Mask
All the answers boil down to three buckets. The first one is and the most prevalent. I don’t have time. The second one, they say, is I don’t have any kind of system to do it. They have realized there’s a sending the right message to the right person at the right time.

I can’t stay on top of that. My brain’s not fit for that. And then the third thing is, I don’t really know what to say. I don’t know how to do it. Like, do I do this by email?

Do I send a text or I make a phone call? If I send them emails, do I say this? Do I say that? It’s a know-how problem. So why don’t people follow up? First of all, we establish if we followed up, we’d get a heck of a lot more growth in our business.

Everybody knows that’s true, though. Okay, then why don’t we follow up? I don’t have the time, I don’t have a system, and I don’t have the know-how. So that’s what we have to establish first before we say, OK, well, then what does it look like to follow up the right way?

We have to first be bought into the fact that, yes, if I would follow up better, my business would grow. And then second, we have to be really honest with ourselves about why aren’t we following up? And that comes down to time, a systematic way of doing it, and know-how.

In our early days when we started getting people into our software, we would find these people who had built crazy manual systems for how they followed up. Calendaring systems, file folder systems, because they intuitively knew that follow up worked really well.

If I sent a certain thing to clients that on the anniversary of me working with them or on their birthday, or if something had changed in their lives. We found that insurance agents were really good at this. Certain ones that had been lifers and they built these systems for follow up that were totally manual. But they knew it worked, and so they did it, and then they saw our software, they’re like, Oh my gosh, this is this is amazing, I can actually automate this.

So the point is we’ve got to understand what needs to happen in the follow up and then we can figure out later how to automate it. So here’s the thing. It doesn’t have to be an elaborate, crazy system.

What I tell people all the time is there are a few basics that every business needs that will grow their business if they will do these.

The first one is follow up on new leads. And this can be any kind of lead collection. Think of this as like the front end of your process where you’ve got a magnet at the front end that’s attracting people who are interested in what you do and you are collecting those leads, whether they come through an event that you go to or they fill out a form on your website, or they call into your office, or they walk in, or whatever. However, that interaction occurs, you want to collect that lead and now you want follow up to occur on that lead. So that’s new lead follow up. That’s one of the staples of follow up in entrepreneurship.

The second staple is once you have a lead that converts to a customer, a paying customer, a client. Now you have a certain follow up process that you want to follow to nurture that customer, wow them, impress them, cause them to say, Wow, you know, this company really is following up well with me. By the way, you look really big and good to them when you do that because usually it’s only bigger companies that do this kind of thing. So you strike a really great impression with them. That’s the second, new client follow up.

And then the third is what we call long term nurture. This can be done with a newsletter. It can be done with some kind of an anniversary nurture. It can be done lots of different ways. But the idea is to stay in touch with them. Show up. Don’t let them forget about you. You know you aren’t forgetting about them, but they’re forgetting about you because they go on with life.

Those are the three most fundamental aspects of follow up. And what I said at the beginning, you can start very basic before you build out a more sophisticated system behind you. The basics of the system are new lead follow up, new client follow up, and long term nurture.

Ken Cook
I think for you guys who are watching this right now, I want you to realize that Clate just gave you guys the secret to 1,000,000 dollar business.

I say this all the time, marketing is not rocket science. It’s not the complex, mystical, beautiful thing that the AMA wants us to believe that it is.

Clate Mask
Right, that you have to have an MBA for.

 

Ken Cook
It’s nuts and bolts.

Clate Mask
Yeah, you demystify it down to a linear process that has follow up in it, where you break it down to new lead follow up, new client follow up, and long term nurture.