I am a great believer in not starting something unless I plan to finish it. Yet how many people start tasks or projects and never get around to finishing them – what a waste of time and energy!
Never is this truer than with a marketing or business development campaign. Lots of effort goes into planning and delivering a campaign, some great content is produced and then leads start to come in but people are busy doing their ‘day job’ and don’t follow the leads up in a timely manner or at all, and very quickly these leads go ‘cold’. Think how much each of these leads cost you or your business? A great example of this was a company that spent £20k attending an exhibition and designing/building an eye catching stand. They were at the show for 3 days (think about the time that cost from being away from the office), generated about 100 leads from the show but when they all got back from the event they all got busy catching up with work and failed to follow the leads up in a timely manner. Considering the direct and indirect costs of this, each lead cost the business around £300 so to not follow up immediately after the event was a huge and expensive mistake. I am sure this is a familiar story to many of us.
So I always tell my clients – don’t start something you don’t think you will be able to finish. It’s better to do fewer things well and thoroughly than do lots of things badly!
If you want some support around this or with your business development, then please get in touch.
Great blog post. I spoke to a decent percentage of attendees at one particular exhibition prior to the event to ask them about their follow up plans. I was amazed how few of them had proper follow up strategies. So many of them said that they make a note of any ‘hot leads’ and follow up with those directly after the show. Very few I spoke with considered that you shouldn’t assume people aren’t interested. I love talking and learning about businesses, and I can see that people often dismiss me seeing that I run a Virtual Assistant business. I’m not their direct customer, but I source suppliers for my clients and frequently make recommendations or include people I’ve met in a shortlist of potential suppliers for my clients. It’s also important to remember that people may have more business interests than what’s printed on their business card. They might be a Director of another company or have a family member who runs a different company. It’s a mystery to me why people wouldn’t have a follow up strategy! I attended one event and gave my business card out to loads of businesses. From memory, I only got two follow up emails. I became a customer of one of those two about a year after they had sent the initial follow up message.