The real challenge with follow up for solo consultants isn’t lack of leads or time (although those can be issues, too).
After all, if you had exactly one person to follow up with this week, you could easily make that happen in all but the most extreme situations.
The problem is that we have too many people to follow up with, and we don’t have a process for handling it, so it becomes overwhelming, and we just skip it. Which creates a vicious cycle.
Naturally, we might feel tempted to replace human-to-human follow up with AI or other types of automations. This works well in many situations– I don’t expect someone from Nespresso to maintain a 1-1 relationship with me, I expect to get automated emails inviting me to buy more coffee. But if you’re in a relationship business, you’re in a conversation business, and tech should be getting you into the right conversations instead of getting out of them (a mistake I made for man years).
With a process (and an effective system to support the process), follow up becomes easier, more natural, more fun, and more effective.