It’s one of the big dilemmas– we know we need to do a better job of following-up, but with limited time and limited energy, how do we know who to follow up with?
I know I’ve spent hours staring at lists of people, organizing and reorganizing, knowing rationally that talking to any of them was better than organizing the list, but paralyzed by trying to “optimize” the limited time I had.
Enter Call Mode
This is the idea behind Mimiran’s Call Mode. You start it, and it takes you to the next person you’re due to talk to. You have a conversation, or set a time to have one, and move to the next person. All the energy goes into the actual conversation, not the decision about who to converse with… (I like to set it up in my calendar with specific blocks for partners, prospects, etc.)
When you define a default conversation interval for a Tag (“I want to talk to prospects every 7 days”, “I want to talk to partners every 60 days”, etc), Mimiran will show you how many conversations you need to have each week to keep up with your audience. For example, if you have 11 Prospects, and you want to talk to them every week, you naturally need to be having 11 prospect conversations each week to keep up.
As you meet more people, or if, like me, you weren’t as judicious as you perhaps should have been when tagging prospects coming through Lead Magnets, you may find yourself with a schedule that you can’t sustain. You’ll see your Overdue Conversations number soar on your dashboard and in your notification emails.
What to do?
- Tidy up your Taggings. I sometimes realize that folks I had tagged as “Prospects” aren’t really short-term prospects, they need some longer term nurturing. I don’t want to forget about them, but I don’t need to ping them so frequently. Switch the tag from “Prospect” to “Nurture”, and you conversational burden goes down a bunch. I do something similar with folks who I thought would be “Partners”, but really aren’t. It’s also helpful to have an additional tag that’s a subset of “Partner”, like “Power Partner”, “Champion”, or whatever you want to call it. Make sure you keep up with these folks, the 20% of partners who supply 80% of your business. (Note that you can select multiple Contacts and swap the tags out for all of them at once.)
- Set a less rigorous conversation frequency. Maybe you can go from 7 to 10 or 14 or 30 days. For partners, maybe you can go from 45 to 90 or even 120 days. Note that if you finish some big projects and have more time, you can always tighten these intervals back up. If you know you’re going to have more time when your current project/vacation/emergency ends, you can also just manually move contacts with next conversations in that stretch to the following week (although this can create a pileup effect– be careful).
- Decide not to talk to some folks again. Every once in a while, I run into people I don’t want to talk to ever again. Be explicit about it. I tag them as “Disqualified” and remove the next conversation date. Other times, you just have too many people to handle. It’s not that you have anything against certain people, it’s just that you can’t possibly follow up with everyone. (See this Maximum Social Network calculator to get a rough idea of how many people you can handle.)
- Focus on existing relationships. Sometimes, you still just have too much on your plate. If you’re feeling like this, when in Call Mode and looking at a contact you haven’t spoken to before, send an email with a link to your calendar (if you don’t already have the contact’s scheduling link). You can make this a task associated with the tag, and/or a task template, so it’s quick and easy. Then set the next conversation date for a couple of weeks out. Focus your time on the people you’ve already talked to. (No point in turning more people into contacts you don’t have time to follow up with…)