I’ve been thinking a lot about follow up a lot this Fall. It’s one of the most important parts of a business development plan but also often overlooked. During the Hera Hub Business Accelerator Expo for Startup Week last month, I worked on breaking down the steps so it seems like less of a struggle. One of the reasons I’m thinking about this a lot is that what people really need is to follow up like a machine. I can coach people to do it but to make it even easier I thought – why not build a follow up machine? So I did.
Origin of the Machine
To back up a little, one thing I learned in all this talk about follow up is not that people don’t see the value, or even that they don’t want to do it but that keeping track of follow up is just hard. Customer Relationship Management Systems can certainly help but they’re only as good as the information you put in.
In many cases the systems we have for keeping track of follow up, from a spreadsheet to Salesforce, don’t give us the information we need that is relevant to the person we want to follow up with. Sure, you can put in the person’s birthday and LinkedIn will tell you when their “work anniversary” is. But what about the other things that will help you stand out to your prospects or clients? How can you use all the information that’s out there to build and maintain a meaningful relationship?
- If the notice that someone switched jobs doesn’t come across your LinkedIn feed in that daily (or weekly) scroll, how do you know when to congratulate them?
- Is your drip campaign relevant to your targets or prospects or just your company?
- Attending conferences and events is great for networking, but how do you know if your target prospects will be there?
- And this is the biggest one – how do you manage all these touchpoints when you need to manage your own business?
Introducing TouchPoint and TouchPoint Tuesdays!
I worked with my friend Brad Eisenberg to build a machine that solves these problems for my clients. I call it, simply enough, TouchPoint.
TouchPoint makes sure you get timely and relevant updates on your top corporate targets so that you don’t miss an opportunity to turn your contacts into meaningful connections.
With TouchPoint you will,
- Tell us your target and priority contacts
- Receive an email every Tuesday with a reason to get in touch with your targets and suggested action to take
- Follow up authentically to build meaningful connections, and
- Win new business
The emails look like this:
Picture this list curated with your contacts and just the information that’s relevant to them.
- Did your contact switch companies? Here’s their Linkedin with a note to congratulate them!
- Did a target company just announce a vendor summit for new suppliers? Register then reach out and let your contact know you plan to attend
- Did your target company pop up in the news with a challenge you can help them solve? Send them an email referencing the article.
- Did your contact or company just win an award? Email to congratulate them!
Initially, my plan was just to use to help my current clients with their follow up. It will help me keep track without going to multiple lists and spreadsheets.
But then I thought, why not make subscriptions available to people who just want this service? TouchPoint will help them focus on their targets and cut out the noise for one annual subscription fee of $100/month.
If TouchPoint could help you, you can sign up using this form and if you want to chat, about it, I’d love to talk to you about how TouchPoint can manage and grow your business development relationships.