Should you follow up or not?

The psychology of reactance.

I get asked this constantly, in person, on the channel, in DMs, occasionally by people the slightly cornered look of someone who's been arguing with their sales director.

Should you follow up with a client or not.

The question itself suggests something isn't quite right, because nobody who's confident about what they're doing tends to ask it. They just do the thing. The question is a tell, it means someone has been burned, probably more than once, and they've started wondering whether the whole thing might be doing more harm than good.

Which, the way most people do it, it absolutely is.

The two camps tend to be these. The first lot follow up religiously, they've got a CRM with reminders, they send the polite check-in email at 48 hours, the second one a week later, the third one with a small bit of news attached, and they wonder why the conversion resembles a trappist noble silence.

The second lot have been so badly bruised by the first approach not working that they've swung the other way entirely and just don't bother, on the theory that if the client wants the thing they'll come back for it. They won't, by the way. Mostly they'll forget, or buy something else, or be reminded of you only by an algorithm three months later when it's far too late.

Neither camp is right, but they're both responding to something real, which is that the polite follow-up email is one of the most effective ways ever invented to talk a client out of a purchase they'd already decided to make.

I've watched it happen to me, a buying intent completely murdered by a perfectly pleasant little email saying "just checking in."

And I do this for a living, I should have seen it coming. I didn't and most clients don't either. They tell themselves they went off it, that it wasn't really right, that they'll come back later, and they almost never trace it back to the message that did the damage.

So yes, you should follow up.

Of course you should, the relationship doesn't sustain itself, and the alternative is just hoping, which isn't a strategy, and hope certainly doesn't pay bills.

But the question people are actually asking when they ask whether they should follow up isn't really should they, it's how to do it, because everything they've tried so far has either chased the client away or felt like doing nothing at all.

Those aren't the only two options. There's a third, and it's the difference between continuing a conversation and pursuing an answer.

That's what this week's video is about.

Chat to you next week.

Paul

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