Stay In Touch - Out of Sight, Out of Mind

One of your chief jobs in selling your services is to figure out how to stay in touch with your clients and your top prospects. The old adage, "Out of sight, out of mind" should be your marketing mantra.

Whether you work for IBM or Accenture, or you are an independent consultant, try to find ways to stay in contact with your clients. For a variety of reasons, usually because we are too busy, or we don't want to "bother" the other person, or we fear rejection, we often fail to practice this simple and critical strategy.

But you MUST overcome these three excuses if you are going to be successful. The bottom line is this: you will not stay in the minds of your clients unless you stay in touch with them on a regular basis. And if you are not in their minds, they will not think of you when they have work that might be done by you.

Here are three actions you can take right now that eliminate fear of being rejected, eliminate the "I'm too busy excuse" and I don't want to "bother" the other person:

1. Send something of value to the person. Send something like a report, a study or an article you feel would be useful for the person. The key word is useful. Substitute useful for educational if you prefer. It should not be marketing or sales related. In other words, it should not be about you!

2. Call them and leave them a message. Say something like, "I was thinking about you the other day, and I just thought I would drop you a line to see how you are doing." You'd be amazed how much people appreciate this. But you have to mean it and you must not ask for anything (like an appointment).

3. Create a newsletter (or monthly update) via email. Take the example from number 1 above. It has to be about them (not you) and it must be educational or something of value. This may take a little effort on your part. And it make take a little creativity. Most of all, it doesn't have to be by you. A couple of examples to make this easy are: take what you have written for a client - redact the client's name and anything that associates the client with the report. Send the prospect or current client some key parts of the report that may be beneficial or may cause the prospective client to think - "I didn't know they did this kind of work" or "I have a similar issue with our HR organization." Or is could be a something personal development related, like this article on Yahoo http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/article/companyknow/33873

All in all here are three ways to stay in touch. Be like the old AT&T commercial and "Reach Out. Reach Out and Touch Someone" To hear the audio track from this well-known commercial in the latter days of the Bell System, click HERE!


Best of luck Joe Murphy

http://www.josephbmurphy.com/