Episode Details

What's the secret to getting results? Amazingly it's not some online marketing trick or strategy. It's just plain old follow up. But how do you follow up? And how can you have a marketing strategy—especially for your small business? In this episode of the Three Month Vacation from Psychotactics, you learn exactly how to follow up to get results.

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Time Stamps

00:00:00 Introduction-My Story With Compaq 00:03:07 Table of Contents 00:04:09 Topic 1: Education and Sales to Follow Up 00:09:04 Topic 2: How Often Should You Follow Up 00:13:16 Topic 3: How Do Amazon and Apple Follow Up? 00:16:21 Summary 00:17:48 Final Details

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Transcript

Sean D'Souza:I've not always lived in New Zealand. I lived in Mumbai, India for a long time and back then, I used to be a cartoonist. I wasn't so much into marketing or not into marketing at all. Even as I say that, somehow it seems odd and the reason for that is because even without realizing it, I was using the concepts of marketing, so let me tell you this story. Even though I grew up in Mumbai, I mostly drew for newspapers and magazines and places like that.

The pay is terrible there because all of the syndicates like Universal feature syndicate and all these syndicates that send out cartoons, they just mass dump the cartoons into other countries, including India.

It's so cheap that a newspaper or a magazine can just bring dozens of them. If you look at the cartoon pages, they are there every single day, a whole page of cartoons. There I was competing against this absolutely dirt cheap, probably 20 cents a cartoon scenario and of course I couldn't make a living doing that, so I started looking out for companies because companies do presentations and within presentations, you can use cartoons. At one point I picked on this computer company called Compaq.

They showed some initial interest in the cartoons, but then they went quiet. Now as I said, I wasn't doing any marketing back then, but I followed up and then I followed up and then I followed up and then I followed up and followed up. One day, their manager called up and he said, "Can you come over?" He took me to their boardroom and there I was in front of fifteen or twenty people sitting there and he said, "Tell them what you did." I'm completely confused now. It's like, "What did I do?"

He says, "Tell them when you started communicating with me," and so I did and he says, "Tell them how many times you communicated with me," and of course I followed his instruction. I did want the job after all. Then he turned to the entire group which happened to be in sales and marketing and he said, "This is the difference.

This is why he is standing here. This is why he's going to get the job. It not because of his skill, it's not because of pretty much anything I know about him, it's because he followed up and because he was persistent, that's why he's standing here and that is a lesson for you in sales and marketing."

Yes, it was a lesson for me in sales and marketing too because when you're a small business especially, you don't know whether you should follow up. If you're a big business, you can just buy ads and flood them in the marketplace and repeat them ten thousand times and maybe they'll do the job and maybe they won't, but you have those deep pockets, but if you're a small business, what do you do? You follow up, but how do you follow up without becoming a pest?

The first thing we're going to cover today is how do you follow up without becoming a pest. The second thing is how often do you follow up and then we'll look at some r