Remember your senior year of high school and all the K.I.T.’s in your yearbook? Keep in touch, a promise you probably live up to every 5-10 years around reunions. That may work for friends, but that does not work for business even less so if they might rely on you for technology advice. Perhaps the worst words anyone can say to you are: “Are you still in the computer business?”

Since I dumped all my Yahoo groups subscriptions and most blogs (over 1 month clean!) I have started keeping a 30-day, 60-day and quarter folder. Every month, I drag the items in my Inbox into these folders. Then I go through the 30 day old mail folder and process the flagged items. Are there things that need an extra clarification? Do I need to touch back with some people? Any issues that I thought “I’ll catch up with it later when I’m not swamped” and then the weekend came in and I just lost track of it?
Hey, it happens. I’m human. This is why I check.

I must admit, I’m far from where I need to be with the followups so I am trying a few new things to stay in touch. The difficult part of it is the contact preference – some people look at phone calls as an interruption, some people consider email thread they did not initiate as SPAM (or it inadvertently ends up there anyhow), some people prefer mail / fax or a cell phone chat while driving from client to client.

It is often cited that it is more expensive to land a new client than to keep an existing client there. What I’ve been successful with is taking it one step further: It is cheaper to convert the existing leads to clients than to go out and get new ones. However, this takes some TLC – and lead qualification is an emotionless process the sales people use to pack their pipeline and meet goals: Are you buying in the next 30 days or not? Yes = pressure; No = Disqualify lead.

I believe our products are good enough that they don’t need to be pressure pushed – so we don’t. But I also do not believe that anyone needs to be dismissed just because they don’t need a solution here and now. Staying in touch, responsive and most importantly relevant is the difficult part.

So here is some food for thought.. how much money do you spend on advertising to pull in new leads as opposed to keeping relevant to the leads you already have?

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