Lessons

Lesson Info

Following Up

We're gonna talk about growing your network. Obviously, this is one of the things that you guys came in for, naturally. We wanna talk about growing this, making it expansive and of course following up. This is a common question that we saw in the chatroom I guess, if you can call it that. One of the most common questions we see at any event like this, how do I follow up with people. We got a lot of non verbal communication about first impressions, about using these skills when you first meet somebody but what happens after you actually meet this person, then what? A week? Is it six days? We don't know how to do this stuff when we're dating, we certainly don't know how to do it when we're doing this with a business. So , we're gonna talk about follow up and maintenance because those are actually two different things, right? Most of us never think of maintenance, or we think of follow up as a one time event. Not really the case. There are two types of follow up slash maintenance. There's...

systematic and opportunistic. And essentially what these are are basic philosophies and we're actually going to do both of these. Systematic is essentially putting in place systems that create reminders for you to follow up, that create follow up opportunities for you in a systematic way, hence the name. They're not as self conscious as making a huge list or thinking about all the people that you have to follow up with, that's overwhelming. We use programs for this like Contactually. There's also Highrise, and there's things like this. I hope I can mention product names on this because I just did. And there's also another thing I like to do on Facebook is use people's birthdays to engage with them on their birthday. I actually do it beforehand because on the birthday you get all those messages and you get bots and all this stuff. If you look at the calendar, often on the first of the month, and I did this for years until it became purely overwhelming and I switched to Contactually. I would message every single person that month on Facebook that had a birthday, and I would say, hey what are your goals for this year, what are you up to, I haven't spoken with you in a long while, and I got a lot of responses. In fact, I got so many, I had to stop doing it because it became incredibly burdensome and there was no way to automate it. Contactually is a program that looks inside my Google contacts, my iPhone contacts, and it will create little cards for each person, like a contacts program would, but you can put them into buckets. And what that is, and the buckets I have, by the way, are all in the bonus materials at [Inaudible 00:02:22].com/creative_live where you can see the buckets that I use. 90 days, PR reps, different types of close friends, after 21 days and other buckets, where these contact cards go, and then they pop up and I get a reminder, or I can log into the program and check and see who I need to contact to maintain my relationships. That's systematic follow up. It's very deliberate. It's something that's programmed into either a software as a service, some sort of social media that I'm using, and the birthday list linked in. And the way that we do the follow ups are we text or call. It's really easy to just send a follow up email, you can do that for certain types of looser contacts, the 90 day contacts, the acquaintance contacts. But texting and calling is always, always better. So, I almost wish I had made a slide for this. But essentially, in person follow up is better than a call which is better than a text which is better than an email. In person is better than a call, which is better than a text, which is better than an email. The reasons for this are probably less important. Obviously it has to do with the personal touch. A text is like an email that you, I don't even know what it is , just somehow knowing to text somebody is a much more direct way to get in touch than email even though you can write a lot more in an email and usually you have to sit down to do it and look up their address. Texting somehow still feels more personal and more deliberate. A phone call obviously requires more effort and if you can do it in person, then fantastic! Although that's, of course, not as scalable and requires a lot more energy, and often a lot more of an expense as well. Opportunistic maintenance is the other side of the coin. And again, we're doing both of these. You can pick one or the other, but I highly recommend that you do both. Opportunistic maintenance is about staying in touch with people spontaneously. Which is really hard to program, right? How do we make a system that let's me spontaneously reach out to people? Well, there are already systems that bug you with people's personal stuff all the time everyday when you use it. Can you think of one? Maybe Facebook. Argh! This person had a baby. This person had another life event. This person ate a sandwich for lunch. Right, unfollowed. Right, we see this stuff all the time and when we see something interesting what do we do? We click Like. Well, okay great. I'm not looking at the 48 people who clicked Like on a post. I'm just not doing that. If I see someone's name I might think, oh, I haven't talked to them in a long time and that's pretty much as far as it goes. So instead, for opportunistic maintenance, what I recommend that you do is look at that newsfeed, if you do use Facebook or LinkedIn or any other newsfeed style social media. Instagram, for example, and then send that person a text as follow up. Don't write a comment. You can do that too, I guess, but it's better to write a text. It's better to have a call than it it is to put a comment on a post. I think comment is underneath email. Right? (laughter) Like is less than Comment which is less than email which is less than text which is less than phone which is less than in person. How's that? How's that for needing a slide? (laughter) I hope you all got that, right? No problem. So, use the news feeds. Use the media feeds as a way to remind you, casually, to spark up a conversation with someone you haven't spoken with in a while. Also use the news feeds to bolster your systematic contacts. So if you see someone in a news feed and you think, "Man. I haven't talked to this person "in a while." You can then add them to a bucket in Contactually and then you won't have to worry about them popping up in your feed again in order for you to say hello again in three years. A lot of people of course don't use social media. That's fine. We're not trying to get everybody in this net. What we're trying to do is make sure that we're using both systems and random spontaneous opportunities to keep people engaged to make sure that we're constantly doing this process with as little effort as we can really muster. Because otherwise it's not scalable. This, it sounds lazy to say as little effort as possible but what I really mean is if you've gotta make phone calls to everybody to wish them happy birthday, and you've got 400 people that month having a birthday on Facebook, you're not gonna do it. It's impossible. You'd have to spend your whole life developing those, cultivating those relationships and it wouldn't be worth your time. There'd be no return on that investment, you'd drive yourself crazy, you would hate it and the whole system would collapse. So we wanna use both types of maintenance. In fact, another way to do this, because if you, what do I say, I don't know what to write. Hi? Send? That's not gonna do it. This is called the Benjamin Franklin Effect And this is in the workbook, page 53. There's a name blank and there's an ask blank. And what this is , this is an old Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People strategy, if you've ever read that book. Ben Franklin had, and I'm gonna butcher the story, 'cause I always do and it doesn't matter 'cause the point is always the same. He had an enemy or somebody that didn't like him and he didn't know what to do about it. But he knew the guy collected old books. Remember, no Barnes & Noble's, no Amazon back then, and if you had a copy of a book, it might be the only copy of that book that anybody you know has, and it's the only way to get it. So he would write to that person and say, "Hey, guy who hates me for no particular reason, "or for a reason I wanna fix. "I heard you have a rare edition of "Faust" "in the original german translation. "Would you mind if I borrowed it?" And of course, this person wanting to be polite, would say, "Sure enough. I'll have it sent "along right away." He'd send him the book. Benjamin Franklin would maybe even not read it. Who knows? Doesn't matter. And he would send the book back with thanks. And what this did in the other person's brain is cause a rationalization process. It triggers a rationalization that says, "Well, I thought I didn't like Ben Franklin, "but I lent him this really precious book, "so maybe I do like him because I helped him "and I wouldn't help somebody that I dislike." So it actually flipped the switch in this person's head and turned out to create an, it opened a window. It opened an opportunity for Ben Franklin to then make things right and start a new fresh trend of positive relations and behavior with this other person. So, this worksheet is all about this, right? We're going to figure out how to maintain our network, can possibly also repair a relationship by filling in these names here. So these first three names are people that you already know and the ask is something that you can ask from them. Doesn't have to be anything brilliant, can be something very small. Advice is always really, really good. That's why I put asking for advice here. You don't have to ask them for an old edition of a book, that might be considered a little weird now. You can ask them for advice or help in an area in which they are an expert. And there's always, always a great way to do this. It's a great way to stay in touch. It's like sharing an article, as we spoke about earlier, however kind of in the reverse. It's a very organic way to stay in touch as well. And it also helps bring people along your journey on an emotional level. Hey, I'm starting a new job, you're one of the only lawyers I know, do you have any tips and advice? Suddenly, this person, your old neighbor who still thinks you're a punk for walking across his lawn in '97, now feels an affinity for you. So this could be really good for people who you see in your feed and you cringe 'cause you're like, "Oh yeah, the last time I spoke with her "I sort of left a mess at that place, "I don't really wanna deal with that." You can then circle back and try to start fresh. So you also see below the line people you do not know whose help you would like. This is slightly easier 'cause if you don't know 'em chances are you haven't screwed 'em up, right? Haven't screwed up the relationship. And then the last blank is warm introductions. And these are for the above blanks, just to be clear. So the warm introduction blanks, who can introduce me to the people in blanks four and five? Who can do that? Because cold outreach is only mildly effective. And we go over that in, and we'll do a little bit of that soon. However, warm introductions for the win. And any day, any time, warm introductions are always, always, always better. And you'll see on page that there is an email script that requests that info, that introduction. So you'll see draft an email to your two warm leads requesting the information that you want and need. There's a template in the bonus materials, [Inaudible 00:10:21]com/creative live. Don't draft the email now. Aint nobody got time for that. You can find it in the bonus materials on the website.