What is Follow Up, and why is it so important?

Follow up is doing what you said you were going to do. No more, no less. Follow up can happen after meetings, after events, after networking conversations - any time two or more people get together and agree to do something, follow up is required. And if follow up doesn't happen... then the meeting / event / conversation etc was a complete waste of time.

Let's look at follow up from a networking point of view. Think about the following scenarios:

·      You got chatting with a business person at a mixer networking event. There was some common ground between your two businesses, and you agreed when chatting that it would definitely be a good idea to meet up for a coffee.

·      You delivered a great 60 second presentation on your business at your networking group, telling an excellent story about how you helped one of your clients. Someone came up to you afterwards, told you how interested they were in what you’d said, and gave you their business card saying ‘call me’.

·      In a conversation with someone at the end of a networking meeting, they show an interest in your business, so you promise to email them over some information about your latest offers.

·      While in a 1-1 meeting with a contact, it becomes clear that you have a particular client that your fellow networker would be keen to be introduced to. You have enough credibility with the client in question, so you agree to make the introduction.

·      After your weekly networking group meeting, one of the fellow members tells you that they know someone that could introduce you to your dream client. All they’d need from you is to understand how to start a conversation about you, so the pair of you agree to have a chat on the phone to move things forward.

In each case, the action required is fairly simple, ranging from sending an email, through making a phone call either to set a time to have a coffee, to setting up an introduction. What would happen if you didn’t complete the follow up action in each of these scenarios? 

To answer this question, let’s remind ourselves of a concept - established by the founder of BNI, Ivan Misner - called the VCP process. What this process tells us is that when networking, the goal is to set up a profitable (P) relationship with our fellow networker. However, to get to P, we need to go through V and C first. V is for Visibility: we meet someone, we get to know them and their business. C, or Credibility, is where we get to find out if someone is any good.

Follow up is the first test of credibility. At this point, we’re not actually being judged on the technical part of what we do (i.e. are we a good accountant). This is really a test to see what sort of person we are. If you say you’re going to send an email, send it! If you say you’ll call to set up a time to have a coffee, make the call! If you say you’re going to make an introduction, make it!

So, asking the question again, what would happen if you didn’t complete the follow up action in each of the scenarios above? The answer is your credibility will suffer, meaning you have less chance of reaching a state of profitability with each of the people involved. Let’s face it, each one of those situations suggests a great deal of opportunity for your business: you’d be mad not to complete the follow up!

But, bizarrely, experience shows that many people don’t follow up after networking. It could be for a number of reasons. Chris, in the story above, felt embarrassed that he didn’t know every detail that he needed to know, so didn’t complete his follow up effectively. It could be that people over-promise when in a networking situation. If could be that people forget important details and feel embarassed to admit they've forgotten. It could be that people simply don’t understand the importance of follow up and the damage that is done to their credibility by not following up.

Whatever it is though, it does give us Unnatural Networkers an opportunity. Hopefully it is becoming clear that there is not rocket science involved with following up: it isn’t difficult. It is just incumbent upon us to do what we say we are going to do. It is therefore very easy for us to move upwards in the VCP process and establish our credibility, just by following up well.