Whether it’s a matter of making the most out of your marketing campaign and improving your ROI or capitalizing on word-of-mouth referrals, never let a lead slip through the crack—they could be your next diamond in the rough. Every single lead you receive through your business should be considered that one magic client who can help you elevate your business, taking it from where it is now to where you want it to be. The power of follow-up is immense and should be considered one of the best friends of bootstrapped budgeters.
First, it should be noted that trends indicate positive results when business owners verbalize their follow-up efforts with their prospective clients as “reconnecting” instead of “following up;” it’s much more personal and will help you achieve a better business relationship. For example, “Hello, this is Derek Heck from Bootstrapping Blog and I’m reconnecting with you in regards to our last conversation.” Pretty simple right? Yet countless business owners fail to do this on a daily basis. It’s similar to neglecting to insulate your pipes or letting a leaky faucet go unchecked—it seems minor at the time, but you eventually end up losing a lot of money through this type of negligence.
Or perhaps you do have good intentions and plan to follow up, but just haven’t had the time. Well, I’m sincerely asking you to burn your Procrastinator’s Creed contract and jump into action. If not, then your lead goes from blazing hot, to lukewarm, to somebody else’s client! Plus, by following up promptly, you will be telling your prospect volumes about how you’ll treat them as a client, meeting deadlines on time and providing a close watch over their account. Remember, clients don’t just want to know that they’ll get the service or product they’re buying, they want to know that they will be comprehensively taken care of.
So what’s a good timeframe for following up? Probably about a week later. You don’t want to come off as a telemarketer selling jewelry cleaner and calling back the next day. Let them breathe a little and have time to look over your proposal. And make sure you set a solid date and time, indicating when you’ll be reconnecting—call them exactly when you say you will! And make sure they actually write your appointment down when you plan it. Don’t be afraid to specifically ask them to get their planner out and write it down. If you don’t, you’ll end up getting more flakes than a bowl of Wheaties.
And how about a “blind” follow-up? You won’t always have the opportunity to speak with your prospect in the initial phase. For example, you may receive a lead through your website—if someone signs up for your newsletter. In this case, you should develop a standard follow-up template or autoresponder. Remember, the Web is faceless and without emotion—you need to constantly think of ways to reach out to people and remind them that there’s an actual human behind your website
Here’s an example a website lead follow-up:
I see that you visited my blog at www.bootstrappingblog.com recently. I hope you’ve been enjoying our content and have been able to apply some of what you’ve read to your own business.
Call-to-Action Paragraph.
And in case you missed it, I thought I’d pass this article along:
“It’s nothing personal.” Bullspit! There’s no such thing as nothing being personal in the business world. No matter who’s involved in a business equation, people are either spending money they worked hard to earn, or are looking to earn the other person’s money through hard work. Unless you’ve won the lottery, any blood, sweat and tears poured into your business makes the scenario very personal. Read Full Article
Please feel free to contact me and let me know how I can help you with your business. I eagerly welcome all inquiries.
Now go get ‘em tiger!
“It’s nothing personal.” Bullspit! There’s no such thing as nothing being personal in the business world. No matter who’s involved in a business equation, people are either spending money they worked hard to earn, or are looking to earn the other person’s money through hard work. Unless you’ve won the lottery, any blood, sweat and tears poured into your business makes the scenario very personal.
If you’re running your business like a robot, void of emotion and looking at your clients like binary code, then they’ll eventually start tearing you apart like HAL 9000. You will get significantly more mileage out of your bootstrapped budget if you treat your customers like people. What’s the best way to do this? You’ve got to build relationships.
Especially in a world that’s virtually all virtual, prospects and clients want to know there’s a real person caring for them and their business. A prime example of this is the latest Allstate tagline stating that “You’re In Good Hands with Allstate.” Make your clients feel like they are individuals and that you will always be there for them and you will build immense loyalty. As you can imagine, customer loyalty bolsters your budget for several reasons.
For one thing, it’s always significantly more lucrative to retain clients than it is to shop out new ones. Even if you decide to raise your rates down the road, loyal customers will be willing to pay more because you’ve built up value with them. Your ideal clients should not take on the air of an accountant, constantly counting pennies, but should be looking beyond your fees and focusing on the positive results you’re producing for their business. If you’ve taken the care and time to build a solid relationship with your clients, then they’ll gladly pay more for the peace of mind they get from knowing you’re treating their business as if it were your own.
Transcending the business barrier and achieving a personal level to the business you do creates a third dimension. Any additional element you can add to your client relations serves to fortify your situation as a whole. Here we can apply the apples-to-apples scenario: You should always be thinking of how you can distinguish your apple from all the other apples out there. Especially in tough economic times, when businesses are having as much luck trying to stretch their budgets as they would using a timing belt as a rubber band, you need to illustrate as many value points as possible. If all other elements are equal in comparison, a client will remain loyal to you if you’ve established and maintained a personal rapport.
In addition, when you take the time to build a personal relationship with your clients, then you naturally garner a better understanding of what they want and what their business needs for the greatest success. A little extra TLC will then actually help save you time and money, as you’ll be able to handle their account more efficiently. And not that we’re encourage sloppy business, but a personal relationship will also help foster some added forgiveness for the occasional error!
Another huge positive for you bootstrappers is the fact that when you maintain a personable level with your clients, then they are significantly more likely to refer your business to others, increasing your word-of-mouth business, which is…uh huh, go ahead and let it roll of your tongue…free!
So, we’ve mentioned the importance of monitoring your marketing and we’re going to continue to do so because of its great importance. Otherwise, if you’re not monitoring your marketing, then it’s similar to throwing a piece of bait into the ocean without securing a line to it. Where did it go? What happened to it? You’ll be asking the same questions about your budgeting if you don’t keep a careful eye on promoting your business.
What’s one of the best ways to keep track of what’s working and what’s not with your marketing? Just ask. It really can be that simple. You should always have several marketing lines in the water, so if you get a new prospect or client, they could have come from any number of sources. One of the first things you should be asking them is “How did you hear about us?” or “Where did you find us?” You should also be sure to ask people via your website as well.
This method may not be earth-shatteringly new, but we just don’t see it that much on the Web or hear people asking us as much. Plus, you know the old adage, when we assume, it makes an ass out of u and me. Even if you’ve heard it before, its significance still bares repeating. By asking people how they found out about you, you then get a direct laser beam on your marketing. If after a couple of months of marketing, you find that 10 people found you through the local newspaper ad you posted, 50 people found you through the Internet and one person found you through your postcard mailers, what does that tell you? Dump the mailers and reallocate that funding towards your Internet and newspaper ads; with a majority of it going towards the more successful method.
We specifically suggested waiting a month or two before assessing your marketing because you should always be looking at statistical significance. Granted, statistical significance does sound pretty cool in a complex way, but it’s pretty simple. If you make an assessment after a week, then that hasn’t allowed enough people to see your add to make an accurate judgment. For example, at that point, you could have had one person across the board, which would have suggested that you keep investing your money equally in each marketing category. But as we saw after a few months, that would have meant a big waste in postcard mailers. So be careful about taking one set of numbers as gospel.
Speaking of statistics, you might gain a lot from a basic statistics class. Don’t worry, there’s no real brain teasers involved and you don’t have to be a true mathematician. What it will do is help you get a general grasp on the behavior and trends of numbers in your business and industry. From knowing what’s statistically significant enough to base your bootstrapped budget on, to knowing that correlation most certainly doesn’t always mean causation, a little extra education here and there will always help boost your business.
As a dedicated business owner, you probably spend much of your day focusing on how you can help your clients. Bravo! This is what you should be doing as a human being anyways, helping others as much as you can. However, some of us get on a path of helping others through our businesses and just keep rolling along with the same mentality. But as much as we applaud helping others, we also strongly suggest that you help yourself.
Along with your business, you also need to invest in yourself. A proper education will ultimately enable you to help a greater number of people to a greater degree. Think of it this way. Let’s suppose your current business is like Charlie from Flowers for Algernon before the procedure. The poor guy had a big heart and great intentions, but he couldn’t even beat a mouse in a maze. But afterwards, he was able to actually contribute to society. Not that we’re saying your business is mentally challenged, just that no matter how well intentioned your business pursuits are, you’ll always be able to offer a greater degree of help to others through continued education.
And if you’re one of those number-oriented people who goes to sleep by the sound of your ROI ticker, then your educational pursuits may require an extra degree of patience. Self-edification doesn’t always produce immediate, perceivable results, but trust us, your clients will see the difference and you’ll build their loyalty on a foundation of marble instead of balsa wood.
Besides, never before have we had access to so many experts and such powerful materials as we do now. From a full master’s program to a community college course, and seminars to certification courses, there are plenty of education avenues that will suit even a bootstrapped budget. And with the Web providing thousands of new articles on a daily basis, you can take the completely free route and hold yourself to reading one or two new articles every single day. Create a cranium-cramming schedule and put aside a certain block of time every day for your personal edification. To not keep up with what is out there is causing you to miss a lot of amazing breakthroughs. In addition, the trend has been that with the more knowledge we have, the easier things tend to be later on. If you put some front-end time and effort towards investing in yourself, then things will get much easier down the road, unless you regress like Charlie of course then you’re just plum out of luck.
The power of personal development is infinite. It’s amazing how set some of us become in our ways. Not necessarily in a stubborn manner, but because we become programmed to go on autopilot, functioning in ways that are familiar to us. We don’t even realize that we’re capable of so much more because we haven’t challenged ourselves in such a long time. Pursuing personal development open’s our minds to the limitless possibilities within us. Become a better you, and your bootstrapped budget will become a bad ass boot-up-the-competition’s-butt budget, or something like that.
Here are some of the programs that I am currently investing my learning dollars in.
We’ve all heard of people flipping real estate; buying the house for a low amount, doing some minor/major work on renovations and then selling for a profit. Now people are doing the same thing with websites, site flipping. But is it a fly by night profession or another great business avenue for people to take? In this article I want to dig a little deeper into the subject. Let me know what you think in the comments.
Concerns about site flipping
There are a few arguments I see a lot when talking about site flipping, one I see the most being the fact that quick built websites are ruining the quality of the internet. In my opinion, you can’t hurt the quality of a place with billions upon billions of websites already floating around google. Searching for “clinic” in google brings up 115 MILLION results. Now, building websites targeting this keyword really will not make a dent in he amount of quality information out there. So regardless if people think its wrong, you can still do it for and make a profit for it.
Build with quality in mind
Even if you’re putting up a website to just sell, you should still treat it as a website you’d be proud to tell people you own. Flooding the page with 20 ads but only have 500 words is not something (in my opinion) to be proud of.
If flipping is your game and you want to make a go of it, as always it starts with great content, a desire to make it work and a determination to keep going. I am a shining example of an entrepreneur who loves the thrill of the build, it is almost like a high but coming off it when heading into the “maintain it” stage of the lifecycle is when I get extremely bored and restless.
This is not uncommon, look over the history of the vast percentage of the fortune 500 companies and you will find that usually the founder is not the person running the company any longer.
So if your unique ability is in finding a niche, building a following, passing it off and doing it all over again this could be a very profitable business model for you.
In this economy – flip the coin over
With the daily economic doom and gloom that is shoved down our throats, it’s hard to remember that we are in the middle of one of the best buyer’s market we have seen in a long time. History has proven that more millionaires are created in a recession if you take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves when people are scared.
Buying websites may be one of the easiest of these markets to get into because I don’t think there is a lot of “noise” in this market yet. This blog is an example of the power of this. I had been looking and learning everything I could about online marketing when I stumbled on the marketplace at sitepoint.com and found this site for sale. It was inline with my passion, had a great community and I saw that I could provide value to the readers and have a place to build credibility for myself without having to start from scratch and presto here I am.
Now when this economy turns around I will have an asset that I can choose to keep or be able to sell when it is the right time to do so. I believe that in the future websites that have strong ranking, a big following and good content will catch the eyes of bigger companies wanting to get a foot up on the competition.
Either way I’m left with choices and that is never a bad thing.