What's Your Follow Up System?

Have you developed a system for handling the leads coming into your business each week?

There are all sorts of systems, I have used many different ones myself. Here's a few examples...

The Post-it note system, I kept Post-its on my desk to remind me of the important things that I had to take care of, like a follow up call with a prospect or a lunch meeting with a customer. This system got a little out of hand when I found my desk covered in little yellow papers.

Then they came out with multi-colored Post-its and I quickly adopted different colors for the urgency of different tasks. Soon I had the same problem, a desk covered in notes, albeit a more colorful one.

A friend introduced me to the Day-Timer, this worked great for a while until I got out of the habit of taking my leather bound world around with me everywhere I went. I soon lost interest and left it in a drawer in my office, I think it's still there....

How about business cards, anybody out there collect business cards for the people you meet and then make meticulous notes on them or grade them from 1 to 10 or A+ to D- or something along those lines.... I've done that too.

The system has some positives like being able to associate a face with someones card and logo, assuming you have a really, really good memory, but it certainly has it's challenges too. It's especially difficult when you want to collaborate with others in you company or on your team and share Ideas or follow up tasks with these business prospects, because you know you really don't want to hand over those cards you spent so much time and effort collecting.

Introduce technology into the equation and we can add dozens of systems to the list, like Outlook, Act, Goldmine, Salesforce.com, Google Aps, your IPhone, Droid, etc, etc and so on....

Technology can automate so many of the tasks that need to be handled with your customers and prospects if set up, handled and processed correctly.

But.... (and this is the important point in this posting), you need to know how to use the tools and incorporate them into your business and your regular operations.

You can invest in the very latest technology, the most cutting edge products and systems available and still fall short in your effectiveness if you are not incorporating the tools into your day to day operations.

For example, a pneumatic nail gun will save a carpenter hours even days of time on the job site unless he does not know how to use it or is just not comfortable with the tool and would prefer the feel of his well worn hammer handle to anything else.

The best system of follow up is the one that you will use, period.

We have kept this in mind as we have developed the tools and services available to our customers over the years. We know there are many of you out there that will always be comfortable taking the fax out of the fax machine or printing out the hard copy and taking a sharp pencil to the pages of the report to find the projects you want to follow up on.

Be assured though, that as you begin to search for different ways of processing the information each week, we will be there to support you in the endeavor.

With tools like CSV files that can be imported into your company systems and programs automatically and assigned to their respective process for follow up or via creation of completely custom searches based on parameters you set, we have those technologies and others dialed in as well.

If you don't have an IT department to handle all of these new changes, don't worry because we do and we can help you along the way. We still answer the phone and listen to our customers.

We try to help you resolve the problems or challenges that you have and whether those are simple or complicated we have the people in place to make sure you are maximizing the benefits of the investments you are making in our company and more importantly, yours.

We love to hear from our customers, we strive to improve every day and together we will grow and succeed!

P.S. I still have a Post-it or two on my desk at any given time!

Make it a great day!

Justin Harris

Business Development Director

Construction Monitor

1-800-925-6085 x112

jharris@constructionmonitor.com