Coping With the Needy

If you are with me you'll know that each morning I make contact with all the people whose Follow-up date is today or earlier, then I wade through contacts with the stalest last-modified day.

In other words, I deal with what I promised I'd do, then I make sure that I keep touching contacts ("in touch") without too much time elapsing; I want to stay in the front of their minds.

I keep track of how many follow-ups are scheduled at the start of each day, and how many remain at the end of the day to be carried forward to tomorrow.

Over the past three weeks I've seen follow-ups bloom from about 10 to 43 (this morning).

What is Going on?

I look closely and see that the bulk of the follow-ups arise from stale contacts in large corporate firms, members of the Deep Pocket Club, and I'm finding it difficult to reach them by phone, or have run out of things of benefit to them to spark a conversation.

So I Phoned Cheryl Scoffield

I had a goal in mind: I want to make a presentation to ten people in the boardroom of each of these 30+ large corporations. Once I've demonstrated my stuff for 20 minutes, the questions start to flow, and once that happens, they are hooked.

How to reach my goal of 30 presentations over the next two months?

I have the email addresses; the people know of me by name in most cases, by face in a few.

Cheryl's first idea: Write up a set of stories of what I've done for people and issue it as a newsletter with a call to action at the foot.

Out of all my (dozen?) stories, at least one will have to strike a chord, and then that contact will start to realize the advantage of having me in.

I chimed in at this point and realized that I can record a short video on each "story" showing my solution, store the video on my web site, and provide a link to a video for each story.

Why "Cheryl's First Idea"?

Because I'm going to call her back and ask for another idea.

And another ....